#Fun Facts About Kangaroos Kangaroos are one of many marsupials native to Australia. They are expert jumpers
and even swimmers and they live in groups called mobs. Kangaroos like all marsupials a sub-type of mammalâ give birth to relatively undeveloped young that develop further in the mother's pouch.
A female kangaroo gives birth to a baby or joey once a year after about a month of gestation.
A newborn joey can be anywhere from 0. 2 to 0. 9 inches (5 to 25 millimeters) long the size of a grain of rice to the size of a honeybee.
The tiny hairless and blind newborn immediately crawls into its mom's pouch (all female marsupials have one) where it nurses
Evidence also suggested the people in eastern town were trading with people in workers'town for hippo-tusk fragments.
As the climate changed the very large mammals that had adapted to extreme cold like mammoth and wooly rhinoceros became extinct.
#How Bomb Tests Could Date Elephant Ivory Bomb tests generations ago could indirectly help fight illegal poaching of African elephants new research shows.
and then deposited in the bodies of herbivores like African elephants. By looking at the levels of this carbon isotope known as carbon-14 in elephant tusks and ivory researchers can find out how old they are.
In the United states for example ivory taken prior to a 1989 worldwide ban on African elephant tusks may be traded legally
while new ivory is illegal to traffic said Kevin Uno a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New york. I don't necessarily think this will save the elephants
but it's a critical tool to fight poaching of elephants said Uno co-author of a study detailing the technique published today (July 1) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The best way to stop the killing of elephants is to identify the major poaching hotspots
Elephant Images: The Biggest Beasts On land Poaching getting worse Poaching of African elephants is as bad as it's ever been
and getting worse Uno said. There were an estimated 46.5 tons (42200 kilograms) of ivory seized in 2011 with even higher numbers suspected in 2012 Wasser said.
That suggests as many as 50000 elephants were killed to provide the ivory seized in 2011. With a total population of 400000 elephants this is a very serious situation Wasser said.
In other words if the rate of poaching isn't slowed African elephants could be gone mostly within 10 years.
Trafficking is carried out in part by large criminal networks and is a multibillion-dollar industry. It's driven largely by demand in China for ivory and rhino horns
which are valued for the supposed medicinal benefits. The United states also is a destination for illegal ivory according to the study.
Two things must be done to stop poaching said Richard Ruggiero an expert on elephant poaching with the U s. Fish
Secondly we need to be much better at providing security for elephants to assure detection apprehension
The yak is the third largest beast in Asia after the elephant and rhino but due to its remote location has never been weighed officially.
Yaks live in alpine tundra grasslands and the cold desert regions of the northernâ Tibetan Plateau ranging from 13000 to 20000 feet (4000 to 6100 meters) in elevation according to the IUCN.
Dozens of species disappeared altogether including 17 giant lemurs three pygmy hippopotamuses two aardvarklike mammals a giant fossa (a catlike carnivore) eight elephant birds a giant crocodile and two giant tortoises.
The passenger pigeon the dodo and the woolly mammoth are just a few of the species wiped off the Earth by changing environments and human activities.
Woolly mammoths next? Other scientists dream of bringing back a beast that roamed the Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago:
the woolly mammoth. Well-preserved mammoths have been dug out of the Siberian tundra containing bone marrow skin hair and fat.
If a living mammoth cell were found it could be grown in a lab and coaxed to form an embryo.
The embryo could be implanted into the closest living relative of mammoths an elephant which would give birth to a baby mammoth.
Images: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts Finding a living mammoth cell is very unlikely. But South korean biomedical engineer Insung Hwang hopes to find just a cell nucleus and produce a clone from it like Dolly the sheep.
The nucleus would be implanted into an elephant egg whose nucleus had been removed. But this is no easy feat no one has harvested yet successfully an elephant egg.
The challenges aren't trifling. Even if researchers succeed in creating a mammoth passenger pigeon or other extinct creature it has to survive in the wild.
or woolly mammoth has a strong appeal to the public's imagination Temple said. But the species that are hyped often don't meet those criteria at all he said.
when woolly mammoths existed. Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+.+Â Follow us@livescience Facebook & Google+.
you'd have better luck putting butterfly wings on a rhino. Most images of the Jersey Devil look like a monster that a high school Dungeons & dragons player might dream up as a composite of different unrelated animals
which consists of plant-eating rhinoceros-like dinos including Triceratops. It has the biggest nose and the longest horns of any of the ceratopsids said study co-author Mark Loewen a paleontologist at the University of Utah.
what the ancestor of mice elephants lions tigers bears whales bats and humans once looked like researchers say.
