Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:15:35 GMT

Bison to Roam Colorado After a Break of More Than a Century

The North American bison, Bison bison, is one of the largest wild cattle in the world. The species disappeared from the wild in the eighteenth century after extensive hunting for its meat and skin. The bison were once a key part of North Americas short-grass prairie ecosystem, and was a symbol of the wild west. The nNorth American bison, estimated their numbers at sixty million at the times the first Europeans arrived in the new world.

Bison live in herds of twenty to fifty animals. The cows lead a herd, normally members of a family. A bull can grow upto 6 feet high and weigh more than a tonne.

The fur of a mature bull in winter is dark brown to black in colour. The length of the hair measures up to sixteen inches on the forehead, ten inches on the forelegs. The hair on the hindquarters is shorter. The color and character of the bison’s fur varies with the season. The calves have reddish-brown fur and do not have the conspicuous hump. Bison have a keen sense of smell and hearing, they can distinguish smells from as far as 3 km away.

The endangered wild bison were returned to Colorado’s Front Range, after more than a century of its disappearance. In an enclosed 1,400 acre section of a wildlife refuge, that was once the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, sixteen buffalo brought from the National Bison Range in northwestern Montana were released on Saturday.

The 17,000-acre arsenal is being transformed from a chemical weapons and pesticide manufacturing centeNorth American bison, after necessary cleaning. The refuge is already home to hundreds of other species that include deer and bald eagles.

It was estimated that there were forty million bison in the year 1800. All of them were so thoroughly annihilated by the settlers that, by 1883, there were no wild bison in the United States of America. By the turn of the twentieth century there were less than six hundred bison left in North America. Fortunately, a small, devoted group of conservationists saved a few hundred bison. But for their efforts in breeding them there would have been no bison around today and they would have vanished foreveNorth American bison.

Fish and Wildlife, the agency that brought in the buffalo manages bison on seven refuges. More bison might be relocated to the site if the first herd thrives, the agency saidNorth American bison Posted by: Rmpraj      Read more     Source

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:11:23 GMT

150 Million Year-old Arboreal Lizard Glided on Wing-like Membrane

Yet another new fossil discovered, revealed some new facts of ancienew fossil of an ancient arboreal lizard reveals that they used to coast through the air with the help of a wing-like membrane, which they used to stretch across their elongated ribs.

The gliding membrane — called a patagium, could be stretched across eight elongated dorsal ribs! If expanded fully, the layer of stretchy skin would have spanned about 4.5 inches across!

Discovered in the Liaoning Province in northeastern China, Xing Xu of Shenyang Normal University in China and his colleagues described the fossil. The site has a reputation of yielding a treasure trove of feathered dinosaurs and early bird remains in recent years.

This gliding lizard lived about 150 million years ago i.e. during the Early Cretaceous period. This newly found fossil is about 6 inches long. Its immature features suggest that it died at a young age.

A detailed study on the fossil is published in the March 19 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Posted by: Irani      Read more     Source

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:51:52 GMT

Diverged from Its Cousin 1.4 Million Years Ago?

A bizarre type of animal that has been spotted on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo was, till date, believed to be a cousin of a leopard. But, on Thursday, the WWF has confirmed it to be a completely new cat species.

American scientists have determined that the two populations of leopard and this new species diverged some 1.4 million years ago. To make this finding, they compared the DNA of this new leopard with its mainland cousin, according to the conservation group.

The new species seems to be the largest predator in Borneo, having the longest canine teeth compared to its size of any cat. The animal can grow as large as a small panther.

It has been estimated that there are 5,000 to 11,000 of these animals left in Borneo’s rain forests. And, these animals seem to be threatened by logging. The rain forests are believed to hold many more undiscovered species, according to WWF.

Photo Credit: AP/WWF, Alain Compost, HO Posted by: Irani      Read more     Source

March 14, 2007, 10:12 PM CT

New Mammal From Mesozoic Era

n international team of American and Chinese paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 125 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era, in what is now the Hebei Province in China.

