Petar Beron was awarded with the Sign of Distinction of the President of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences at a ceremony held on 9 October 2020 in the Academy. Prof. Julian Revalski, Full Member of BAS, conferred the award for his merits in the field of acarology and zoogeography and on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The award ceremony was attended by representatives of the Board of BAS and the National Museum of Natural History of BAS (NMNHS). […]

Camera traps captured rare footage showing Felis chaus chaus, the northern subspecies of the reed cat (or swamp cat) in the Korchay and Turyan-chay reserves (northern Azerbaijan). The cameras were installed as part of a joint study by the Institute of Zoology at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, WWF-Azerbaijan and the National Museum of Natural History-BAS. The study, which began in 2018, involved three Bulgarian scientists and one Azerbaijani scientist. The condition of rare and endangered predators in the Transcaucasia is being studied and also includes the leopard and the striped hyena. The reed cat is an Asian species that weighs up to 16 kg. It inhabits mainly wetlands overgrown with dense vegetation. Northern Azerbaijan is one of the northernmost parts of the range [...]

The Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences is a member of the European Network for the Radar Surveillance of Animal Movement (ENRAM: http://www.enram.eu/). This is a research network whose activities were funded by the COST program (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) from October 2013 to October 2017. Prof. Pavel Zehtindjiev and Boyan Michev from IBER-BAS, together with researchers from all over Europe and a wide range of experts - including ecology, biogeography, ornithology, entomology, meteorology, mathematics and engineering - have joined forces in this area of ​​aeroecology to achieve remote sensing of animal migration for the first time across many countries. Thereby, existing efforts to monitor and predict animal movement patterns can be coordinated and extended to a [...]

The detailed description was published on 16 April 2020 by Prof. Denis Geraads of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and Prof. Nikolay Spassov of the National Museum of Natural History at BAS in the renowned palaeontological journal Geodiversitas. http://sciencepress.mnhn.fr/en/periodiques/geodiversitas/42/9 The skull of which the description was made is one of the best preserved in the world. It was discovered in the 1980s by teacher Dimitar Kovachev during excavations at the palaeontological site near the village of Hadzhidimovo, together with his students from the high school in Asenovgrad. Today, the unique skull is stored at the “Dimitar Kovachev” Palaeontological Museum in Asenovgrad, a branch of the National Museum of Natural History at BAS. http://www.nmnhs.com/palaeontological-museum-in-asenovgrad-bg.html  Machairodus is one of the most famous fossil animals, [...]

Dr. Tihomir Stefanov, ichthyologist at NMNHS, during the expedition Field research under the project "Ichthyological studies in coastal sea in the Bulgarian Polar Base on Livingston Island" of the National Museum of Natural History of BAS (NMNHS-BAS) was conducted within the 28th Bulgarian Antarctic Expedition. The main objective of the project is a pilot study of the ichthyological diversity, the biology of the species, the genetic profile and the parasitic fauna of the fish in the waters of Livingston Island in front of the Bulgarian Polar Base. As a result of the field studies, a total of 7 species of fish were identified - six representatives of the family Notothenidae of the genera Notothenia and Trematomus and one species of ice fish - [...]