Zoology News

Here's a curious illustration from a medieval bestiary in the Vatican Library. I've seen attempts on various websites to identify it as a sea-lion, though its trunk is surely more suggestive of an elephant seal - but what about its hoofed forelimbs?? Weird.

"Reading through some correspondence tonight reminded me of the time when I received an interesting letter from one longstanding correspondent, Miss Lorna Lloyd of Worcester, England, describing the head of a strange animal mounted as a trophy on a shield, and seen in an antique shop in London's famous Portobello Road.

A quarter-sized butterfly with blue-and-purple wings and rarely seen along Colorado's Front Range is a mystery to researchers who only know that it loves hops even more than the state's legions of beer geeks.

There have been many searches for living thylacines or Tassies in Tasmania and mainland Australia, but should cryptozoologists be seeking it in New Guinea instead? "The official extinction in 1936 on Tasmania of the remarkable thylacine Thylacinus cynocephalus , that tiger-striped canine marsupial mammal as big as a wolf but which could hop like a ... (more)

A 13-year search for one of the smallest big cats in the world just ended, confirming what many feared: The Formosan clouded leopard is extinct in Taiwan .

Tea Party radio hosts Ken Clark and Jason Worley agreed Friday that Colorado House Minority Leader Mark Waller is a "jellyfish." As you can see below, Clark and Worley, who host KLZ's Grassroots Radio Colorado, identified Waller as a jellyfish without explaining the taxonomic features that led to their conclusion.

Seals, ferrets hawks and turtles - a new A 100,000 rescue centre is proving to be the number one emergency service for animals in distress.

"Black panthers, i.e. melanistic leopards, are exotic-looking felids at the best of times, but the individual constituting the principal subject of this present ShukerNature blog post was a truly exceptional female black panther, purchased from Dublin Zoo during the early 1980s, and exhibited for a few years at Glasgow Zoo before being sold ... (more)

Thirteen years, 1,500 infrared cameras, hundreds of catnip-baited hair traps and an almost incalculable number of hours in the field have confirmed what scientists have long feared: the Formosan clouded leopard is in all likelihood extinct.

When people hear the word " lake monster ", most people today think of the creature that supposedly inhabits the Loch Ness in Scotland called the Loch Ness Monster, which they affectionately-named " Nessie ". However, the lore of lake monsters also exists in North America.

Pierre Sonnerat was a famous 18th-Century French explorer and naturalist. As will be revealed here in the following ShukerNature post of mine, however, he was also a blatant hoaxer - confirmed by the curious case of New Guinea's non-existent penguins, and kookaburra.

The Formosan clouded leopard, a clouded-leopard subspecies native to Taiwan, is now extinct, according to a team of zoologists.

Last month, I was privileged to host a visiting zoologist from India, Dr. K.S. Anoop Das.