The new mammal, documented in the March 15 issue of the journal Nature, provides first-hand evidence of early evolution of the mammalian middle ear--one of the most important features for all modern mammals. The discovery was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"This early mammalian ear from China is a rosetta-stone type of discovery which reinforces the idea that development of complex body parts can be explained by evolution, using exquisitely preserved fossils," said H. Richard Lane, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, which co-funded the discovery with NSF's Division of Environmental Biology and its Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) program.

Named Yanoconodon allini after the Yan Mountains in Hebei, the fossil was unearthed in the fossil-rich beds of the Yixian Formation and is the first Mesozoic mammal recovered from Hebei. The fossil site is about 300 kilometers outside of Beijing.

The researchers discovered that the skull of Yanoconodon revealed a middle ear structure that is an intermediate step between those of modern mammals and those of near relatives of mammals, also known as mammaliaforms......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

March 14, 2007, 10:06 PM CT

Explosive Growth Changes Salmon Industry

A new report, the first to take a comprehensive look at market competition between wild and farmed salmon, sheds new light on the contentious and complex issues surrounding farmed and wild salmon.

The Great Salmon Run: Competition Between Wild and Farmed Salmon, released by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network of World Wildlife Fund and IUCN-the World Conservation Union identifies two important trends that have remade the salmon industry in the last 25 years: farmed salmon has grown from just two percent of the world supply in 1980 to 65 percent in 2004. About three-fourths of the fresh and frozen salmon consumed in the United States is now farmed. In response, the value of the North American wild fishery has plummeted, as indicated by the decline in the value of annual Alaska salmon catches from more than $800 million in the late 1980's to less than $300 million. The decline in value of wild salmon catches has had wide-ranging economic and social effects on wild salmon fishermen and fishing communities.

"Wild salmon could never supply the market demand being met by farmed salmon. A fundamental point of the report is that the debate should not be about wild versus farmed, but whether each method of production is being done right," says Dr. Gunnar Knapp, professor of economics at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and one of the study's authors......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:24:55 GMT

Animal bookmarks

When it's time to stop reading, I usually grab the nearest flat object that's lying around to use as a bookmark: a train ticket, beer mat, Kraft cheese slice, almost anything will do. My books have been starting to smell a bit though, so I should probably invest in one animal bookmarks. An animal bookmark clips onto the front cover of your chosen reading material, allowing you to jam the animal's long tail between your desired pages to keep your place. I'm afraid they're only available in Japan at the moment though. Anyway, I've just realized that I shouldn't buy one of these anyway - I don't like animals, so why would I want an animal bookmark? That's not strictly true, I like pandas, hedgehogs and squirrels. That's it though. The bookmarks available include cats, dogs, giraffes, monkeys, crocodiles, pigs and sheep. No pandas, no hedgehogs, no squirrels.

Posted by Stuart 

Posted by: Stuart      Read more     Source

March 13, 2007, 10:23 PM CT

New Species of Snapper Discovered in Brazil

A popular game fish mistaken by researchers for a dog snapper is actually a new species discovered among the reefs of the Abrolhos region of the South Atlantic Ocean.

The international science journal Zootaxa recently published the discovery of Lutjanus alexandrei, a new snapper species that belongs to the Lutjanidae family, by scientists Rodrigo Moura of Conservation International (CI) and Kenyon Lindeman of Environmental Defense. The study published in Zootaxa provides a revised key for identifying all Lutjanus species in the western Atlantic, along with evidence that the new species completes its life cycle in different but interdependent marine habitats, such as coral reefs and mangroves.

"This discovery that a large, popular fish is a species new to science shows how little we know about the oceans that surround us," Moura said. "It looks like other snapper species found in the Caribbean and eastern United States, as well as the dog snapper caught by fishermen here in Brazil, but it is a distinct species with different markings and color."

