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.
Last year the Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia volume titled Extinct Life appeared in print. I was asked to cover South American mammals, perhaps because they wanted me to write about borhyaenoids, toxodonts, litopterns, astrapotheres and so on (some of which have been covered on Tet Zoo in the past - I really need to get back [...]..
The most persistent — and infuriating — question about diversity in science writing has to be: "Why do we need diversity?" Sometimes that question is followed by this: "Isn't science color-blind?" To answer that second question first — no, science is most definitely not color-blind, any more than history or politics or literature is color-blind...
The amazing power duo of Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck (Sweet Fern Productions) has come out with a new animated short on the discovery of microbes.
I’m writing this post for two reasons. One is to recommend a new book by Columbia astrobiologist Caleb Scharf (who also writes a terrific Scientific American blog, “Life, Unbounded“), and the other is to defend an old book of mine...
This week’s video is a preview for the movie ‘The Theory of Everything’, which premiered last week to North American audiences.
I came across these incredible videos by John J. King II (AleutianDream on YouTube) and I just had to share them. These snorkelers are in such close and peaceful contact with wild humpbacks and sperm whales in waters near the Dominican Republic, and Dominica respectively...
“What is your generation going to do? You don’t have a choice. You will make a mark. Will it be the mark of apathy? Or will you make the internet what it could be?” Michael Carroll is a Professor of Law and one of the founders of the Creative Commons...
Last summer, researchers demonstrated that non-invasive imaging combined with a staining technique enables the fast comparison and study of earthworm species and other animals in unprecedented detail...
South Africa has finally finished compiling its report on the number of rhinos poached in the country last year and, as expected, the news is terrible.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, I have the urge to write about frogs. Today we look briefly at the first of two behaviourally peculiar, anatomically surprising groups, both of which are endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, both of which belong to a major neobatrachian frog clade called Allodapanura, and both of which have been united in a clade [...]..
“Why is it that an animal that is actively trying to kill us, such as a lion, gets more respect than one that is only trying to nibble on us a little, without causing much harm?” -Piotr Naskrecki Biologist Piotr Naskrecki, who traveled with me to Belize last year, returned home to find himself incubating [...]..
As the European Space Agency’s Philae lander bounced and settled onto the surface of comet 67P/C-G’s crumbly nucleus it wasn’t just space exploration, it was time travel...
Regular readers will know that I have a major interest in ichthyosaurs, the so-called fish-lizards of the Mesozoic (see links below). As you'll know if you keep your finger on the pulse of Mesozoic reptile news, last week saw the publication of a really interesting new animal from the Lower Triassic: the Chinese `proto-ichthyosaur' Cartorhynchus [...]..
BERLIN: The former oil shale mining site of Messel, near Frankfurt, Germany, is well known for its spectacular fossils of organisms that lived between 47 million and 48 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch...
There's an anime-style visual novel/role-playing video game called Long Live the Queen, in which you play a 14-year-old princess named Elodie whose mother, the Queen, only recently passed away under suspicious circumstances...
August 3, 1562 a devastating thunderstorm hit central Europe, damaging buildings, killing animals and destroying crops and vineyards. The havoc caused by this natural disaster was so great, so unprecedented, that soon an unnatural origin for the storm was proposed...