We have all these placentals alive today from elephants to shrews from things that fly to things that swim Spaulding said.
One of the richest sources of information about life in the Pleistocene epoch can be found in the La Brea Tar pits in Los Angeles where remains of everything from insects to plant life to animals were preserved including a partial skeleton of a female human and a nearly complete woolly mammoth.
In addition to the woolly mammoth mammals such as saber-toothed cats (Smilodon) giant ground sloths (Megatherium) and mastodons roamed the Earth during this period.
About 13000 years ago more than three-fourths of the large Ice age animals including woolly mammoths mastodons saber-toothed tigers
Recent research suggests that an extraterrestrial object possibly a comet about 3 miles wide may have exploded over southern Canada nearly wiping out an ancient Stone age culture as well as megafauna like mastodons and mammoths a
#Preventing an Elephant Eden from Becoming Paradise Lost (Op-Ed) Richard Carroll is vice president for Africa at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Washington D c. He contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
I first stepped out of the dense tropical rain forest of Central african republic's Dzanga-Sangha region into a 30-acre clearing with mineral rich soils known as the Village of the Elephants.
Instantly I was transported into prehistory with forest elephants of every size shape and color sucking the mineral salts out of the soil chasing one another rolling around in mud-pits
This elephant Eden now a crown jewel in the three-nation Sangha Trinational World Heritage Site is under attack.
and slaughtered at least 26 elephants four of them calves collecting as much ivory as possible before disappearing to most likely begin preparing their next attack.
What's left of the elephants lies as silent witness to a global crisis. A handful of elephants have returned
since but locals describe the area as an elephant mortuary. Elephant Images: The Biggest Beasts On land The threat to stability posed by incidents such as the one at Dzanga Bai is being highlighted today (May 29) in a briefing before the United nations Security council.
In a report to the world's highest international security body U n. Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon says Poaching
Saving the elephants of Dzanga Bai is critical. Central african republic must act quickly to secure the area
These elephants travel far and carry no passports as they cross international borders throughout the Sangha Trinational.
Forest elephant populations have plummeted 62 percent over the past 10 years driven largely by demand from newly rich individuals in China and Thailand.
and the forests were largely empty of species like elephant. But with the help of Mekema and his people the government of CAR was able to protect Dzanga Sangha
#Reviving the Woolly mammoth: Will De-Extinction Become Reality? Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000.
Ten years later a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington D c. today (March 15) for a forum called TEDXDEEXTINCTION hosted by the National geographic Society to talk about how to revive extinct animals from the Tasmanian tiger and the saber-toothed cat to the woolly mammoth and the North american passenger pigeon.
Some have their hopes set on the woolly mammoth a relative of modern elephants that went extinct 3000 to 10000 years ago and left behind some extraordinarily well preserved carcasses in Siberian permafrost.
and an Asian elephant egg a challenging prospect as no one has ever been able to harvest eggs from an elephant.
poll options 50 162=Woolly mammoth; poll options 50 163=Gastric brooding frog; poll options 50 165=Saber-toothed cat;
and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades Ronald Clarke a Rutgers criminologist who helped organize the conference told Livescience.
and to address the underlying poverty that motivates people to kill and traffic animal products like rhino horns.
Rhino poaching is raging out of control and is worse than it has ever been.)
He also advocated building more fences around large reserves a suggestion that was met with some resistance by at least one ecologist present at the conference who questioned Leakey after his talk about the fence's ability to stop elephants.
The stories of people eating mammoth go back more than 100 years but are more legend than truth.
Chocolate-Covered Elephant Ivory Seized in Macau Ivory poachers go to sometimes-absurd lengths to smuggle prized pieces of elephant tusks across borders.
Based on the amount of ivory seized worldwide in 2011 some researchers have estimated that up to 50000 African elephants were killed that year for their tusks.
