William Mullen

The feel-good feelings of tens of millions of people toward a movie-star killer whale named Keiko, generated by the 1993 hit film "Free Willy" oddly may end up being harmful...

Naughty or not, Padihorpakhered, a powerful Egyptian priest who lived 2,700 years ago, learned from his father, Horsiese, also a priest, how to cheat time immemorial and assure that their...

When the Adler Planetarium opened in 1930, it seemingly flew in the face of Chicago's visionary planner, Daniel Burnham, who wanted the city to be the Paris of the prairies,...

Two years ago, when workers began excavations for the Chicago Academy of Sciences' new building in Lincoln Park, they found a piece of very old Chicago that nobody knew existed...

Most historians of the city pay scant attention to 1848. They usually dwell on the arrival in the 1770s of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable as the town's first permanent...

Again hoping for an unlikely milestone for the Shedd Aquarium's captive whale-breeding program, officials announced Monday that two more of its beluga females are pregnant. Puiji and Immiayuk, the first...

Until this year, it was axiomatic that if a critter grew feathers, it was by definition a bird. Then in June birds were knocked off that exclusive taxonomic perch by...

A little over a year ago, during my normal duties of reporting the comings and goings at Chicago's zoos, I discovered one of my favorite gorilla families had disappeared from...

At night in a huge African national park, a group of gamekeepers peer through laser-equipped, infrared night-vision rifle sights at a pride of lions feeding on a dead antelope, quietly...

If you are of a certain age and can recall television in black and white, it should take just a couple of slight adjustments of your memory dials to clear...