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Science / Wildlife

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Wild Things: Life As We Know It

From chimpanzee communication to paper wasps and humans fleeing Vesuvius

The product of a ten-year Sino-American conservation effort, the cub may help scientists reestablish the endangered giant pandas in the wild, where about 1,600 are believed to exist.

Learning from Tai Shan

The giant panda born at Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo has charmed animal lovers. Now he’s teaching scientists more than they had expected

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Wild Things: Life as We Know It

Rediscovery of a Laotian rodent, orangutan culture and crossing the Bering Strait

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God Save the… Ravens

A verreaux's sifaka lemur can jump 30 feet

For the Love of Lemurs

To her delight, social worker-turned-scientist Patricia Wright has found the mischievous Madagascar primates to be astonishingly complex

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Wild Things: Life as We Know It

Coyotes in densely populated areas (a Los Angeles suburb) can be alarming. But wildlife experts say they fill a niche in the urban ecology.

City Slinkers

Why are coyotes, those cunning denizens of the plains and rural west, moving into urban centers like Chicago and Washington DC?

Because Africa's scarcest natural resource is water, environmentalists say the hippo, or "river horse" (in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where poachers have devastated hippo populations), will increasingly come into conflict with people.

Hippo Haven

An idealistic married couple defy poachers and police in strife-torn Zimbabwe to protect a threatened herd of placid pachyderms

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Return of the Jaguar?

Novel camera traps have documented the elusive cat in Arizona, suggesting it may not be gone from the United States after all

Portrait of Charles Darwin

The Evolution of Charles Darwin

A creationist when he visited the Galápagos Islands, Darwin grasped the significance of the unique wildlife he found there only after he returned to London

Phoenix, a life-size model of a North Atlantic right whale, at the center of the new Sant Ocean Hall, 2008

A Whale Called Phoenix

A very large mammal will help tell an even weightier tale—about the ocean in this crowded, challenging century

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Natural Selection

In Darwin’s Galápagos Islands, evolution is on display

35 Who Made a Difference: Daphne Sheldrick

When feelings of kinship transcend the species boundary

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35 Who Made a Difference: Clyde Roper

He’s spent his life chasing a sea monster that’s never been taken alive

35 Who Made a Difference: Richard Leakey

The leader of the Hominid Gang asks what he can do for his continent

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35 Who Made a Difference: Janis Carter

The primate who taught other primates how to survive in the wild

A giraffe in South Africa.

Hiding in Plain Sight

A veteran photographer shows the extraordinary knack that some animals have for…disappearing

Raymond Tritt, 52, dresses a fallen bull on the spring caribou hunt. Like virtually every Gwich'in man, he still remembers every detail of his first successful hunt, four decades later. The 100,000-plus caribou of the Porcupine River herd are a focal point for the Gwich'in people: they are a main source of sustenance as well as the key element in the group's rituals, dances and stories. "If we lose the caribou," says a tribal elder, "we lose our way of life."

ANWR: The Great Divide

The renewed debate over drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge hits home for the two Native groups nearest the nature preserve

Green turtle swimming over coral reefs in Kona

Back from the Brink

Not every endangered species is doomed. Thanks to tough laws, dedicated researchers, and plenty of money and effort, success stories abound

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Ghost of a Chance

How did the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was feared extinct, hang on all these years?

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