Domesticated dogs are some of the most popular animals on the planet, but their cousins in the wild aren’t always as beloved. For thousands of years humans have persecuted wolves, jackals, dingoes, foxes and other members of the family Canidae, pushing many species into or close to extinction. Here are five of the most endangered [...]

Rhinos, cheetahs, gray wolves and frogs are among the endangered species in the news this week. Worst News of the Week: All of the rhinos in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park have been completely wiped out by poachers, who are now turning their effort to the park’s elephants. The 1.1 million hectare park is the size [...]

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a $2,500 reward for information about the January 18 shooting death of a critically endangered red wolf (Canis rufus) in North Carolina. The wolf, which wore a radio collar around its neck, was at least the 10th member of his species illegally shot and killed in the [...]

On Wednesday, January 16, a four-year-old Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) named M1133 took the first careful steps out of his crate into Arizona’s Apache National Forest, near the New Mexico border. It was the first time he had ever been in the wild. Officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and [...]

People often ask me, “How can you write about endangered species all the time? Isn’t it depressing?” Sure, it can be, but not as depressing as the sheer number of stories that I don’t get to write about. So let’s catch up on some of the stories that should have made headlines this month. First [...]

If scientists in Brazil have their way, the populations of eight endangered species could soon expand through a mass effort to clone them. The project is spearheaded by the Brasilia Zoological Garden in partnership with Embrapa, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency. The scientists have already spent the past two years collecting 420 genetic samples [...]

The last wolves in Africa face a difficult road if they are going to survive. Just 500 Ethiopian wolves (Canis simensis) remain in the mountains of the country for which they are named. The animals now live in six fragmented populations located hundreds of kilometers apart from one another; three of these populations have fewer [...]

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) have targets on their backs. One of the next barrages of gunfire will start soon in Minnesota, where more than 23,000 people have applied for the 6,000 permits that the state will issue for its fall hunting season, set to start November 3. This is one of the latest salvos against [...]

After not being seen for more than 30 years, the Japanese river otter (Lutra lutra whiteleyi) has been declared extinct by the country’s Ministry of the Environment, which also last week declared several other species extinct. Once numbering in the millions, Japanese river otters—a subspecies of the European or Eurasian otter (L. lutra)—were overhunted for [...]

In an abbreviated, terse press conference on Wednesday Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) will propose removing gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the endangered species list in the northern Rockies and the western Great Lakes. Last month, lawmakers in Congress added riders to the annual budget [...]

While visiting the rugged Falkland Islands in the 1830s, Charles Darwin puzzled over a local wolf that was the only endemic land-dwelling mammal and looked little like other canids on the mainland. By 1876, the Falklands wolf (Dusicyon australis) was extinct and with it threatened to go its mysterious history. But a new genetic analysis [...]