Tag Archives: Endangered and Extinct Species

The folk song “Frog Went a-Courtin’” recounts the efforts of a sword- and pistol-toting frog to woo a mouse, who warns him that without the consent of her Uncle Rat she “wouldn’t marry the president.” The courtship rituals of Darwin’s frogs, in the cool, temperate rainforests of southern South America, are not nearly as conditional. What sets their hookups apart …

Good etiquette is expected at meal time in the penguin colony, but the diners with the best manners are found on a new, special island for birds of a certain age. There, geriatric African penguins don’t have to worry about younger birds bombarding the buckets of fish delivered by trainers at the New England Aquarium in Boston. “They all get …

President Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Now, he also wants to log. On Saturday, Mr. Trump directed federal agencies to examine ways to bypass endangered species protections and other environmental regulations to ramp up timber production across 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands. The move appears aimed at increasing domestic supply as the president …

While the Trump administration in Washington was cutting environmental programs, delegates at U.N. biodiversity talks in Rome made modest progress Thursday on a series of measures to support nature. Governments gathered to tackle global biodiversity losses that are unprecedented in human history, driven by the ways people have transformed the world. The seismic geopolitical changes of recent weeks loomed over …

By any measure, the diabetes drug Ozempic has been a blockbuster, racking up billions of dollars in annual sales. In the United States alone, pharmacies fill millions of prescriptions for Ozempic and related drugs, which have become popular for their weight-loss effects, every month. But in the beginning, before the celebrity endorsements and the think pieces and the global supply …

Helen Hays, an intrepid ornithologist who for nearly 50 years led scores of volunteers to Great Gull Island, a postage-stamp islet in Long Island Sound, where they endured dive-bombing birds and fierce ocean storms to help revitalize it as one of the world’s largest nesting sites for common and roseate terns, died on Feb. 5 in Scarsdale, N.Y. She was …

It’s taken decades, but scientists may have finally found Earth’s first fowl. It started in 1993 on Vega Island, a frigid, windswept rock off the Antarctic Peninsula. A mostly headless skeleton of a loon-size diving bird emerged from rocks that, at 68 million years old, predated the dinosaur extinction. The species, which scientists named Vegavis iaai, presented a puzzle: What …

In at least two executive orders since he took office last week, President Trump has invoked a panel with a telling nickname: the God Squad. The committee is made up of high-level officials who can override the landmark Endangered Species Act so that development or other projects can proceed even if they might result in an extinction. It’s called the …

There is no shortage of unpleasant odors in New York City: overflowing garbage on the sidewalk, unmentionable substances in the subway, traffic fumes and more. This week, yet another foul scent has entered the smellscape, but in this case, New Yorkers are flocking to experience it: the blooming of an Amorphophallus gigas, a.k.a. a corpse flower, at the Brooklyn Botanic …

The Biden administration on Thursday withdrew a proposal to expand protections for an endangered whale species. The rules would have required some ships along the Eastern Seaboard to slow down. North Atlantic right whales, a rare species conservationists have aimed to safeguard, have been injured or killed by collisions with vessels along the East coast. In August 2022, the National …