To save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction, the BioRescue team is racing to create lab-grown egg and sperm cells of the critically endangered subspecies. The team has now reported a milestone in Science Advances: they have generated primordial germ cells from stem cells – a world’s first. Thirty-three-year-old Najin and her daughter Fatu are the last surviving northern white rhinos ...

It may be surprising to learn that even giraffes, parrots, and oak trees are included in the list of threatened species, as well as cacti and seaweed. Seaweed is one of the planet’s great survivors, and relatives of some modern-day seaweed can be traced back some 1.6 billion years. Seaweed plays a vital role in marine ecosystems, providing habitats and ...

The rare Tapanuli Orangutan, discovered last year in Sumatra, Indonesia, and one of the rarest animals on the planet could become an extinct species soon unless urgent action is invoked to reign in on a mega dam in China, said a team of global scientists. Besides the usual deforestation, the researchers have pointed out that the Batang Toru project being ...

A strain of the disease responsible for killing off nearly two thirds of the UK’s greenfinches has been discovered in myna bird populations in Pakistan. Mynas are native to the Indian subcontinent and are one of the world’s most invasive species. Although the disease is not generally fatal to them, experts from the University of East Anglia studying the birds ...

The Burmese star tortoise (Geochelone platynota), a medium-sized tortoise found only in Myanmar’s central dry zone, has been brought back from the brink of extinction thanks to an aggressive captive-breeding effort spearheaded by a team of conservationists and government partners. Efforts to restore the tortoise are described in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Herpetological Review. The tortoises now ...

Using a combination of fossils and chemical markers, scientists have tracked low ocean-oxygen in early Jurassic marine ecosystem that could have led to survival of only a few species. The research, led by Rowan Martindale of the University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences, zeroes in on a recently discovered fossil site in Canada located at Ya Ha Tinda ...

The dinosaurs wiped out from Earth gave rise to most of the frogs alive today. A new study by Chinese and American biologists shows that if the calamity had not wiped the planet clean of most terrestrial life 66 million years ago, 88 percent of today’s frog species wouldn’t be here. Nearly nine out of 10 species of frog today ...

Many of the world’s 27 species of crocodylians will soon be either totally or locally extinct due to human population expansion and intensive land-use for agriculture depleting the water bodies, which provide succour to crocs, said a University of Queensland researcher. Emeritus Professor Gordon Grigg of UQ says the fact that these reptiles had survived millions of years was no good ...