Futurist Thomas Frey: Like many others, I’m a fan of TED Talks and a Feb 2013 talk by Stuart Brand titled “The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?” has caught much of the world off guard.
Continue reading… “Should We Revive Extinct Species?”
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Bird Thought Extinct in 1940’s Found Nesting on U.S. Soil
Short-tailed Albatross
In the middle of the last century, things weren’t looking good for the majestic Short-tailed Albatross. From a hardy population estimated to be in the millions just decades earlier, the bird’s numbers underwent a dramatic decline from over-hunting — nearly disappearing from the face of the Earth entirely by the late 1940s. But, while many conservationists believed them to have been made extinct, the few remaining Albatross were plotting their eventual comeback — and now, for the first time, they’ve been spotted nesting on U.S. soil.
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Small Island States in Danger of ‘Extinction’
The island of Tarawa, Kiribati, South Pacific
All of the global warming hype has created unprecedented levels of fear among people in small island countries like Tarawa and Kiribati. They are now calling for a ‘climate change insurance fund’ to protect their people from ‘going extinct’ as yet another fear-based UN report warns that a sea level rise will make whole nations uninhabitable.
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Chinese Scientist Exploring Cloning to Save the Endangered Giant Panda
The Giant Panda is the world’s most endangered species.
China has been exploring every possible means of saving giant pandas, one of the world’s most endangered species, from becoming extinct, even if it means resorting to cloning them. Chen Dayuan, a senior scientist who specializes in cloning at the institute of zoology in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced the idea of performing cloning techniques on giant pandas in 1998.
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Great White Sharks Now One of the Most Endangered Creatures on Earth
Fewer great white sharks are left in the oceans than there are tigers surviving on Earth
They are known as one of the deadliest creatures on Earth. But according to a shocking new study, great white sharks are also one of the most endangered. (Pics)
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Ancient Tribal Language Becomes Extinct As Last Speaker Dies
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
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14 Monstrous Extinct Beasts
Scientists keep discovering extinct species that hardly seem possible outside of cartoons. If they were still around, we might not be! Web Urbanist shows us some of the biggest, fiercest, and weirdest of animals that are no more. For instance, the whorl shark had its own “jaw saw”!
Whorl Sharkswere similar to their modern cousins despite jetting along almost 300 million years ago. While modern sharks have rows of serrated teeth ready to replace any that fall out, the whorl shark has an interesting lower jaw that looked like a circular saw, where newer teeth would push older teeth further along the line.
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Extinked Art
The Ultimate Holding Company, a British arts collective, offered tattoos of 100 endangered species to people who are committed to preserving them as a project they call Extinked. One hundred volunteers were chosen out of several hundred who applied to receive a tattoo. Those who made it through had written about why they deserved to be a “lifelong ambassador” for their species.
Joe Richardson, founding member of the collective, is confident that the social experiment will rouse people to action. He was surprised to see how personal the tattoos were to the volunteers, who touchingly described their relationship to their chosen species in their applications.
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Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Could Be ‘Functionally Extinct’ Within Decades
Great Barrier Reef
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living organism, is under grave threat from climate warming and coastal development, and its prospects of survival are “poor,” a major new report found. While the World Heritage-protected site, which sprawls for more than 345,000 square km (133,000 sq miles) off Australia’s east coast, is in a better position than most other reefs globally, the risk of its destruction was mounting.
Continue reading… “Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Could Be ‘Functionally Extinct’ Within Decades”
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More Than 800 Animal And Plant Species Now Extinct
An aerial view of a patch of deforested jungle
More than 800 animal and plant species have gone extinct in the past five centuries with nearly 17,000 now threatened with extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported on Thursday.
Continue reading… “More Than 800 Animal And Plant Species Now Extinct”
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New Evidence Humans Are Related To Orangutans
Humans related to orangutans, not chimps
New evidence underscores the theory of human origin that suggests humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science. Reporting in the June 18 edition of the Journal of Biogeography, the researchers reject as “problematic” the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence .
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Rare Red Kite Chicks Hatch in Scotland
Rare baby birds.
Red kite chicks have hatched in the wild in Aberdeenshire for the first time in almost 150 years.
The chicks are being raised by birds released two years ago as part of a project to reintroduce the birds to the skies over the county. At least three have hatched.
Red kites were once common all over the British Isles, but were persecuted almost to the point of extinction in the 19th century.
In the UK, the population had almost died out until birds began being reintroduced from overseas via breeding programmes in the 1990s.
Continue reading… “Rare Red Kite Chicks Hatch in Scotland”
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