We have used stable isotopes to quantify African elephant diet over time as it relates to rainfall history
which is useful information for elephant conservation. Typically after rainfall grasses become more abundant and constitute a greater portion of an elephant's diet.
Using carbon isotopes in hair we can see exactly how much grass these animals are eating
Tales from a Conservation Biologist Elephants really really hate camera flashes. When conservation biologist Firoz Ahmed installs camera traps in Kaziranga National park in northeastern India's Assam state he
We've got kung-fu elephants. They just come and kick our camera traps Ahmed said.
Even a heavy steel box weighing 30 pounds (12 kilograms) isn't elephant-proof because tusks can poke inside a camera lens opening Ahmed said.
We have to have equipment that can sustain an elephant trampling for an hour he said.
The holes that the elephants and the rhinos and the buffalos make that becomes the highway
So this place has rhinos more than 2000 of them and we always pray in the morning I don't want to see a rhino.
OAP: What are some of the threats faced by tigers in India? FA: This is a human-dominated place.
In the last two weeks we lost four rhinos to poachers and in the last six months we lost about 20 rhinos to poachers.
We killed only two poachers. The area is not remote it is in the middle of the state
Kaziranga has about 2200 Asiatic one-horned rhinos India's biggest conservation success story. We also got poachers.
They killed a rhino on Jan 14 2011 and we thought maybe we got them on camera
#US Crushes Its Stockpile of Elephant Ivory Six tons of carvings jewelry trinkets and tusks were being reduced to powder Thursday afternoon (Nov 14) as the United states for the first time destroyed its ivory stockpile.
Poachers kill more than 30000 African elephants for their tusks each year according to some estimates. Â See Photos of the Seized Ivory Some argue that the seized ivory should be sold to alleviate the demand for ivory Dan Ashe director of the FWS wrote in a blog post today.
and China the Xaysavang Network facilitates the killing of endangered elephants rhinos and other species for products such as ivory Kerry said in a statement.
but Ashe said on his blog that the FWS hopes it will be used to design memorials to educate the public and build awareness about the plight of elephants.
and wildlife traffickers federal officials had planned to pulverize 6 tons (5. 4 tonnes) of illegal elephant ivory this week
which has imperiled rhinoceroses elephants and great apes. Black market Horns: Images from a Rhino Bust The Colorado ivory crush will be rescheduled
but a spokesman said the agency will not be able to make a decision about when until the Fish and Wildlife Service resumes normal operations.
If we're going to solve this crisis we have to crush the demand driven by organized crime syndicates who are robbing the world of elephants
So we hope this encourages other governments to take bold decisive steps to curb the demand for illegal elephant products.
But a CITES report published last year found that elephant poaching has been on the rise
According to some estimates at least 25000 elephants were killed in Africa last year. Traffickers sometimes go to great lengths to circumvent the law and sell ivory on lucrative global markets.
#US to Destroy 6 Tons of Ivory This Week In a first U s. officials are going to destroy their massive stockpile of illegal ivory this week hoping to send a zero-tolerance message to elephant poachers.
But a CITES report published last year found thatâ elephant poaching was at its highest level in a decade and rising.
This has driven an epidemic of poaching especially of elephants for ivory and rhinos for rhino horns that appears to be said worsening Hannah.
Tigers lions and other big cats have also increasingly been poached due to demand for various body parts like their iconic fur.
Rhino poaching for example has doubled more than since 2010 in South africa according to the country. And this year rhinos went extinct in the adjacent country of Mozambique according to news reports.
It's hard to imagine that animals like African elephants and rhinos will survive unless countries where they live do more to protect them Hannah said.
Such measures will have to include better protection by game wardens and perhaps more protected areas for wildlife Jenkins said. 7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction The most effective way to fight poaching would be to decrease demand said Kenyan scientist and conservationist Richard Leakey at a conference
on wildlife crime this May at Rutgers University. One way to do that would be to better educate people in China
and Southeast asia who buy these products most of whom don't know that elephants and rhinos are being driven to the brink of extinction said Leakey who is the son of famed paleontologist and fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey.
