IFAW, Lawmakers Push Bill Protecting Big Cats
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One of the many idiosyncrasies of humanity is our desire to domesticate otherwise wild animals and keep them around as pets. This has generally worked out well for us in regards to small...
Latest Megafauna Stories
Exotic feline fans from around the world will gather in the nation’s country music capital for three days of felines and fun during the annual convention of the premiere wild cat organization, the Feline Conservation Federation. (PRWEB) May 20, 2013 Thursday, June 6th, exotic feline enthusiasts from around the world will gather for three days of learning, networking and fun during the annual convention of the Feline Conservation Federation (FCF). Federation members own and work with...
The multi-million USD Life&Pension contract encompasses the implementation of a range of financial products UXBRIDGE, England, May 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Sapiens International Corporation [http://www.sapiens.com ], (NASDAQ and TASE: SPNS), a global provider of innovative software solutions for the financial services industry, announced today that Wesleyan Assurance Society [http://www.wesleyan.co.uk ] (Wesleyan), a mutual founded in 1841, offers specialist financial advice to...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The second largest, and one of the least understood, animals to ever live on the Earth is the fin whale. The animal has a huge body and a global range that makes its movements and behavior hard to study under normal circumstances. This spring, a fin whale carcass washed up on a Seattle-area beach, reminding researchers that the sleek animals, sometimes called the “greyhounds of the sea,” are vulnerable to collision when they...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of researchers led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has completed a major review of the available evidence to conclude that most species of gigantic animals that once roamed the Australian continent disappeared before the arrival of humans. These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and challenge the claim that humans were the primary cause of extinction for...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study has once again shown that our human ancestors had no qualms about eating every part of their prey, including the brains. After uncovering fossils in Kenya, anthropologist Joseph Ferraro of Baylor University and his colleagues discovered that the earliest humans living in East Africa had a taste for multiple parts of the antelope. These early humans would even scavenge the leftovers of larger predators and finish off...
[ Watch the Video: Baboons Understanding Math ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Baboons can be as accurate as human children when it comes to discriminating between different quantities of various objects, experts from the University of Rochester and the Seneca Park Zoo claim in a new study. Jessica Cantlon, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the university, and colleagues observed eight olive baboons between the ages of four and...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In 2002 a fossil specimen of an ape skeleton was unearthed in Spain. The researchers who discovered the remains assigned it a new genus and species, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, estimating that the ape lived about 11.9 million years ago. The researchers argued that the ape could be the last common ancestor of modern great apes, which include chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas and humans. Now a new study led by a University...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Humpback whales are known for their songs that can be heard from miles away and new research from a team of American biologists has detailed the whales singing habits as they roam the feeding grounds of the northwest Atlantic. The study’s findings, which were published in the open access journal PLOS ONE, emphasize the usefulness of passive acoustics listening techniques in monitoring animal activity. “We have monitored and...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research, led by the University of St. Andrews, has found humpback whales are able to pass on hunting techniques to each other, just as humans do. A new feeding technique has spread to 40 percent of a humpback whale population, the team discovered. Their findings have been published in a recent issue of Science. After herring stocks – their preferred food – crashed in the 1980s, a community of humpback whales off the cost...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In October 1972, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), a landmark law that enacted a moratorium on the import, export, and financial transaction of any marine mammal or their parts within the United States. To mark the 40th anniversary of its passage, a team of American biologists has published an analysis of the law’s effectiveness in the latest edition of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS)....
Latest Megafauna Reference Libraries
The Baikal seal (Pusa sibirica), also known as the nerpa or the Lake Baikal seal, is a true seal in the Phocidae family that is native to Lake Baikal located in Siberia. This species is one of three seals that reside solely in fresh water areas. It is not known exactly how these seals came to inhabit such an isolated area, but some experts assert that a sea-passage was formed that linked the Arctic Ocean and Lake Baikal. The Baikal seal is one of the smallest of all true seal species,...
Image Caption: Fossil of Feresa Attenuata, Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum KAIKYOUKAN, Japan. Credit: OpenCage/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.5) The pygmy killer whale is widely distributed in tropical and sub-tropical waters worldwide. Regular sightings of this species occur off the coast of Hawaii and Japan, and also in the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka and Lesser Antilles. In the Atlantic the pygmy killer whale has been seen off the coast of South Carolina and Senegal. This species swims in...
The Ross seal (Ommatophoca rossii) is a true seal in the Phocidae family, and can only be found on pack ice in Antarctica. This species was formally described by James Clark Ross in 1841, during his British Antarctic Expedition. It is very uncommon to see in its range and rarely leaves the pack ice, with stray individuals occurring off southeast Australia or sub-Antarctic islands. The Ross seal can reach an average length between 5.5 and 6.9 feet, although some females can reach up to 8.2...
The ribbon seal (Histriophoca fasciata) is a true seal within the family Phocidae that can be found in the North Pacific Sea. It prefers a habitat in arctic and subarctic areas like the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. As is typical to seal species, it will leave the water during the winter and spring months, where it will remain on pack ice to breed, birth pups, and molt. For the rest of the year these seals will live in open water, although some will occasionally move north as the ice...
The grey seal (Halichoerus grypus), known as the gray seal in the United States is a species that can be found on shores on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. Its other common names include the Atlantic grey seal and the horsehead seal, because of its elongated nose. It has a large range on the shores of Ireland and Great Britain, with larger populations residing in areas including the Farne Islands near the Northumberland Coast, North Rona near northern Scotland, and Ramsey Island near...
