Washington • Kay Behrensmeyer was supposed to be preparing for a three-week expedition to Kenya. Instead, she spent Thursday packing her research permits, her fossil-collecting supplies, and maps she’d spent weeks compiling and annotating by hand into a Fed-Ex box, which she shipped to a junior colleague on the project. Behrensmeyer, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History, wasn’t going anywhere. The federal government was shut down.
In research labs and at field sites across the world, the week-long government shutdown has ground scientific progress to a halt. Thousands of scientists are among the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors who must stay at home without pay.