Fan Peng-Fei of China’s Dali University was worried the first time he entered the forest habitat of the critically endangered cao vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus). The isolated forest, skirting the China–Vietnam border, had been heavily degraded by years of agricultural development, firewood collection and charcoal production. What little forest remained provided poor habitat for the [...]

Bornean orangutans, gray bats and Grauer’s gorillas are among the endangered species in the news this week. This Week’s Most Heartbreaking Story: A family of Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) was photographed clinging to the sole remaining tree in their former forest habitat after the rest of it had been chopped down for a palm oil [...]

Poaching, habitat loss, inbreeding and hybridization. These are just a few of the threats faced by many wild feline species around the globe. Here are six of the world’s most endangered feline species and subspecies—some of which may not survive into the next century. 1. Amur leopards Let’s start with the good news: The population [...]

Primates that spend their entire lives in trees tend not to survive after those trees are cut down. Sadly, that’s what’s happening in northeast India, where the forest habitats for one of the world’s rarest apes are rapidly disappearing. The western hoolock gibbon (Hoolock hoolock) has lost an estimated 90 percent of its population over [...]

China’s efforts to conserve and grow its populations of endangered giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are at odds with its own changing forestry policies, which could damage or destroy up to 15 percent of the pandas’ habitat, according to conservationists writing in the February 1 issue of Science. At the heart of the matter is a [...]

When wildlife officials in Borneo first encountered a three-month-old pygmy elephant on January 25, he was surrounded by death. Four members of his herd lay on the ground around him, their bodies cold and bloody. The baby was nudging his dead mother with his trunk, trying to get her to rise and feed him. Tragically, [...]

Two Brazilian researchers doing some recreational bird-watching have made an amazing discovery: the first nest ever found for the critically endangered Stresemann’s bristlefront (Merulaxis stresemanni). One of the world’s rarest birds, the bristlefront has an estimated population of just 15 individuals, all at the 600-hectare Mata do Passarinho Reserve run by Fundação Biodiversitas in the [...]

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. The 30-centimeter-long, nocturnal solenodons possess a [...]

What better way to study the world’s largest arboreal animals than by putting an eye in the sky? A team of scientists working in Indonesia has done just that by launching inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drone airplanes), to study critically endangered Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) from above the treetops. The technology is already being [...]

Counting butterflies in the wild is not an easy task, even when you are looking for the largest butterfly in the world, the Queen Alexandra’s birdwing (Ornithoptera alexandrae) of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Females of the species have an impressive and eye-catching 30-centimeter wingspan, 50 percent larger than the more colorful males. But the Queen [...]

Humans may have been causing climate change for much longer than we’ve been burning fossil fuels. In fact, the agrarian revolution may have started human-induced climate changes long before the industrial revolution began to sully the skies. How? Through the clearing of forests, which still remains the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human [...]

AUSTIN—A new and unpublished analysis of the regional impacts of a hypothetical scheme to mitigate global warming via radical deforestation was unveiled here Sunday at a gathering of science journalists and writers, on the heels of a blogging firestorm about geoengineering and climate change in anticipation of the release of Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, [...]