This little monkey could certainly jump on the bed without falling off and bumping his head.

Read the rest

Zookeeper Brianne Zanella is tasked with exercising Oregon Zoo's baby goats, who visit the seals for the first time in this charming video.

The smaller of the two, Ruth is a two-month-old Nigerian dwarf goat kid named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her friend Sonia is a mini-Nubian goat kid. No word on when or if they are getting an exotic tiny goat named Elena.

There's a whole Tiny Goat Visits series for those interested in a deep dive into goat-related entertainment.

• Tiny Goat Visits Seals (YouTube / Oregon Zoo) Read the rest

Amateur fossil hunter Phil Mullaly was exploring Jan Juc in south Australia's Victoria's Surf Coast when he noticed a shark's tooth poking out of a boulder on the beach. According to paleontologists at Museums Victoria, that tooth and two others found are 25-million-years-old and came from a Great Jagged Narrow-Toothed Shark (Carcharocles angustidens), a species that could be as much as 30 feet long. From CNN:

"If you think about how long we've been looking for fossils around the world as a civilization -- which is maybe 200 years -- in (that time) we have found just three (sets of) fossils of this kind on the entire planet, and this most recent find from Australia is one of those three," (Museums Victoria researcher Erich) Fitzgerald told CNN...

"That doesn't happen. That just doesn't happen. That's only happened once before in Australia, and that was a totally different species of shark," he said.

When Mullaly told him the boulder he found was still on the beach, Fitzgerald said "my jaw sort of dropped."

"Man stumbles upon rare 25-million-year-old teeth of mega-toothed shark" (CNN) Read the rest

The International Garden municipal park in Cairo, Egypt is under scrutiny after Mahmoud Sarhan, 18, visited the zoo and noticed that the "zebras" looked very much like donkeys painted with stripes. His photos of the bizarre beasts went viral yet Garden Project director Mohammed Sultan insists that the "The zebra is real and not painted."

From CNN:

Sarhan said several things about the animal stood out and made him suspicious. The black paint had melted on the donkey's face and the ears didn't look like the right size for a zebra, he said.

In this difficult economy, it's worth doing everything you can to keep from having to visit a doctor or dentist. This gorilla gets it: Instead of booking an appointment, which would cost its troop a boatload of money, it goes on ahead and extracts its own tooth, like a furry boss. Read the rest

Dillon Marsh (previously) documents interesting types of utility poles around the world, including ones colonized by birds in the Kalahari desert: Read the rest

"There are a trillion species on this planet. Only nine are used for all sports." Clean comedy and crowd work are both deceptively difficult, but Kellen Erskine manages both in this amusing bit about high school animal mascots. Read the rest

It's an accomplishment to find and photograph a lynx: they want little to do with humans and make an effort to keep themselves to themselves. It's an even bigger accomplishment to not only find a lynx to photograph, but to also spend enough time with it that it comes to see you as a hunting buddy. Read the rest

I first spoke with Chris Skaife in 2013 after he was was awarded a position at The Tower of London following a long and distinguished career in the the British Army. A Yeoman Warder, Skaife holds the position of Ravenmaster. As the title implies, he’s responsible for the care of the Tower's unkindness of ravens.

Our first conversation about his gig left me fascinated: Here was a man with a job that’s completely singular in the world. His days, are full or tourists and the occasional state visit, history and tradition. That he goes about his duties in a uniform that looks like it’s designed to kill its wearer on a hot summer day, is shorthand for the amount of dedication he has to his responsibilities. I came from talking with Skaife with so many unanswered questions about what his day entails, his passion for the birds under his care and what it’s like to navigate such a unique gig.

Happily, I’ve had most of my questions answered by Skaife’s upcoming book, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. It’s not out until October, but it is available for pre-order at Amazon. Chris, good fella that he is, provided me with an early draft of the book to read, a few weeks ago. I’m looking forward to buying the real McCoy once it becomes available.

