My friend Wendy traveled to Madagascar where she was bitten by a (tame) lemur, nearly fell through a broken bridge to her doom, and climbed a mountain of steps. It was a trip of a lifetime—although we’re all very happy she’s home safely. She brought me a couple of of neat things back from Madagascar, [...]

Back in 1994, Richard Preston scared the bejeesus out of everyone with his eye-opening non-fiction thriller “The Hot Zone”. It was a gripping read, and teenage me couldn’t put it down. In it, Preston documented the depredations of filoviruses — a family of wildly contagious filamentous RNA viruses that cause horrible, gory, swift deaths by [...]

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 [...]

A new genus of bat has been discovered in South Sudan, the world’s newest country. The strikingly striped bat has been placed into the genus Niumbaha, which means “rare” or “unusual” in the Zande language of the region. A paper describing the bat was published this week in the journal ZooKeys. This actually isn’t the [...]

A dead tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) found at Table Rock State Park in South Carolina has tested positive for Geomyces destructans, the deadly and mysterious fungus that has killed millions of bats since it was first observed in February 2006. The fungus has now been found in 21 U.S. states and five Canadian provinces. When [...]

Things keep getting worse for North American bats. Nearly seven million from various species have now fallen victim to the deadly but little-understood disease known as white-nose syndrome (WNS) since it was first observed in February 2006. The fungus that causes WNS, Geomyces destructans, has quickly spread from cave to cave and state to state, [...]

The U.K. Highways Agency plans to build a series of new “bat bridges” to help endangered bats fly across the busy A11 highway near Norfolk in eastern England without being killed by cars and trucks, but even though measures to protect bats from projects like this are required by law some politicians are balking at [...]

The deadly fungal infection known as white-nose syndrome (WNS) has killed at least a million bats since it was first observed in 2006. In some areas more than 90 percent of the bats have been wiped out. Scientists have been behind the eight ball in their efforts to protect bats from this mysterious and devastating [...]

Many smartphone applications are designed more for fun than substance (Angry Birds, anyone?), but a new app from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Bat Conservation Trust offers individuals and communities a chance to get involved in citizen science in a very real way and to help conserve bat populations in the process. [...]

Not every story about endangered species is horrible. Sometimes there’s some good news mixed in with the bad. Although none of these stories is worth dancing in the streets over, each nonetheless merits at least a little bit of celebration. Tasmanian devil DNA Scientist from Penn State University and other institutions have completed sequencing the [...]

The news about endangered species doesn’t slow down. Here, we update some Extinction Countdown stories covered in recent weeks: A plan to save bats The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a national plan to combat the bat-killing white-nose syndrome (WNS) on May 17. As we have reported here many times before, the fungus that [...]

Sometimes there are so many stories about endangered species that not all of them can be covered in depth by this blog. Here are some quick updates on stories previously covered in Extinction Countdown. Wolves still being targeted Even though conservation groups had proposed a compromise to keep gray wolves (Canis lupus) protected under the [...]

The most surprising part of this story was that they managed to record brainwave activity from the sharks. This tale is about one of the most fascinating figures in the history of neuroscience: Dr. Robert Galambos. This is his story. Right: Robert Galambos, MD, PhD  Source: The New York Times Decades ago, Dr. Galambos discovered [...]

Here’s one of the most remarkable specimens I own. It’s a very dead juvenile pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus sp., most likely P. pipistrellus) that died after becoming impaled on the long and dangerous spines of a gorse bush. As should be clear, even given my limited photographic abilities, a large gorse spine pierced the base of [...]

Of the world’s 5700-odd living species of mammal, more than 1200 are bats, making them the most speciose mammalian group after rodents (of which there are about 2200 species). Bats are phenomenally diverse and occur in most terrestrial environments around the world. Understandably, they’re often compared to birds, and several bat groups – those that [...]

By Jason G. Goldman and Matt Soniak Humans have a complicated relationship with our non-human cousins. Some animals we invite into our homes, and treat as members of our families. Indeed, in November of this year singer Fiona Apple made headlines when she announced that she would cancel the South American segment of her tour [...]

Regular readers of this blog know that while I think studying animal cognition, behavior, and communication is (sometimes) fun and (always) interesting, the real importance – the why should I care about this – is because by understanding animals, we can attempt to learn more about ourselves. I’ve written about this before. Here are the [...]