When Steven Spielberg’s famous mechanical shark, Bruce, first appeared onscreen in the summer of 1975, Chris Lowe thought it looked fake. Dr. Lowe, who now leads the Shark Lab at California State Long Beach, was 11 that year. He had grown up on Martha’s Vineyard, the island in Massachusetts where “Jaws” was filmed. He had…
The deep-sea environs of the Earth’s poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures: giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish. Finding and identifying these animals can be difficult, however; some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds. But on Christmas Day last year, the…
The Trump administration is proposing a drastic reimagining of how public lands across the United States are used and managed, according to an Interior Department document leaked to the public in late April. The document, a draft of the department’s strategic plan for the next five years, downplays conservation in favor of an approach that…
The Trump administration has moved to end federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a showy grouse with the misfortune of inhabiting southern and central grasslands long sought-after for agriculture and energy development. In a court filing on Wednesday, officials said the Fish and Wildlife Service had erred in a Biden-era decision that placed the…
De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as…
President Trump on Thursday said he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales. Mr. Trump issued an executive order…
The Spanish police say they rescued 19 exotic felines from a home on the island of Majorca that were bound for sale on the growing illegal world market for big cats, and they arrested the Russian couple who owned them. With demand for large felines like lions and tigers high in some quarters — some…
A South Carolina man pleaded guilty on Thursday to importing sperm whale teeth and bones from four countries and selling them in the United States, federal prosecutors said. The man, Lauren H. DeLoach, 69, of St. Helena Island, S.C., pleaded guilty to Lacey Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act charges for importing and selling sperm…
Under blue skies, where low-rolling hills rise south of the Canadian border in the tiny town of Adams, N.D., a couple braves the stench of old honey, wax, smoke and bee muck. Nancy and Keith Budke, married 43 years, are migratory beekeepers. They produce honey with the taste of canola nectar, sweet clover and other…
Demand for pangolins in Asia, where populations of these scaly mammals have dwindled, has driven traffickers to Africa, the only other continent where the increasingly endangered animals can be found. Nigeria has become a hub for pangolin trafficking and other illegal trading of wildlife. But authorities have been cracking down, recently arresting a Chinese national…