Scientists say they’ve used human test-tube baby techniques to try to save the nearly extinct northern white rhino. In an improbable experiment, they are trying to resurrect an entire subspecies using dead males, two infertile remaining females, and some closely related southern white rhinos. And they say they also plan to use stem-cell technology to try to create a population of pure northern white rhinos in the lab.

A mob slaughtered nearly 300 crocodiles at a breeding ground in Indonesia's West Papua province in retaliation for the death of a local man, officials said Monday. A total of 292 crocodiles were killed by hundreds of villagers on Saturday following the funeral of a 48-year-old man who was killed by crocodiles after entering the area around the breeding pond, said Basar Manullang, the head of the local Natural Resources and Conservation Agency. The man was believed to have entered the sanctuary in the Klamalu neighborhood of Sorong district to cut grass for his cattle.

In a southwest Louisiana crawfish pond, two endangered whooping crane chicks peck about for crawfish, insects, plants and other food. They're only 2 months old, but they dwarf the full-grown great egrets nearby. Their tall white parents bugle alarm at an ATV and people across the pond, and all four cranes move farther away.

A bear conservationist says she is shocked by Instagram videos showing two Vancouver-area girls hand-feeding black bears through an open patio door. In one of the videos, the two unidentified girls giggle when a bear cub swats at one of them after she gave it a cracker. Another video shows a girl feeding a cub a cracker through the sliding door. In a third, a man, who appears to be their father, feeds an adult-sized bear a full package of crackers through the same door.

A park ranger is grateful to be alive after a terrifying grizzly bear attack outside his home in Bella Coola.Jordan Carbery said he arrived home last Monday night and saw some bears in his headligh…

The news coming out of East Africa's Virunga Mountains these days would have made the late (and legendary) conservationist Dian Fossey very happy. According to the most recent census, the mountain gorillas introduced to the world in Gorillas in the Mist, Fossey's book and the film about her work, have grown their ranks from 480 animals in 2010 to 604 as of June 2016. Add another couple hundred apes living in scattered habitats to the south, and their population as a whole totals more than 1,000. Believe it or not, this makes the mountain gorilla subspecies the only great apes known to be increasing in number.

A proposed ivory ban could be extended to protect hippos, walruses and narwhals, the government has said. Ministers have proposed strict legislation to ban the sale of ivory items of all ages, with a few exemptions, as part of efforts to protect elephants from poaching. Around 20,000 elephants a year are slaughtered for their ivory, and wildlife campaigners argue the ban will slow the pace of the killing. But concerns have been raised that the focus on elephants in the ban puts other ivory-bearing animals at increased risk of poaching for their ivory.

It's the canine crime of the century: A wolf was killed by gunshot, tied to a concrete weight and dumped in a lake. Killing a wolf is a crime, and German wildlife groups are appealing for help to find the murderer.

When the last male Northern White Rhinoceros, 45-year-old Sudan, died in March it looked like the end of the sub-species was nigh.

A Canadian man was killed protecting his children from a polar bear while they were visiting an island in Canada's Arctic Archipelago, police said. Aaron Gibbons, 31, and his children were visiting Sentry Island, a popular spot for fishing and hunting in Canada's Hudson Bay, on Tuesday when the bear approached them, his family told CNN partner CBC News.

US farmers are planting more and more acres with seeds coated with neonicotinoid pesticides. An ecologist explains why this approach is overkill and may be doing more harm than good.

The red wolf, which once roamed all the way from Texas to New York, has dwindled to a wild population of around 35, found only in one peninsula in eastern North Carolina. On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed allowing landowners to legally kill those wolves once they leave the confines of a small protected area known as Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. The proposal was panned by wildlife experts.

Gray wolves from the radioactive forbidden zone around the nuclear disaster site of Chernobyl are now roaming out into the rest of the world, raising the possibility they'll spread mutant genes that they may carryfar and wide, a new study finds. The wolves are prospering not due to any mutant superpower, but because the radioactive zone now acts like a wildlife preserve, researchers added.

