Chinese archaeologists have found fossils that prove pandas once roamed what is now the southern Chinese island of Hainan, state media said on Wednesday.
The 400,000-year-old fossils, mostly of teeth, showed the tropical island was once connected to the Chinese mainland, the Xinhua news agency cited Huang Wanbo, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as saying.
The fossils were found last year in a quarry, Huang said.
The giant panda is one of the world’s most endangered species and is found only in China.
The call of the red-shouldered vanga was recorded in 1997 on the occasion of the species’ first reported observation in the wild.
The British Library Sound Archive compiled its CD with the environment group Conservation International which is heavily involved in projects aiming to conserve Madagascar’s unique biological legacy.
In December of 2006, the Central Park Zoo reared and released 450 Puerto Rican Crested Toad tadpoles in a man made pond in Puerto Rico’s Guanica State Forest.
From the Miami Herald in the USA:
Metrozoo tadpoles sent to breed in Puerto Rico
HUNDREDS OF PUERTO RICAN CRESTED TOAD TADPOLES WILL BE FLOWN FROM MIAMI TO THEIR NATIVE LAND, WHERE BIOLOGISTS HOPE TO BREED THE RARE SPECIES
Posted on Tue, Dec. 04, 2007
BY JENNIFER LEBOVICH
jlebovich@MiamiHerald.com
Several hundred Puerto Rican crested toad tadpoles hatched at Miami Metrozoo last week are making a big leap in survival of the amphibian.
The tadpoles will be boarding a plane Tuesday, en route for Puerto Rico, where biologists hope they will repopulate the dying species.
In 2004, the Miami-Dade zoo got six toads as part of a captive breeding program. At the time, there were fewer than 250 of the Puerto Rican crested toads in the wild. It’s the only toad native to Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico: Tropical frog battles to survive as climate change takes its toll: here.
The Bronx Zoo has a put a most unusual frog on display: the Kihansi spray toad. For one thing, the Kihansi spray toad survived on only 5 acres in the Kihansi gorge in Tanzania, adapted to the areas’ unique and constant mist from the gorge and a waterfall. For another, female Kihansi spray toads give birth to live young, instead of laying eggs. Finally, the Kihansi spray toad is extinct—at least in the wild: here.
One hundred Kihansi Spray Toads have been flown to their native Tanzania after a close brush with extinction, reports the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS): here.
The charity issued a briefing paper Getting Away With Murder yesterday, to coincide with the second annual conference of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC).
The War on Want briefing says that while the US and Iraq are taking steps to regulate the ‘multi-billion pound industry employing 20,000 people in Iraq’, Britain is refusing to do the same.
Apart from four big skeletons, like a 26 meter long Mamenchisaurus, also smaller fossils, dinosaur eggs, nests and tracks will be on show. This will be the first time that those fossils will be on show in Europe.
“Thanks to those finds from China, we are getting a clearer picture of our own Maastricht dinosaur, of which we only know small loose bones”, according to a local authority spokesperson. The Maastricht dinosaur will be on show for the first time ever. Its skeleton is being reconstructed right now.
Sister Hodan, a human rights activist presents the deadly consequences of the Ethiopian invasion in Somalia. The illegal Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia caused rape, massacre, indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighborhoods, mass displacemen of half million people. It is another Darfur.
On March 8, 2007, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! broadcast the testimony of former Abu Ghraib commander Col. Janis Karpinski as she responded to my questioning at a January 2006 war crimes commission in New York. Karpinski said American women soldiers in Iraq who had to go outside to use the latrine at night were raped by male soldiers. They stopped drinking water after 4:00 in the afternoon to avoid having to urinate. But in the 120-degree heat, some died of dehydration. Then, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez ordered that dehydration not be listed as the cause of death. See my article, “Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers’ Deaths,” … for more details on this shocking cover-up.
Rep. Harman: Military Woman “More Likely to Be Raped by a Fellow Soldier Than Killed by Enemy Fire”: here.
