Let’s start at the beginning: what’s a dhole? It’s not a giant fruit corporation. It’s not Homer Simpson’s catch phrase. It’s not welfare payment by a government. Dholes are actually wild canids, efficient predators and communal pack hunters. These rust-coloured carnivores roam the jungles and montane forests of Central and East Asia filling the humid […]
Tag: extinction
Will Humans Survive the Sixth Great Extinction?
In the last half-billion years, life on Earth has been nearly wiped out five times—by such things as climate change, an intense ice age, volcanoes, and that space rock that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, obliterating the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species. These events are known as the […]
Lion among 23,000 species threatened with extinction
The mighty lion, reclusive cave crabs and the world’s rarest sea lion are among nearly 23,000 species at risk of dying out, a top conservation body warned on Tuesday. In an update to its “Red List” of threatened species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) hailed some clear advances in saving endangered […]
Vaquita porpoise going extinct right before our eyes
If you’ve never heard of the vaquita, then picture a porpoise about the size of a small human with black-lined, expressive eyes and a rounded mouth. The smallest members of the porpoise family, vaquitas are today found only in the waters of Mexico’s northern Gulf of California – and pretty soon, you won’t find them […]
Iberian lynx: back from the brink of extinction … and run down by cars
The world’s most endangered feline species, the Iberian lynx, is making a comeback in Spain after being pushed to the brink of extinction. But the costly efforts to reintroduce the spotted cat into the wild face an unexpected enemy – cars. The number of lynx killed by collisions with vehicles has soared since Spain’s economic […]
Eastern Cougar extinct, no longer needs protection, says US conservation agency
Eastern cougars that once roamed North America from Canada to South Carolina are extinct and no longer warrant federal Endangered Species Act protections, US wildlife managers have said. The proposal to remove so-called eastern cougars from the list of endangered and threatened species comes nearly 80 years after the last of those mountain lions was […]
Earth enters new extinction phase
The Earth has entered a new period of extinction, a study by three US universities has concluded, and humans could be among the first casualties. The report, led by the universities of Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley, said vertebrates were disappearing at a rate 114 times faster than normal. The findings echo those in a report […]
Yellow-breasted bunting population collapses across Eurasia
In 1914 the world’s last passenger pigeon died. Nicknamed Martha, she was not killed by hunters—like so many others of her species—but simply old age. With her passing, the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was lost forever to extinction. A hundred years before Martha’s death, however, the passenger pigeon may have been the most populous bird […]