People often ask me, "How can you write about endangered species all the time? Isn't it depressing?" Sure, it can be, but not as depressing as the sheer number of stories that I don't get to write about...
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week that African lions ( Panthera leo leo ) may deserve protected status under the Endangered Species Act.
The sad death of conservation icon Lonesome George this past June in the Galápagos Islands marked the long-dreaded extinction of the Pinta Island tortoise ( Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni )...
Even as the ice-dwelling polar bear is threatened by climate change, so, too, is another bear that lives in a completely different habitat. In this case it's the critically endangered Gobi bear ( Ursus arctos gobiensis ), the only bear species that has adapted to desert life...
What a difference a year makes. Last November, two male African penguins ( Spheniscus demersus ) living at the Toronto Zoo made worldwide headlines after they took more interest in each other than in members of the opposite sex...
If scientists in Brazil have their way, the populations of eight endangered species could soon expand through a mass effort to clone them. The project is spearheaded by the Brasilia Zoological Garden in partnership with Embrapa, the Brazilian government's agricultural research agency.The scientists have already spent the past two years collecting 420 genetic samples for the species—mostly from dead specimens found in the Cerrado savanna region—and are now waiting for legal authorization to start the cloning...
The last wolves in Africa face a difficult road if they are going to survive. Just 500 Ethiopian wolves ( Canis simensis ) remain in the mountains of the country for which they are named...
In another example of how little we know about the natural world, scientists recently got their first up-close glimpse at the rare and elusive spade-toothed beaked whale ( Mesoplodon traversii )...
Nine new species of colorful, arboreal tarantulas have been discovered in central and eastern Brazil, an area where only seven tarantula species had previously been known.
A tiny new lizard species has been discovered in Western Australia, and just in time: its only known habitat is already being destroyed.The six-centimeter-long coastal plains skink ( Ctenotus ora ) lives in the sand dunes of the Swan Coastal Plain, which starts about 70 kilometers south of Perth...
As tens of thousands of refugees crowd into the area around Virunga National Park in the warn-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the animals that already lived there are getting squeezed out their native habitats...
An eight-year study of Komodo dragons ( Varanus komodoensis ) has revealed some interesting differences between the genders in the world's largest lizard species.
In 2010 a black rhinoceros female named Phila survived two separate and brutal attempts on her life. In the first, poachers used a helicopter to attack the private game reserve where she lived in South Africa...
A global effort to prevent all future species extinctions would cost about $80 billion a year, or $11.42 annually from every person on the planet, according to a study published last week in Science .The study, released in conjunction with eleventh meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) currently underway in Hyderabad, India, is intended to support goals and commitments to halting extinctions and preserving nature by the year 2020 that the world's governments have agreed to under the convention.More specifically, the study finds that lowering the extinction risk for all of the species that are currently known to be threatened would cost the first $4 billion per year...
The body of the last wild Siamese crocodile ( Crocodylus siamensis ) in Vietnam was found floating in Ea Lam Lake on September 29. The 3.2-meter-long, 100-kilogram female had been strangled by two steel wires, possibly by hunters...
A primitive, venomous mammal endemic to Cuba and once listed as extinct has been rediscovered after a decadelong quest. The shrewlike Cuban solenodon (Solenodon cubanus)—a “living fossil” that has not changed much in millions of years—was all but wiped out in the 19th century by deforestation and introduced species...
Squirrels: So bushy-tailed, so ubiquitous—so deadly.We don't normally think of squirrels as killers, but North America's eastern gray squirrels ( Sciurus carolinensis ) have actually been called one of the worst invasive species on the planet...
A fossilized sample of thousand-year-old parrot dung has revealed a previously unknown ecological relationship that could help save a threatened parasitic plant from extinction.Yup, conservation science is sometimes weird.The plant in question is called Dactylanthus taylorii (aka wood rose or Hades flower)...
What better way to study the world's largest arboreal animals than by putting an eye in the sky?
How does dressing up in a really bad gorilla costume help to save endangered mountain gorillas? Well, it's not actually the costume itself that's important; it's what the man inside the costume is also carrying.Take a look at the photo to the left...
