More than two years after his death, the tortoise Lonesome George has been stuffed and put on display in New York.

Lonesome George, the Last Tortoise of His Kind, Is on Posthumous Display in NYC

Driven to extinction by overhunting, the world’s last Pinta Island tortoise is now a taxidermy display at New York’s American Museum of Natural History

An inlaid alabaster unguent jar in the form of an ibex, with one natural horn, was found in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Anthropocene

Egypt’s Mammal Extinctions Tracked Through 6,000 Years of Art

Tomb goods and historical texts show how a drying climate and an expanding human population took their toll on the region’s wildlife

From the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

100 Years After Her Death, Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon, Still Resonates

The famed bird now finds itself at the center of a flap over de-extinction

Changila, a male elephant who was later killed by poachers near Samburu National Reserve in Kenya.

New Research

Surprise! Science Shows That Elephant Poaching Is Unsustainable

For the first time, scientists have made a comprehensive tally of illegal killing rates across Africa

Cool Finds

Why Everyone From Conservationists to Yao Ming to Andrew Cuomo Supports Banning Ivory Sales

Because of corruption and laundering, any system of legal ivory trade threatens the continued existence of elephants

Not so mysterious: This is not a realistic depiction of a T. rex dinner.

The Ten Biggest Dinosaur Mysteries We Have Yet to Solve

Which one was the first, the biggest, the fuzziest? These puzzles continue to perplex paleontologists

The ecology of the meat-eaters like Allosaurus fragilis  were likely threatened by the decline of the plant-eating dinosaurs, making the "perfect storm" for a mass extinction

Why the Dinosaurs Could Have Had a Chance of Surviving the Asteroid Strike

A new study suggests it wasn’t just the asteroid that killed the dinos, but that other factors weakened their ability to survive it

When the Last of the Great Auks Died, It Was by the Crush of a Fisherman’s Boot

Birds once plentiful and abundant, are the subject of a new exhibition at the Natural History Museum

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New Research

Watch the Unnerving Gait of This 410 Million-Year-Old Arachnid

Working from well-preserved fossils, paleontologists reproduced the trigonotarbids’ walk

Cool Finds

Europe Has Its Own Bison Species That Came Back From the Brink of Extinction

Bison were just reintroduced into a stretch of Romania where they haven’t been found for two centuries

Dinosaurs came in all shapes and sizes, but only the small, feathered variety survived.

New Research

Ancient Birds Avoided Mass Extinction By Shrinking

The shrinkage process was well underway before an asteroid brought doom to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago

Artist Todd McGrain's sculptures of five extinct North American birds are now on display in Smithsonian gardens.

Art Meets Science

Bronze Sculptures of Five Extinct Birds Land in Smithsonian Gardens

Artist Todd McGrain memorializes species long-vanished, due to human impact on their habitats, in his “Lost Bird Project”

Colorful archaea grow in in ponds.

New Research

How a Single Act of Evolution Nearly Wiped Out All Life on Earth

A single gene transfer event may have caused the Great Dying

New Research

Humans Killed the Moa, Genetics Study Suggests

Yet another species humans have the distinct honor of eradicating

The Anguilla Bank skink, a Caribbean species discovered along with 23 others in 2012, is vulnerable to extinction.

How Many Species Can We Find Before They Disappear Forever?

Biologists are in a race to locate and identify new species as habitats become victim to an industrialized world

A pair of Ammonite fossils, about 4 inches across, within a limestone bed very close to the Permian-Triassic boundary.

New Research

How Long Does Mass Extinction Take?

By figuring out the timing and rate of the world’s most massive extinction 252 million years ago, scientists hope to figure out how such lethal events work

Hey you guys, got any flowers? I'm starving.

New Research

Did Flowers Take Out The Woolly Mammoth?

Some researchers think that the mighty beasts may have been bested by tiny flowers. Or, more precisely, the lack of them

A dingo walks along a road in southern Australia.

Maybe Dingoes Don’t Deserve Their Bad Rap

Studies show that Australia’s “favorite scapegoat” most likely didn’t kill the Tasmanian tiger

We’ve Done So Well by Chesapeake Oysters, We Can Start Eating Them Again

Perhaps this time we can keep ourselves from eating them to oblivion

The London Zoo’s Brian Zimmerman looks for a cichlid in Madagascar.

Doomed Species May Be Saved—A Global Search Locates a Female

With this little fish facing down extinction, a global hunt turned up a few remaining wild individuals

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