Now here’s a great conservation success story: After more than 100 years, Galápagos giant tortoise hatchlings finally have a chance to thrive and survive on their native Pinzón Island, after conservationists cleared it of the invasive rats that nearly wiped out the animals...
Nine lives won’t help to perpetuate a cat species unless the cats manage to reproduce. The decline of wild cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), classified as “vulnerable” by the IUCN, led to the coordination of captive breeding programs in zoos and other breeding facilities...
Image of the Week #102, July 31st, 2013: From: How the Fleas’ Next of Kin Ended up Living on a Liverwort in Alaska by Jennifer Frazer at The Artful Amoeba.
Look at this soft, fluffy bundle of newness. This little man is the Lavasoa dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus lavasoensis), a newly described species of dwarf lemur from southern Madagascar.
Life is tough if you’re a northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). These rare, cat-sized Australian marsupials don’t have very long life spans—especially males, which tend to die after their first mating experience when less than a year old...
I have a prediction. There is a scientific hypothesis, formulated over 20 years ago, that we will one day look back on, when the evidence is in, and say “Of course that was right!
Sometimes research into one question reveals the answer to another. In July 2012 Catherine Hughes and Julie Broken-Brow, students at the University of Queensland in Australia, were in Papua New Guinea studying how the region’s tiny microbats responded to sustainable logging of their forest homes...
Back in 2012 I described paleoartist Julius Csotonyi as a Paleoart Rockstar. The title certainly fits: few illustrators today can make a living image-making full-time, especially in the sciences...
Toronto’s newest superhero accidentally trashes the Royal Ontario Museum. And although the ROM is my favourite place in Toronto, I enjoyed every page turning moment.
Among divers and marine biologists, it’s common knowledge that ocean fish lead double lives. Like birds and butterflies, their young often look nothing like the adults, but unlike birds and butterflies, it is the young that are often more beautiful and ornate than their parents...
Regular Tet Zoo readers will recall the article from March on ratite and tinamou evolution. Ratites, just in case you don't know, are the flightless kiwi, ostriches, rheas, emus and so on, while tinamous are their diminutive, flight-capable, superficially pheasant-like close relatives...
Last week, the BICEP2 experiment dropped a bombshell in the physics world by announcing potential evidence for gravitational waves from inflation as well as support for the quantization of gravity...
You need to have pretty good eyesight to see the tiny snails from the genus Plectostoma. These almost impossibly small gastropods from Malaysia and Thailand only reach a millimeter or two in width, but they make up for their lack of size with their stunning beauty...
An advantage of having a, let’s say, ‘volatile’ memory is that you can sit back and do microscopy… on your own hard drive.
A few days back I wrote a post explaining why I am all for private support of basic science, especially in an age when government funding and support is flagging.
Australia has a long history of poisoning its dingoes (Canis lupus dingo), which have an unfair reputation of preying on sheep and other livestock.
It stood 11.5-feet tall and tipped the scales at perhaps 500 pounds, with the body of a raptor, the head of a chicken and the crest of a cassowary; it sported big sharp claws and, probably, feathers...
At first glance, most eyes look the same. There’s a small opening through which light passes. That light goes through the transparent liquid behind the lens and strikes the retina, a thin film of light-sensitive nerve cells that line the back of the eye...
As blasphemous and offensive as it seems to say it, birds are pretty samey. Generally speaking, they're small flying things with long forelimbs, proportionally large heads with big, globular braincases, and grasping feet where an enlarged first toe (the hallux) opposes the remaining three...
How does a mouse build a burrow, and do genes help control this behavior? This was a question asked by members of the Hoekstra lab at Harvard.
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