“Its venom disrupts the blood-clotting system, causing haemorrhage and kidney failure. Without prompt treatment bites can be fatal…”

“Its venom disrupts the blood-clotting system, causing haemorrhage and kidney failure. Without prompt treatment bites can be fatal…”

This little desert hunter may not look especially imposing, but its bite can be deadly, and in India it is one of the “Big Four” snakes thought to be jointly responsible for around 58,000 mortalities per year. Those that encounter the saw-scaled viper would do well to heed the rasping warning sound it emits before […]

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A real-life kraken monster? At 19m it was longer than a railway carriage, devilishly smart and able to crush prey with a devastatingly lethal bite…

A real-life kraken monster? At 19m it was longer than a railway carriage, devilishly smart and able to crush prey with a devastatingly lethal bite…

The largest predators in Earth’s oceans are typically vertebrates, so when palaeontologists recently announced they’d found fossils from a 19m-long octopus that lived during the Late Cretaceous, it’s no surprise a lot of people were left scratching their heads. What is Nanaimoteuthis haggarti? This colossal cephalopod is perhaps the closest palaeontologists have ever got to finding […]

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Overtourism threatens Sri Lanka’s leopards

Overtourism threatens Sri Lanka’s leopards

Yala National Park, Sri Lanka‘s most famous wildlife destination, is facing a conservation crisis as overcrowding and speeding safari jeeps increasingly threaten its wildlife, particularly its famed leopards, reports Mongabay contributor Kamanthi Wickramasinghe. Block I of the park, which boasts of one of the world’s highest leopard densities at one animal per square kilometer (2.6 per square mile), attracted […]

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“It can live for 30 years without food & survive temperatures from zero to boiling point.” 8 indestructible animals that are the ultimate survivors

“It can live for 30 years without food & survive temperatures from zero to boiling point.” 8 indestructible animals that are the ultimate survivors

In certain situations, there are animals that seem almost immortal as they not only survive but thrive in extreme circumstances, says Sheena Harvey. The world’s most indestructible animals on Earth The animal that can survive fire    The trick the echidna, an Australian egg-laying mammal, employs to stay alive despite all around them being destroyed by a wildfire was only discovered in […]

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