When Richard Leakey headed the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1989 he came up with the idea to burn 12 tons of elephant tusks to bring public attention to poaching
and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades. Perhaps a similar gambit could work again Leakey said
But most of these people don't realize you have to kill an elephant to get its ivory
or megafauna such as marsupial versions of lions rhino-size wombats giant kangaroos and flightless birds but about 90 percent of that megafauna disappeared during this time.
or rhino horn in their jurisdictions. Just as with the King amendment where Congress in an even more sweeping way is trying to nix state anti-cruelty laws in the form of an amendment to the Farm bill this Administration is threatening meaningful animal-welfare lawmaking at the state level.
Its Ivory Stockpile To combat elephant poaching the United states is preparing to publicly pulverize its 6-ton stockpile of illicit ivory this week
Elephant Images: The Biggest Beasts On land Right now Africa is hemorrhaging elephants Patrick Bergin CEO of the African Wildlife Foundation said in a statement.
The only way to staunch the movement of illegal ivory is to wipe out the demand
and halt their domestic ivory trade until all elephant populations are threatened no longer. After poaching halved Africa's elephant population in the 20th century the international ivory trade was banned in 1989.
Domestic sales however continue in countries like the United states and China. These lucrative legal markets give a cover
Currently it's estimated that more than 30000 African elephants are killed for their ivory tusks annually. Last year a report from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
or CITES found that elephant poaching was at its highest in a decade. The uptick in killings has been tied to an unsustainable demand for ivory especially in Asia.
and poverty in Africa has created a perfect storm with elephants at the center. What the rich person demands the poor poacher provides Bergin said in a statement.
CITES in their 2012 report on the poaching crisis said researchers have not found a link between these one-off sales and the recent rise in elephant killings.
and dogs elephants and sheep even tigers and black bears have found kinship. The National Trust hopes the deer will rejoin his own herd
Rhinos and elephants for example are shot often near watering holes where they predictably return to drink and the poaching of elephants and rhinos is at an all-time high in many areas.
Poaching has pushed already rhinos to extinction in Vietnam for example. Black market Horns: Images from a Rhino Bust Andrew Lemieux a scientist at The netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law enforcement has outfitted rangers in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National park with GPS-enabled cameras that allow them to cheaply document signs of crimes
like poaching setting animal snares or harvesting of firewood. The project which began earlier this year will help rangers know where to go to best prevent these illicit activities he said during his presentation.'
'Hot products'Animals like parrots are also desirable to poachers in the same way certain hot products like cellphones
First he advocated building more fences around large reserves a suggestion that was met with some resistance by at least one ecologist at the conference who questioned Leakey after his talk about the fence's ability to stop elephants.
Fenced reserves have helped South africa prevent more poaching than many of its neighbors Leakey added (athough even in South africa rhino poaching is at a record high.
One of the main reasons that poaching of elephants and rhinos has shot up in the past few years is due to growing demand in China for ivory
and medicinal products (although rhino horns are made of the same material in finger nails and have no curative properties they are desired for their supposed healing powers in traditional Chinese medicine).
and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades Clarke said. Perhaps it's time to do something similar he said.
and 13 sites without carcasses to monitor the grazing activity of herbivores such as elephants wildebeest and zebras.
and poachers kill an estimated 96 elephants in Africa a day to obtain their tusks the WCS said in their statement.
Elephant numbers have dropped across the continent raising grave conservation concerns about the iconic animals. Follow Andrea Thompson@Andreatoap Pinterest and Google+.
Most of a tiger's diet consists of large prey such as pigs deer rhinos or elephant calves.
#Woolly mammoths and Rhinos Ate Flowers Woolly mammoths rhinos and other ice age beasts may have munched on high-protein wildflowers called forbs new research suggests.
Pretty landscape In the past scientists imagined that the now-vast Arctic tundra was once a brown grassland steppe that teemed with wooly mammoths rhinos and bison.
and fossilized poop or coprolites of eight Pleistocene beasts woolly mammoths rhinos bison and horses found in museums throughout the world.
It's also possible that the vanishing of these high-protein plants hastened the extinction of ice age beasts such as the woolly mammoth.
and infrared goggles to kill elephants in the dead of night. What if unmanned arial vehicle (UAV) developers could imagine their inventions through the eyes of conservation field staff?
