Ecology

Honing your artistic skills can be a huge challenge once you've set your sights on realism. For wildlife painters, they need to be masters of it all - they can't spend 20 years mastering the human form when the world is filled with mountain lions, birch trees, stag beetles and granite.

The artistically-restless Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen goes further than many wildlife artists. With each work, he tackles some new challenge of subject matter or composition. 

New research proves it: The giant panda serves as an “umbrella” that helps protect dozens of other species

Domesticated pigs had many dalliances with wild boars that added new genes to the pig population well after they had settled down on the farm

Researchers found that snakebites were two to three times as prevalent in the hottest and coldest years of the El Niño climate cycle. Christopher Intagliata reports

Antarctica will suffer a major meltdown if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the present pace

The population of this newly identified species has plummeted 70 percent in 15 years

Observations show that the Southern Ocean is still pulling CO₂ from the sky, but that may not last forever

New Orleans sees that even modern engineering cannot eliminate flooding risk

Whereas most predators kill the young or infirm, humans claim a disproportionate number of mature healthy adults of reproductive age

Millions of vultures have died over the past 20 years, victims of a painkiller drug gone wrong

And it's only ever been seen three times ever.