Deforestation

Scientific fraud almost led to this tiny owl’s extinction. Species name: Forest owlet (Heteroglaux blewitti). Known locally as dongar dudaa.

You know that a species is in rough shape when a population increase of just 20 animals is cause for celebration. But that’s the case in northern Vietnam this month, where one of the few remaining groups of critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus avunculus) has grown from just 90 individuals in 2006 to between [...]

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Better late than never? This week the International Union for Conservation of Natural Resources, which publishes the IUCN Red List of threatened species, listed the rare and iconic okapi (Okapia johnstoni) as endangered, something the organization acknowledges should have been done back in 2008.

Every once in a while, scientists working in some remote corner of the globe catch sight of a creature so rare, so elusive and so amazing that you just need to sit up and say “whoa.” This is one of those times.

These arboreal lesser apes evolved for life in the trees. But when people cut those trees down the gibbons had nowhere left to go. Species name: Northern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus leucogenys).

It requires a great deal of patience and more than a few days to get to the few remaining habitats of the La Hotte land frog (Eleutherodactylus bakeri) in Haiti.

Science has a fairly bland name for the national bird of Samoa: the tooth-billed pigeon (Didunculus strigirostris). The bird’s name in the Samoan language, however, is much more colorful: manumea.

Natural forest fires were once an important part of the life cycle of the Santa Cruz cypress, a rare tree that today exists in just five mountainous groves in California.

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.