Already authorities are using fixed-wing conservation UAVS to successfully keep track of hard-to-see rhinos in Nepal
and to monitor elephant habitat and prevent the illegal expansion of palm oil plantations in Sumatra.
providing future generations with the awe that comes from knowing that iconic animals like elephants rhinos
#China Destroys Part of Illegal Ivory Stockpile As part of an effort to discourage elephant poaching and the illegal trade in elephant ivory China this morning (Jan 6) destroyed part of its stockpile of confiscated ivory.
The ceremony largely symbolic was conducted in the city of Guangzhou in Guangdong Province and destroyed 6 tons of ivory (including tusks and various carvings) by burning according to news reports and a release from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
The ivory-burning event in China came just after an article in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly about Chinese demand driving much of the poaching of elephants in Africa lit up social media.
Elephant numbers have declined drastically across much of the continent with some 96 elephants killed each day on average mostly for their ivory according to the WCS.
We congratulate China's government for showing the world that elephant poaching and illegal ivory consumption is said unacceptable WCS president and CEO Cristiã¡
and that elephants will once again flourish i
#France Crushes 3 Tons of Illegal Ivory France became the latest country to destroy its stockpile of confiscated ivory with three tons (2. 7 tonnes) of it turned to dust during a ceremony in Paris today (Feb 6).
More than 15000 ivory pieces were pulverized most of them trinkets seized at airports between 1987 and 2007 from tourists who are likely unaware that their souvenirs contribute to a grisly elephant poaching industry.
Elephant populations have been in decline across much of Africa with some 96 killed each day on average mostly for their ivory according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
and businessmen that buying ivory as souvenirs directly contributes to the elephant crisis we face today Tom Milliken TRAFFIC s ivory trade expert said in a statement.
and teeth are closer to mammal skulls than to reptiles Another genus of Synapsids Lystrosaurus was a small herbivore about 3 feet long (almost 1 meter) that looked something like a cross between a lizard and a hippopotamus.
or an elephant taking a drink at the bank of the river. At that time the Nile wasn't surrounded by desert;
Today Egypt's elephants and giraffes are extinct. So are its cheetahs and aurochs and wildebeests.
There are rock art drawings of hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses from the early Holocene. The tombs of Egyptian pharaohs are decorated with hunting scenes that show
and overhunting might have driven the decline of large herbivores such as elephants giraffes and native camels
and are known best for their collection of saber-toothed cats and mammoths. In the new study researchers used high-resolution micro-computed tomography (CT) scanners to analyze two fossils of leafcutter-bee nests excavated from the pits.
The importance of the crush is not its direct impact on the market price of ivory (zero) or the safety of wild elephants in Africa tomorrow (negligible;
#Elephants Use Specific Alarm Calls to Warn of People, Bees African elephants belt out distinct alarm calls to specify which kind of threat is approaching in the wild be it humans or bees a new study shows.
As the largest land animals On earth elephants face relatively few predators in the wild but these threats include people who poach the animals for their ivory and swarms of angry bees
which can inflict painful stings around the eyes and trunks of elephants. A powerful swarm of bees could even kill a thin-skinned calf.
Researchers had discovered already that elephants produce a rumble like a gravelly baritone growl in response to the threat of bees.
What's more elephants will flee when they hear a recording of this rumble even
when there's no sign of bees around according to that 2010 study in PLOS ONE. Elephant Images:
The Biggest Beasts On land The same team of scientists wanted to figure out if elephants had special calls for other types of threats.
In the new study published in the journal PLOS ONE on Feb 26 they tested how elephants reacted to the voices of Samburu tribesmen in northern Kenya.
Compared with a white noise control both the sounds of tribesmen and the sounds of angry bees triggered uneasy and vigilant behavior in the elephants;
the animals started sniffing they lifted their heads up and scanned the landscape and they hightailed it out of the area.
The elephants also started shaking their heads but only in response to the noises of angry bees likely to knock any insects away from their face.
The suggestion of these threats also elicited vocal responses from the elephants known as rumbles. There were slight differences in the formant frequencies of the rumbles in response to bees
and tongue The authors say it's not clear to what extent the subtle differences in elephant alarm calls are the result of intentional sound manipulation or the simple byproducts of different distressed states.
However they write that the parallels between elephant vocal behavior and human linguistic abilities are suggestive.
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