In a dank, disused railway tunnel in West Sussex hangs a brown, furry parcel, the sole known representative of Britain’s rarest mammal. Scientists don’t like to apply emotive adjectives to animals, but if ever there were a lonesome creature, it would be this greater mouse-eared bat. The bat’s reappearance in December for its 20th winter […]
Tag: natural history
POLL: Should the euthanasia of wildlife for scientific study be stopped?
In the mid 2000s, Patricia Parker of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and her colleagues were trying to solve a mystery. Concerned by how avian pox was wiping out several bird species on the Hawaiian Islands, the researchers wanted to find out if the disease was a threat to a unique bird species of another […]
Early Birds Lacked in Diversity, New Study Finds
Researchers from the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History have found a striking lack of diversity in the earliest known fossil bird fauna – the Jehol aviafauna. “There were no swans, no swallows, no herons, nothing like that,” explained Jonathan Mitchell, a PhD student at the University of Chicago and the […]
Storm-petrel breeding in the Atacama desert
Seabirds, especially pelagic species, are more threatened than most other bird groups with similar numbers of species. Among them,Storm-petrels (family Hydrobatidae) are diverse and widespread in the Pacific Ocean.Markham’s Storm-Petrel (Oceanodroma markhami) is common in the Humboldt Current, including pelagic and coastal waters of Ecuador, Peru, and Chile between 18°N and 30°S. Only a couple […]
Free-tailed funnel cloud (reprint from June 2011)
When Doppler radar first arrived in the area known affectionately to Texans as the Hill Country, the local television station meteorologists were understandably eager to show off the weather forecasting capabilities of their newest toy. Unfortunately, they got off to a less than impressive start. Night after night that summer, evening thunderstorms were forecast but […]