News and research about endangered species from around the world
A tiny new lizard species has been discovered in Western Australia, and just in time: its only known habitat is already being destroyed.The six-centimeter-long coastal plains skink ( Ctenotus ora ) lives in the sand dunes of the Swan Coastal Plain, which starts about 70 kilometers south of Perth...
As tens of thousands of refugees crowd into the area around Virunga National Park in the warn-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the animals that already lived there are getting squeezed out their native habitats...
An eight-year study of Komodo dragons ( Varanus komodoensis ) has revealed some interesting differences between the genders in the world's largest lizard species.
In 2010 a black rhinoceros female named Phila survived two separate and brutal attempts on her life. In the first, poachers used a helicopter to attack the private game reserve where she lived in South Africa...
A global effort to prevent all future species extinctions would cost about $80 billion a year, or $11.42 annually from every person on the planet, according to a study published last week in Science .The study, released in conjunction with eleventh meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) currently underway in Hyderabad, India, is intended to support goals and commitments to halting extinctions and preserving nature by the year 2020 that the world's governments have agreed to under the convention.More specifically, the study finds that lowering the extinction risk for all of the species that are currently known to be threatened would cost the first $4 billion per year...
The body of the last wild Siamese crocodile ( Crocodylus siamensis ) in Vietnam was found floating in Ea Lam Lake on September 29. The 3.2-meter-long, 100-kilogram female had been strangled by two steel wires, possibly by hunters...
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...
Squirrels: So bushy-tailed, so ubiquitous—so deadly.We don't normally think of squirrels as killers, but North America's eastern gray squirrels ( Sciurus carolinensis ) have actually been called one of the worst invasive species on the planet...
A fossilized sample of thousand-year-old parrot dung has revealed a previously unknown ecological relationship that could help save a threatened parasitic plant from extinction.Yup, conservation science is sometimes weird.The plant in question is called Dactylanthus taylorii (aka wood rose or Hades flower)...
What better way to study the world's largest arboreal animals than by putting an eye in the sky?
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