Extinction News

The photo speaks for itself: a woman lies on the ground with just her smiling face visible, her body covered by about 20 dead geese, the result of a “successful”…

Sudan, a 45-year-old rhino believed to be the world’s last surviving male northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), died five years ago at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on…

The Philippine eagle, the archipelagic nation's iconic, endemic apex predator, has been declared threatened with extinction for nearly three decades. Yet despite its status as the national bird, little is…

Hundreds of thousands of European bison once grazed the grassy slopes from Spain to Ukraine — until they gradually went extinct in the wild by 1927. But when the last…

Inside Bolivia’s Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), conservationists from Asociación Armonía rigged up a network of nine camera traps and 15 audio recorders. They were seeking out…

MEDAN, Indonesia — An investigation into the violent death of an orangutan in northern Sumatra in January has shone a light on the persistent problem of human-wildlife conflict and illegal…

Michele Menegon and a team of local and international scientists have just described six new species of thumb-sized chameleon in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains. The forest-capped mountains form an inland…

When John Midgley dug a golden brown tarantula out of its burrow in the remote woodlands of southeastern Angola, he felt he had found “one of the most astonishing animals…

Halting biodiversity loss is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, but our current approaches to global conservation are clearly not working. A good example of this is…

A worldwide international collaboration is locating tropical areas with high concentrations of plants not yet identified by science, then working with local communities to conserve those plants and their habitats.

KATHMANDU — On Nov. 1 last year, a leopard dragged off an 8-year-old boy as he was playing just steps away from the cowshed where his grandmother was milking the…

New research suggests travel between increasingly separated terrestrial and aquatic habitats may impact tropical amphibian microbiomes and immunity, leading to more disease, though more research is needed.

KATHMANDU — A popular dish in Nepal, momos are small, bite-sized dumplings filled with spicy minced meat and wrapped in dough. Served piping hot, they are often accompanied by a…

More than a third of all elasmobranch (shark and ray) species are at risk of extinction due to overfishing. Indonesia is both a hotspot of elasmobranch biodiversity and one of…

As human activities have pushed many animal species to the margins of former habitats, some protected areas may not be located in the right places, especially as frequent extreme temperatures shrink their ranges further.

COLOMBO — Each day, as the sun set over the horizon, Thettuwage Tennakoon and his wife would carefully climb up into their treehouse in the middle of their rice field.…

Each year, the European Union imports an estimated 4,000 metric tons of frogs’ legs. That sum is the equivalent of around 200 million frogs killed to feed demand, the majority…

In December, the UN Biodiversity Conference concluded with a historic commitment agreed to by nearly 200 nations, the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a commitment that aims to halt and reverse…

KATHMANDU — Throughout 2022, Mongabay reported on important biodiversity-related scientific discoveries in Nepal. The stories, some of them republished by different media outlets in Nepal and abroad, brought the country’s…

On a Russian-led expedition in the northern Pacific Ocean in the 1740s, German botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller laid eyes on a species that captured his imagination. It looked like a…

DHAKA — On Oct. 8 this year, police in Bangladesh recovered an endangered western hoolock gibbon from a passenger bus in the Chunati area of the Chattogram-Cox’s Bazar highway. They…

We are peoples of place — our relationship with our lands and waters have sustained us for millennia. What happens to one species or ecosystem has immeasurable impacts on our…

“As a boy, my father killed pumas,” says Vincente Navarra, whose family has been raising sheep against the backdrop of Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness for generations. Navarra, a 71-year-old rancher who…

Scientists say they have solved the mystery behind the periodic disappearance and reappearance of the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari) across huge areas of central and South America. A new study…

The world is losing species alarmingly fast. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent science and policy group, says a million species face extinction. Few…

JAKARTA — “Remarkably lax” and “laissez-faire” law enforcement efforts by conservation authorities in Indonesia have allowed the killing, capture and trade of scores of orangutans to persist, according to a…

CAPE TOWN — Seabird ranger Eduard Drost was busy with a routine inspection in an African penguin colony off the South African coast in 2021 when he noticed a troubling…

KATHMANDU — In 2002, the black softshell turtle was declared extinct in the wild — not a difficult assessment to make, given that, back then, the only known population of…

JAKARTA — A second tunnel collapse this year at a controversial dam construction site in Indonesia has killed another Chinese worker, bringing the toll from the project to 17 in…

PHNOM PENH — Eight people, including two Cambodian Forestry Administration officials, have been charged by U.S. federal prosecutors for their alleged involvement in an international monkey smuggling ring. One of…