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Posted on September 30, 2008 | 0 Comments
Photo courtesy WCS
North America's urban areas have become death traps for black bears, luring wild populations to a diet of garbage and an early demise, the Wildlife Conservation Society reported today.
"Black bears that live around urban areas weigh more, get pregnant at a younger age, and are more likely to die violent deaths," WCS said in conjunction with a study published in the Fall 2008 issue of the journal Human-Wildlife Conflicts.
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 29, 2008 | 0 Comments
Photo courtesy State Fair of Texas
Three thousand years after Pharaoh Tutankhamun's entombment in a golden sarcophagus in Ancient Egypt, the boy king has been reincarnated -- in 1,200 pounds of golden butter.
To coincide with the opening in Dallas of the National Geographic exhibit Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs (which runs from this week until May next year), the signature butter sculpture at this year's State Fair of Texas has an Egyptian theme.
Posted on September 28, 2008 | 0 Comments
Image courtesy of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum
An ancient relative of modern ducks and geese that skimmed the swampy wetlands of what is today England had a 16-foot wingspan and a beak full of crocodile-like teeth, scientists said on Friday.
Announced in the journal Palaeontology, the findings were based on a skull that belonged to Dasornis, a bony-toothed bird, or pelagornithid. It was discovered in the London Clay, a marine geological formation that lies under much of of southeast England.
Posted on September 27, 2008 | 0 Comments
Image courtesy NASA
Almost lost in this week's news of the financial crisis, Presidential debate, and the North Korea nuclear deal once again heading toward the rocks were two discomfiting announcements about the environment.
The Global Carbon Project said carbon emissions have been growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the previous decade, despite the increasing international sense of urgency and efforts to curb emissions in a number of Kyoto Protocol signatory countries.
Although the melt season did not break the record for ice loss (set last year), NASA said its data showed that for a four-week period in August 2008, sea ice melted faster during that period than ever before.
So I was a little disappointed that climate change merited only a brief, passing mention in last night's first Presidential debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 26, 2008 | 0 Comments
For the fifth consecutive year, a batch of great bustards was released yesterday in southern England, part of a project to re-establish the heaviest flying bird in the world in its former range in the UK.
As tall as a deer and weighing up to 45 pounds (20 kilograms)--equivalent to over two wild turkeys--the great bustard was hunted to extinction in England by the 1840s.
Photo courtesy Great Bustard Group
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 25, 2008 | 0 Comments
Photo courtesy of M. Hornbach
On the Pacific island Tongatapu a line of enormous coral boulders hundreds of feet from the sea is said by local legend to have been flung ashore by the god Maui in an attempt to kill a giant man-eating fowl.
But now scientists think that the seven boulders, which are up to 30 feet high and weigh as much as 3.5 million pounds, were hurled 300 to 1,300 feet inland by a giant tsunami triggered by a powerful underwater volcano.
"The house-sized boulders were likely flung ashore by a wave rivaling the 1883 Krakatau tsunami, which is estimated to have towered 35 meters (115 feet) high," University of Texas researchers said today.
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 24, 2008 | 0 Comments
Illustration by Nick Longrich/Courtesy University of Calgary
A bizarre, chicken-size dinosaur that had tweezer-like jaws and stumpy but powerful forearms has been found in Alberta, Canada. It is the smallest dinosaur species ever found in North America. Researchers believe it may have preyed on insects.
It looked "like an animal created by Dr. Seuss," said Nick Longrich, a paleontology research associate in the department of biological sciences at the University of Calgary.
The remains of the Cretaceous "anteater" were found during a dig for Albertosaurus fossils in 2002.
Posted on September 23, 2008 | 0 Comments
Genetic traces of extinct species of Galapagos tortoises have been found in their descendants living in the wild, Yale University announced this week. Now the researchers want to try to revive at least one of the species that have gone extinct by selectively breeding it out of the living hybrid population.
"Museum specimens and current molecular technology, coupled with 15 years of field work studying the tortoise population present now on the Galapagos archipelago has painted a new picture of the origins and future of some of the tortoises," Yale evolutionary biologist Gisella Caccone and colleagues said.
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 22, 2008 | 0 Comments
Photograph of the newly discovered Australian reticulate swell shark Cephaloscyllium hiscosellum courtesy CSIRO
Marine biologist Sylvia Earle is fond of saying that a teaspoon of ocean water brims with life. She once told me that the sea is full of animals yet to be discovered. That we know less about the ocean floor than we do about the solar system.
I'm mindful of these words whenever we publish news about discoveries in the oceans. Finds seem to be announced almost every week. Some of the most popular stories we have published have been about giant squid or strange new species of fish.
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 19, 2008 | 1 Comments
The 100th episode of the hit television show Dog Whisperer airs on National Geographic Channel tonight.
Show host Cesar Millan has earned a reputation for rehabilitating problem pooches as well as training their frustrated owners.
National Geographic News contributor Stefan Lovgren spoke with Millan from his home in Los Angeles about everything from the most challenging cases he's faced to the secrets of his success.
Photo courtesy National Geographic Channel
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 18, 2008 | 0 Comments
A new iguana has been discovered on Fiji, an island country in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Named Brachylophus bulabula (bula means "hello" in Fijian), the colorful new species joins only two other living Pacific iguana species, one of which is critically endangered, U.S. Geological Survey scientists said today.
Brachylophus bulabula female on Kadavu Island, Fiji
Photo copyright Paddy Ryan, Ryan Photographic
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 17, 2008 | 0 Comments
Reconstruction by Kennis & Kennis/Photo by Joe McNally/NGS
Meet Wilma, the first reconstruction of a Neanderthal created using evidence from fossil anatomy and ancient DNA.
