museum without walls and the center of a national network 

 for science education. 



The historic gift of $20 million dollars from the Kenneth 

 E. Behring family to the National Museum of Natural His- 

 tory in the fall of 1997 — at that time, the largest donation 

 ever made to the Smithsonian — will further both these goals. 

 When the museum's new Behring Family Mammal Hall 

 opens in 2003, its exhibits will reflect contemporary under- 

 standings of the adaptation and interdependency of species. 

 The Behring gift is also being used to fund two programs that 

 introduce museum collections and research to schools and 

 communities throughout the United States: Mammals in the 

 Schools, which provides museum specimens to school science 

 labs for srudy with the assistance of museum scientists, and 

 Mammals on the Move, which offers lively, idea-rich small 

 exhibits to airports, malls, and other public places. 



Other wings to the museum without walls under construc- 

 tion in 1998 included programs that bring teachers and 

 museum scientists together on the Internet to create, test, and 

 disseminate middle-school science lesson plans, and the expan- 

 sion of summer-school and intersession science courses offered 

 in parrnership with Voyager Expanded Learning. The 

 museum also strengthened its ties to other institutions 

 throughout the United States and around the world. In 

 Anchorage, for example, a partnership that began with the es- 

 tablishment of the museum's Arctic Studies Center within the 

 Anchorage Museum of History and An has grown to encom- 

 pass long-distance learning programs for Alaskan schools and 

 collaborations with Native cultural centers to produce exhibi- 

 tions seen around the world. In Texas, the museum and the 

 Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives continued to share 

 ideas in research, exhibitions, and education with the San An- 

 tonio Centro Alameda, the National Park Service, the Mission 

 Trails Redevelopment Project, and the Mexico-North Re- 

 search Network. Natural History has undertaken a similar 

 partnership with the Miami Museum of Science to create re- 

 search and public programs to explore South Florida's rich 

 biological diversity. 



Research was central to the museum's work in 1998, as it has 

 been every year. Outstanding examples include the following. 



Through the museum, the Smithsonian was one of eight in- 

 ternational organizations to contribute to the International 

 Conservation Union's Red List of Threatened Plants, the first 

 global survey of diversity and extinction among flowering 

 plants, conifers, and ferns. The Red List shows that more than 

 12 percent of species in these plant phyla are threatened with 

 extinction or nearly extinct. Led by Jane Villa-Lobos, director 

 of the Department of Botany's Latin American Plants pro- 

 gram, museum staff compiled the Red List's data on North, 

 Central, and South American species. 



To test the theory that humankind's earliest hominid ances- 

 tors evolved in response to sudden environmental change 

 during the Pliocene epoch, paleobiologist Anna Behrens- 

 meyer, codirector of the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems 

 Consortium, and anthropologist Richard Potts, director of the 



Human Origins Program, and their colleagues analyzed 

 records of more than 10,000 fossils from the Turkana basin in 

 Ethiopia and Kenya. The fossils, representing 246 species and 

 spanning 4.4 million years to the present, showed no evidence 

 of rapid evolution during the key period between 2.8 million 

 and 2.5 million years ago. The results suggest that from its 

 earliest days, our genus has shown an ability to adapt to a 

 variety of habitats. 



Paleobiologist Doug Erwin was chosen to be a member of 

 NASA's new virtual Institute of Astrobiology. Working 

 together on the Next Generation Internet, Erwin and his col- 

 leagues will research the very early history of life on Earth and 

 the possibiliry of life on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and 

 elsewhere in this solar system. 



Botanist Elizabeth Zimmer of the museum's Laboratory for 

 Molecular Systematics and colleagues completed sequencing 

 DNA extracted from the leaves of a member of one of the first 

 families of flowering plants, a small tree with button-sized 

 flowers recently found on a remote ridge in Madagascar. The 

 discovery and srudy of this primitive species will help 

 botanists better understand how flowering plants came to 

 flourish on Earth 100 million years ago. 



National Portrait Gallery 



Alan Fern, Director 



The National Portrait Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition 

 and study of portraits of people who have made significant 

 contributions to American history and culture and to the 

 srudy of the artists who created such portraiture. It collects, 

 documents, and preserves portraits in all media as both 

 historical and artistic artifacts. 



"Celebrity Caricature in America," a widely reviewed ex- 

 hibition and visitor favorite, featured cleverly stylized like- 

 nesses of colorful personalties from the 1920s through the 

 1940s. The exhibition will travel to the New York Public 

 Library in 2000, and was made possible by the Smithsonian 

 Institution's Special Exhibition Fund, the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution Scholarly Srudies Fund, the Marpat Foundation, the 

 Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation Inc., Mrs. John Timber- 

 lake Gibson, The Kiplinger Foundation, and NationsBank. 

 The catalog was published by Yale Universiry Press, and went 

 into a second printing. 



For the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the National 

 Portrait Gallery and the George C. Marshall Foundation in 

 Lexington, Virginia, co-orgaruzed the exhibition "George C. 

 Marshall: Soldier of Peace," sponsored by the Bayer Corpora- 

 tion Pharmaceutical Division. The accompanying catalog is 

 distributed by John Hopkins University Press. "Faces of 

 Time: Seventy-five Years of Time Magazine Cover Portraits" 

 commemorates Time's 75th anniversary and its gift to the Gal- 



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