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Thousands of conservationists and government officials open talks in Johannesburg on Saturday to thrash out regulating international trade in elephant ivory, rhino horn and hundreds of endangered wild animals and plants.

California Gov. Jerry Brown announced Friday that he signed legislation meant to bring down the record numbers of whales getting caught in fishing gear meant for Dungeness crabs, causing unknown numbers of the entangled mammals to drown or starve.

A flower that got its nickname from its putrid smell is started to bloom Friday at Dartmouth College for the first time since 2011.

Burmese pythons appear to be slithering into new territory, extending their range and putting more of South Florida's wildlife at risk of becoming lunch.

University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researchers are reaching out to citizen scientists to find nests of the black and yellow mud dauber wasp (Sceliphron caementarium) – also known as the "dirt dauber"—in northeastern Georgia.

If we are to tame fungi and optimize their extremely important role in our ecosystem, we must gain a more complete view of their functional abilities. Researchers from TU Delft and Utrecht University have exposed a previously hidden layer of functional…

A camera trap survey in one of Africa's largest conservation landscapes has captured an exciting range of species – from honey badgers and caracals to a hyena holding an elephant's trunk…

WCS reported today that in the late summer of 2016, a WCS field team led by Dr. Trevor Haynes monitored Caspian tern chicks through to fledging in Cape Krusenstern National Monument in Alaska. This discovery of Caspian terns breeding above the Arctic Circle in…

When Tara Clarke went to Madagascar this summer, she packed what you might expect for a trip to the tropics: sunscreen, bug spray. But when she returned seven weeks later, her carry-on luggage contained an unusual item: ten pounds of lemur droppings.

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers has presented their preliminary findings regarding a mitochondrial DNA study they have undertaken as part of an effort to learn more about the domestication history of the modern house cat. Evolutionary geneticist Eva-Maria…

In the female dog, cells of the uterus can accumulate lipid droplets to form so-called foamy epithelial cells during late metoestrus. These cells produce a hormone that is involved in the implantation of the embryo in the uterus. A team of researchers from the…

Despite evolving separately for 400 million years, some sharks and tuna share genetic traits linked to higher metabolism and quick swimming behaviour.

Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) announces that it has developed a new deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis technology called Genotyping by Random Amplicon Sequencing (GRAS) using analytical materials that have been provided by the Kyushu Okinawa Agricultural…

The illegal trade in pangolins, helmeted hornbills and other wildlife products is thriving in Laos, a monitoring group said Friday, urging the Southeast Asian nation to crack down on a lucrative commerce largely fuelled by demand in neighbouring China.

There are more than a dozen species of finch that evolved on the Galapagos Islands, each identified by beak shape and size. Some have strong beaks to crack nuts while others have long, fine beaks to grasp larvae with surgical precision. All of the finches…

It all began with the adoption of a Jardine's parrot in the mid-1990s.

Tiny, abundant biological factories, known as ribosomes, produce the cell's most fundamental building material: protein. If ribosomes don't work, cells can't divide—and this can be an advantage for scientists seeking to develop drugs that target invading…

The fate of over 64,000 live wild animals officially reported to have been confiscated by enforcement agencies remains untraceable, according to a new report released by the University of Oxford Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) and World Animal…

Researchers at MIT and other institutions have created tiny freeze-dried pellets that include all of the molecular machinery needed to translate DNA into proteins, which could form the basis for on-demand production of drugs and vaccines.

Habitat degradation poses a greater risk to the survival of turtles and tortoises than rising global temperatures, according to new research.

Researchers at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre have created the first map that shows the global genetic interaction network of a cell. It begins to explain how thousands of genes coordinate with one another to orchestrate cellular life.

DuPont Pioneer researchers have discovered a protein from a non-Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium source that exhibits promise as an alternative means for controlling corn rootworm in North America and Europe. Science published the finding this week.

In the 1980s, people living on houseboats in the San Francisco Bay were puzzled by a droning hum of unknown origin that started abruptly in the late evening and stopped suddenly in the morning.

Susanne Åkesson, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at Lund University in Sweden, has been awarded the prestigious Ig Nobel Prize. The prize, which she shares with six other researchers from Hungary and Spain, was presented to them for their discovery that…

The New York authorities seized $4.5 million worth of illegal elephant ivory items in what they described as the biggest bust in the state's history, officials said Thursday.

An animal rescue team has captured a manatee that repeatedly had been spotted off Cape Cod, far from its usual Florida haunts.

Whales are the biggest animals to ever have existed on Earth, and yet some subsist on creatures the size of a paper clip. It's a relatively common factoid, but, in truth, how they do this is only just being uncovered, thanks to new technologies.

Federal wildlife officials on Thursday made a formal recommendation to list the rusty patched bumble bee as an endangered species because it has disappeared from about 90 percent of its historic range in just the past two decades.

One year after the worldwide controversy when an American dentist killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, the DICE team says hunting works but only when hunting companies are given long-term land management rights.

A team that includes a Virginia Tech plant scientist recently used life sciences technology to edit 14 target sites encompassing eight plant genes at a time, without making unintended changes elsewhere in the genome.