Twelve species of the family Lutjanidae, including the new discovery, are now identified in the western Atlantic Ocean. They include Lutjanus griseus and Lutjanus apodus, two species restricted to the Caribbean and eastern coast of the United States but previously believed to occur in Brazilian waters until the discovery of Lutjanus alexandrei......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

March 12, 2007, 9:06 PM CT

About Caribbean extinctions

Smithsonian researchers and his colleagues report a new study that may shake up the way paleontologists think about how environmental change shapes life on Earth. The scientists summarized the environmental, ecological and evolutionary consequences for Caribbean shallow-water marine communities when the Isthmus of Panama was formed. They concluded that extinctions resulting when one ocean became two were delayed by 2 million years.

Scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and London's Natural History Museum report their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 12.

Three to 4 million years ago, the Isthmus of Panama land bridge rose to connect North and South America, and divided one vast ocean into two. In response, a major extinction of marine animals that had flourished under open seaway conditions occurred on the Caribbean side of the new Isthmus.

"We may be way off-track when we search for the causes of extinctions by looking only at the time the extinctions occur in the fossil record, which is what paleontologists normally do," said Aaron O'Dea, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "In our case, we see that most coral and snail species died off a good 2 million years after the environmental change that caused their demise."........ Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

March 12, 2007, 8:58 PM CT

Lifting the Chinese tiger trade ban

WASHINGTONAny easing of the current Chinese ban on trading products made from tigers is likely a death sentence for the endangered cats, as per a new TRAFFIC report released recently by World Wildlife Fund and TRAFFICthe wildlife trade monitoring program of WWF and IUCN.

The report warns that Chinese business owners who would profit from the tiger trade are putting increasing pressure on the Chinese government to overturn its successful 1993 ban and allow domestic trade in captive-bred tiger parts for use in traditional medicine and clothing to resume. For example, investors in the growing number of large-scale captive-breeding "tiger farms" in China are pushing for legalizing trade of products from these facilities, which now house 4,000 tigers. The farms keep captive-bred tigers together in large enclosuresa condition not found in the wildand feed live animals to them before busloads of tourists. Such farmed tigers are unsuitable for reintroduction into the wild.

"Reopening any legal trade in tiger parts would be an enormous step backwards for tiger conservation," said Leigh Henry, Program Officer for TRAFFIC North America. "A legal market in China would muddy the waters for enforcement officials and provide smugglers with a convenient cover for laundering wild tigers since farmed and wild products are indistinguishable. Raising tigers in captivity is 250 times more expensive than poaching wild tigers so there's plenty of incentive to poach and smuggle the last remaining wild populations to extinction"......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:28:05 GMT

Global Law Prohibiting Whale-hunting Under Danger of Being Dumped

Recently, a ban prohibicommercial hunting of whales grabbed attention when a proposal to depose it was supported by nearly 33 countries attending a convention over the issue of whale-hunting though nearly 32 nations voted against it. But the ban is still prevailing as three-fourth of the total participating countries must support its termination.

The outcome of the conference has disappointed many animal rights activists and environmental NGOs who were of the opinion that the countries against the return of hunting of whales must work painstakingly to make it a world-wide success.

Justification being offered by the countries supporting whale-hunting is that the increasing quantity of whales needed to be reduced in order to protect other marine species.

Norway has even gone a step further by flouting the global ban on hunting of whales. Norwegian ships have started reaching Barents Sea for this purpose. Apart fromJapan, Russia & Iceland are the other countries in the world to permit whale-hunting.

However, a well-known environmental NGO Greenpeace has blamed the government of Norway of continuing with its not-so-popular course of action on hunting of whales to bolster the states satisfaction.

Not only the policy but the manner in which the whales are killed has also come under scathing attack world over. Harpoons are inclined with a grenade that detonates within the whale. Its supporters look to it as a swift way of killing or butchering a whale but preservationist argues that its a senseless act of nastiness. Read

Posted by: Ashimabhatnagar      Read more     Source