Tag Archives: Endangered and Extinct Species

The deep-sea environs of the Earth’s poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures: giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish. Finding and identifying these animals can be difficult, however; some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds. But on Christmas Day last year, the crew of the R/V Falkor …

The Trump administration is proposing a drastic reimagining of how public lands across the United States are used and managed, according to an Interior Department document leaked to the public in late April. The document, a draft of the department’s strategic plan for the next five years, downplays conservation in favor of an approach that seeks to maximize economic returns, …

The Trump administration has moved to end federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a showy grouse with the misfortune of inhabiting southern and central grasslands long sought-after for agriculture and energy development. In a court filing on Wednesday, officials said the Fish and Wildlife Service had erred in a Biden-era decision that placed the bird on the endangered species …

De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal’s advisers include …

A South Carolina man pleaded guilty on Thursday to importing sperm whale teeth and bones from four countries and selling them in the United States, federal prosecutors said. The man, Lauren H. DeLoach, 69, of St. Helena Island, S.C., pleaded guilty to Lacey Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act charges for importing and selling sperm whale parts, according to the …

In Washington State, April is when millions of young Chinook salmon are released from hatcheries, where they started as tiny, pink globes, to swim downstream and rebuild the salmon population. They are part of an ecosystem that affects tribal, commercial, and recreational fishing and are a main source of food for endangered killer whales. But this year, almost a dozen …

For more than a decade, scientists have chased the idea of reviving extinct species, a process sometimes called de-extinction. Now, a company called Colossal Biosciences appears to have done it, or something close, with the dire wolf, a giant, extinct species made famous by the television series “Game of Thrones.” In 2021, a separate team of scientists managed to retrieve …

Congratulations are in order for Mommy, a Galápagos tortoise and a longtime resident of the Philadelphia Zoo, who recently became a first-time mother at the estimated age of 100. Mommy, who has lived at the zoo since 1932, laid 16 eggs in November. Four of them have since hatched — the first successful hatching for her species at the zoo, …

New research painted a more accurate picture of the megafauna that spread widely around the Americas before they went extinct. Source link

Ten years ago, this was just a big hole in the ground behind a Lowe’s home improvement store in southern New Jersey, an unlikely place to find what might be one of the world’s most important fossil sites. But 66 million years ago, tantalizingly close in time to when the dinosaurs went extinct, a multitude of sea creatures died here …