Neanderthals were a species of human that became extinct 28,000 years ago. The lifesize model was created to illustrate "The Last of the Neanderthals," the cover article in the October 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine.
The article, written by Steve Hall and photographed by David Liittschwager and Joe McNally, explores what caused Neanderthals, who dominated Eurasia for more than 200,000 years, to vanish in the Ice Age, while our modern human ancestors survived.
Posted on September 16, 2008 | 0 Comments
"This is an exciting time for New Yorkers. Just think, just miles from the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Carnegie Hall and Times Square, the great whales are singing," says Christopher W. Clark, director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
"These are some of the largest and rarest animals on this planet trying to make a living just a few miles from New York's shores," he said in a statement released today. "It just goes to show us that there are many important and wonderful discoveries to be made about the living world right here, right in our backyards."
Photo of North Atlantic right whale and calf courtesy NOAA
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 15, 2008 | 0 Comments
Illustration by S.S. Firmage/NGS
Bees, butterflies and other little critters that spend their lives buzzing around flowers provided worldwide economic value of about $215 billion in 2005, French and German scientists announced today.
"This figure amounted to 9.5% of the total value of the world agricultural food production," they said in a paper published in the journal Ecological Economics.
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 12, 2008 | 0 Comments
A tiny tree frog not seen for twenty years and thought to be extinct has been spotted in Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve.
Scientists from the University of Manchester and Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom saw and photographed a male specimen of the frog Isthmohyla rivularis last year. A search of the same area this year turned up a pregnant female and more males, suggesting that the species is breeding.
Photo courtesy Mark Dickinson, University of Manchester
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 11, 2008 | 0 Comments
My daughter Catherine said recently, "Dad, you're in the luckiest generation. You've lived with all the animals and you've got all this new technology."
Photo by Michael Nichols/NGS
I know what she means. My generation has seen the best of times, I sometimes think. The planet seemed to be bigger, richer, more resilient forty years ago. And our technology today is, as the great biologist E. O. Wilson says, godlike.
Posted on September 10, 2008 | 0 Comments
Some 700 species of freshwater fish in North America are in jeopardy, scientists from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada said today.
The number represents nearly 40 percent of all freshwater species on the continent and is nearly double the 364 listed as "imperiled" in the previous 1989 study published by the American Fisheries Society.
Researchers classified each of the 700 fishes listed as either vulnerable (230), threatened (190), or endangered (280). In addition, 61 fishes are presumed extinct.
Posted on September 9, 2008 | 0 Comments
Three-dimensional computer-assisted reconstructions of Neanderthal infants based on fossils found in Russia and Syria (left) suggests that our closest human relatives had brains as large as ours at birth and larger than ours as adults.
The finding indicates that we and the Neanderthals inherited the pattern of early brain size and development from a yet unknown common human ancestor, researchers who did the reconstruction say. Still largely unknown is how this pattern of brain development arose during evolution.
The research also sheds light on the similarities and differences in the life histories of modern humans and Neanderthals: the timing of major events in an individual's life, such as gestation time, age at sexual maturity, and age at death. The differences could have given modern humans an evolutionary advantage, the study indicates.
Image courtesy of M. Ponce de León and C. Zollikofer, University of Zurich
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 8, 2008 | 0 Comments
Science merging with rap posted on YouTube--it's a mashup for the zeitgeist.
The latest version of this phenomenon is the popular "Large Hadron Rap," viewed on YouTube 1,200,000 times.
Posted on September 5, 2008 | 0 Comments
A program to save South Asia's wild vultures from extinction by breeding captive populations may be an exercise in futility, according to research released today.
Captive colonies are too small to protect the species from extinction, University of Michigan scientists have determined.
Vultures once numbered tens of millions in India, Nepal, and Pakistan, where they provided valuable health services by consuming the remains of animal carcasses quickly. The birds also disposed of human remains set out for them on sacrificial "towers of silence" by adherents of the ancient Parsi religion.
Posted on September 4, 2008 | 0 Comments
In my last entry I wrote about the appalling situation in one of our most precious national parks, Virunga in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home of the rare mountain gorilla and many other treasured species of animals and flora.
It got me thinking of the so-called butterfly effect, the notion that a flutter of a butterfly's wings can set off a chain reaction of events that can result in a typhoon on the other side of the planet.
Posted on September 3, 2008 | 2 Comments
One of the hottest fronts in the fight for conservation has got to be Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the last remaining populations of mountain gorillas.
"Intense negotiations" led by the new director of the park, Emmanuel de Merode, has apparently resulted in the withdrawal of more than a thousand Congo Army troops from the park, it was announced today.
"Demilitarizing Virunga National Park remains our greatest and most difficult challenge. The Congolese National Army has taken the first step, which represents a major breakthrough at a time when the threats to the park have never been greater," de Merode said in a press statement.
Photo Paul Zahl/NGS
► Read This Entire PostPosted on September 2, 2008 | 1 Comments
Photo Joel Sartore/NGS
In a remote neck of Canada's backwoods the deer catch a break during the fall. That's when the wolves go fishing.
"Although most people imagine wolves chasing deer and other hoofed animals, new research suggests that, when they can, wolves actually prefer fishing to hunting," researchers from the University of Victoria and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Canada, announced this week.
The study, published in the journal BMC Ecology and funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, shows that when salmon is available, wolves will reduce deer hunting activity and instead focus on seafood.
Posted on September 1, 2008 | 1 Comments
A tiny wasp that lays its eggs in living caterpillars belongs to one of the most astoundingly diverse groups of insects on Earth.
"It's been estimated to have [50,000] to 60,000 species, which is about the same as all vertebrates -- all fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles -- which is a lot," says University of Illinois entomology professor James Whitfield, who led the taxonomic study.
Photo by Won Young Choi
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