A deadly but critically endangered snake, one of the world’s rarest birds and a heavily guarded flower are among the endangered species in the news this week. A New Snake with a Sad Story: A gorgeous but extremely dangerous new snake species has been discovered in Honduras. The new palm pit viper has been named [...]

When a polar bear suddenly takes ill and dies, the natural inclination is not to suspect zebras as the cause. But according to research published August 16 in Current Biology, that’s what happened at Wuppertal Zoo in Germany in 2010. The strange saga started on June 8, 2010, when Jerka, a 20-year-old female polar bear, [...]

A few weeks ago, the director of wildlife for Nunavut, Canada, made an unexpected declaration, claiming that the number of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in the western Hudson Bay region is increasing, even though scientists say the population is declining. Western Hudson Bay is one of 19 distinct polar bear subpopulations, and previous research has [...]

Billionaire media mogul Ted Turner has made a $1 million donation to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International to help support a new initiative to save endangered Grauer’s gorillas (also known as eastern lowland gorillas, Gorilla beringei graueri), a subspecies living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) whose population is on the decline. [...]

Just two weeks after the World Wildlife Fund declared the Vietnam Javan rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus) extinct comes the announcement of another rhino extinction, this time the western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) of Africa. The declaration came last week from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) as part of [...]

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) got a long-awaited boost on November 23 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) finally designated more than 485,000 square kilometers of “critical habitat” for the species, which is listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The critical habitat was first proposed in October 2009, and a ruling [...]

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed designating some 200,000 square miles of lands and waters along the north coast of Alaska as "critical habitat" for endangered polar bears (Ursus maritimus). In May 2008 the bears received limited protected status as a "threatened species" under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). A proposed [...]

Last year, amid much media hoopla, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) received protected status under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. One aspect of that protection is that American hunters, who often travel to Canada to hunt polar bears, can no longer  bring their trophies into the U.S. Canada considers polar bears to be a "species of [...]