Government shutdown upends scientific research

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 resear