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In 2019, Cyclone Idai swept through Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, which was bad for the animals but good for researchers. The 1,500-square-mile park is one of the most ecologically diverse preserves in the world, as well as the most technologically sophisticated.
If you’ve never witnessed the birth of a rhinoceros, do we have a video for you. This month the Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England announced the birth of the extremely rare Eastern black rhino.
The orcas were still at it off the coast of Spain on Halloween when a small but persistent pod of the killer whales harassed a boat for a solid 45 minutes, causing enough damage to sink it.
No one had seen the extremely rare Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna since 1961, so it was assumed that the weird, egg-laying mammal was extinct. Earlier this month the beast that looks like a spiny anteater was rediscovered in Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains, likely the only place on Earth the creature exists.
his week Iceland’s most famous singer, Björk, drops a new song featuring Catalan singer Rosalía. The collaboration is intended to raise awareness – and cash – to push back against Iceland’s salmon farms.
It’s been four decades since drug kingpin Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippopotamuses out of Africa to populate his lavish estate in Colombia with exotic animals. Escobar has been dead a long time but his hippos have flourished, with more than 150 of the beasts stomping throughout the Magdalena River basin.
On August 19, 71-year-old hiker Richard Moore of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and his 12-pound dog Finney had set out to climb Blackhead Peak just east of town. He never returned, and a several-days-long search did not find the missing man.
Researchers spent many hours watching and filming domestic cats in a Los Angeles cat cafe, and they determined that the felines can conjure nearly 300 facial expressions. The research is published in the journal Behavioural Processes.
Last year at this time we reported the virgin birth of zebra sharks at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. Now comes news that an epaulette shark at Brookfield Zoo – also near Chicago – has performed the same trick.
An Asiatic black bear named Na spent the last 20 years in a tiny cage in Vietnam. Now she will get a second life in a large, open habitat in a sanctuary with other bears.
We have been following the charmed life of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who flew the coop in the Central Park Zoo nine months ago and has lived in freedom ever since. This week Flaco took off again, this time to a garden in the Lower East Side and beyond. Wherever he lands next is up to Flaco.
A private golf course in Sedona, Arizona is under siege as dozens of javelinas – the wild pig-like peccaries of the Southwest – have been tearing up the grass in search of tasty grub worms. Seven Canyons Golf Club in the state’s Coconino National Forest has not yet figured out how to deal with the marauding beasts.
A sheep named Sugar, who had escaped from an Australian farm five years ago, was spotted living in a mob of wild kangaroos at a reservoir 20 miles from Melbourne.
Japanese scientists have successfully grown mouse embryos aboard the International Space Station, a first. Their research appears in the journal iScience.
Among the 6,400 extant species of mammals, it was long believed that only humans and four species of toothed whales experience menopause. Now wildlife biologists have observed “the change” in chimpanzees, and the discovery is challenging a long-accepted hypothesis for why it happens at all.
A new (but very old) Jurassic-era creature has just been described by paleontologists, and it already goes by many names: ancient sea monster, Lorrainosaurus, sea murderer (!), and, as noted in the journal Scientific Reports, where the new research appears, “macropredatory pliosaurid.”
“The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous.” That’s how Chicago lawyer Ioan-Radu Motoarcă opens his argument, published in the serious Oxford University Press journal Analysis.
In August 2019, Japanese researchers tagged 14 streaked shearwater seabirds with GPS trackers with the aim of monitoring their nesting behavior. But when Typhoon Faxai battered the eastern coast of Japan later that month, one of the birds was taken on a wild ride.
In May, we were wishing Bobi a happy birthday, his thirty-first – by far more birthdays than any other dog had ever celebrated. We’re sad to report that there will be no more, as Bobi has passed on after three decades.
The depth of human tragedy attendant to the Hamas-Israeli war leaves little emotional bandwidth for animal welfare, but animals – dogs, cats, and other pets – still need care. Animal rescue goes on, within and near Gaza, even under extremely dangerous and stressful conditions.