The book’s structure and Skaife’s friendly, matter-of-fact narrative style made for a quick, enjoyable read. It smacks of a friend talking you through his day at work. Read the rest

This is amazing to watch. Read the rest

Lions ate at least two rhinoceros poachers trespassing on a game preserve in Kenton-on-Sea, South Africa. Along with the poachers' remains, rangers found a high-powered rifle and axe.

"They strayed into a pride of lions - it's a big pride so they didn't have too much time," Sibuya reserve owner Nick Fox was quoted as saying. "We're not sure how many there were - there's not much left of them."

More in this press release from the Sibuya Game Reserve.

(BBC) Read the rest

Sometimes a toad or frog just wants a light snack. Read the rest

This is Zsa Zsa, the English bulldog who this weekend took home the top prize at the 30th annual World's Ugliest Dog Contest in Petaluma, California.

"Nine years young with a swaggering tongue, Zsa Zsa delivered a shower of slobber as she claimed this year's title," said a news release.

From CNN:

A function of the annual Sonoma-Marin Fair, it seeks to demonstrate "the pedigree does not define the pet." By raising awareness about the benefits of adoption, "the contest speaks to the importance of advocating for the adoration of all animals," even those not blessed with Lassie's movie-star looks.

Many of the pups taking part in the contest were rescued from kill shelters or puppy mills, organizers say.

That includes Zsa Zsa, your 2018 queen, who spent five years at a puppy mill in Missouri before being purchased by the nonprofit Underdog Rescue.

Zsa Zsa resides in Anoka, Minnesota with her human Megan Brainard. Read the rest

As Earth's human population expands, it's harder for other mammals to avoid people during the daytime. As a result, some mammals are becoming increasingly nocturnal. Nobody knows how that shift will affect individual species and even entire ecosystems. In a new paper in the journal Science, University of California, Berkeley wildlife ecologist Kaitlyn Gaynor and her colleagues examined data on how 62 species across the world spend their days and night. From Scientific American:

For example, leopards in the Central African nation of Gabon are 46 percent nocturnal in areas without bushmeat hunting, but 93 percent nocturnal where the practice is common. In Poland wild boars go from 48 percent nocturnal in natural forests to 90 percent nocturnal in urban areas. Even activities people consider relatively innocuous, such as hiking and wildlife viewing, strongly affected animals’ daily rhythms. Brown bears in Alaska live 33 percent of the day nocturnally when humans stay away, but that number goes up to 76 percent for bears exposed to wildlife-viewing tourism. “We think that we're leaving no trace often when we’re outdoors, but we can be having lasting consequences on animal behavior,” Gaynor says...

Perhaps even more alarming is the cascade of effects that could occur in the wider ecosystem as animals switch from day to night. “Patterns of competition and predator–prey interactions might change with the nocturnal behavioral changes,” Gaynor says. If one species—say a top predator—starts hunting at night and goes after different types of prey, it will likely have innumerable trickle-down consequences for everything along the food chain.

This bear smartly checked out a couple cops suspiciously loitering in their car on the side of the road. Reportedly the officers were just eating their lunch. This time. Read the rest

Swimming pigs, splashing horses, and diving bulls await in this lovely roundup of animals swimming, some of whom are a bit surprising to see taking to water so eagerly. Read the rest

According to researcher Kaeli Swift of the University of Washington's Avian Conservation Laboratory, crows hold "funerals." When they see a corpse of their own kind they gather together and squawk loudly. To determine what they may be doing, Swift displayed a taxidermied dead crow to other crows. On some days though, she wore a creepy mask and wig. After multiple experiments with and without her disguise or the dead bird, the crows appeared to remember "the experience with the mask and dead crow and now connected the area with danger." From Deep Look:

And here’s what Swift said makes that really interesting: These new mobs (she encountered even weeks later) contained crows that had never seen the masked Swift with the dead crow. But they still learned to avoid the masked figure.

Learning directly from each other, rather than through individual experience, is called social learning.

“By participating in these funerals, crows can get information about new dangers without taking the risk,” Swift said.

Read the rest