The Amazon in 4D

摘要

An interdisciplinary team is linking data from field research in the Amazon into a comprehensive digital collection, aiming to map evolution in space and time. In a chilly specimen storage room on the sixth floor of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), Joel Cracraft opens a cabinet and slides out two trays filled with delicate, palm-sized songbirds, inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest. One tray holds a jumble of red-headed manakins-eyeless, boneless, and stuffed with cotton. The other holds their close relative, golden-headed manakins. The two species seem to differ only in the color of the males' crown feathers. But they are never found in the same place. Red-headed manakins live south of the Amazon River; golden-headed manakins live north of it.