Scientists are testing light therapy, a fungus-killing fungus—and maybe, doing nothing

An Arctic fox generally isn't part of a crab fishing boat's bycatch, but one crew from southern Labrador managed just that last week. An Arctic fox generally isn't part of a crab fishing boat's bycatch, but one crew from southern Labrador managed just that last week. Alan Russell of St. Lewis said his ship was about seven kilometres offshore when they spotted something on a nearby iceberg. "We seen something on the ice. Wasn't sure what it was," Russell told CBC's Labrador Morning.

A ranger discovered human remains close to a pride of lions while taking guests on a safari drive at the reserve on Tuesday. “We suspect two were killed, possibly three,” owner Nick Fox told NBC News. An ax, shoes, and gloves were found later when police and an anti-poaching unit arrived. The lions had reportedly been heard making noise in the early morning hours on Monday.

A pride of lions just killed rhino poachers in a South African game reserve.

Mexico's population of wild jaguars has grown 20 percent in the past eight years, according to a study released Thursday, a bit of good news for an iconic species whose numbers have been declining. There are an estimated 4,800 jaguars in Mexico, found the study, carried out by a consortium of institutions and academics with remotely activated cameras triggered by sensors.

Wallabies have been filmed hurling themselves into a metal fence after being trapped in a park for more than a year. Animal welfare activists said the marsupials were “starving” after Cairns Regional Council erected barriers around the park in a suburb of the North Queensland city. The Australian Society for Kangaroos (ASK) said some of the wallabies had “died trying to escape, smashing themselves up against fences”.

As they make their global journeys, migratory birds not only set birdwatchers’ binoculars agog, they also help the planet maintain its essential ecological balance.

More than half of Canada’s landmass is comprised of boreal forest—a vast and tree-filled region that extends across the country. To help conserve the forest, the province of Alberta has designated four new protected parks in its northeastern region, reports David Thurton of the CBC. When added to other contiguous conserved lands in Alberta, the new parks make up the largest stretch of protected boreal forests on the planet.

Beyond pandas and tigers, how many endangered species do you really know? By Elaina Zachos.

The world’s largest cat-proof fence has been completed in central Australia, creating a 94 square kilometre sanctuary for endangered marsupials. The 44km fence – made of 85,000 pickets, 400km of wire and 130km of netting – surrounds the Newhaven wildlife sanctuary, a former cattle station that has been bought by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. Endangered species such as the bilby, the burrowing bettong and the mala (also known as the rufous hare-wallaby) will have a chance to replenish their populations inside the massive sanctuary, safe from Australia’s feral cat epidemic.

Eighty years after they were hunted to extinction, the successful reintroduction of a herd of wild European bison on to the dunes of the Dutch coast is paving the way for their return across the continent. The largest land-living animal in Europe was last seen in the Netherlands centuries ago, and was wiped out on the continent by 1927. Despite successful efforts to breed the species again in the wilds of Poland in the 1950s, and renewed efforts in the last decade in western Europe, the European bison remains as endangered as the black rhino.

A landmark report by UN environment experts on plastic pollution, published to coincide with World Environment Day (5 June), shows that governments across the world are starting to take action and that bans and levies are starting to take off. The UN Environment’s Single-Use Plastics: A Roadmap for Sustainability report looks at more than 60 case studies to come up with a number of recommendations to curb plastic pollution and combat an escalating problem that “we are already unable to cope with”.

In 2014, a toxic invasive species—the Asian common toad—was spotted in Madagascar’s largest seaport. Conservation biologists quickly sounded an urgent alarm, warning that the invader could devastate the African island’s unique biodiversity, which includes lemurs and hundreds of other animals found nowhere else in the world.

Behavioural ecologists from Liverpool John Moores University, UK and McGill University, Canada sampled guppies from two rivers in northern Trinidad. In each river, guppies live above a waterfall, a location that only guppies and a few other small species of fish have managed to colonize, and below the fall, where many predators including pike …

This lion king (pictured above) is a queen. And she’s not the only one. Five lionesses in Botswana have grown a mane and are showing male-like behaviours. One is even roaring and mounting other females. Male lions are distinguished by their mane, which they use to attract females, and they roar to protect their territory or call upon members of their pride. Females lack a mane and are not as vocal.

An Arctic fox generally isn't part of a crab fishing boat's bycatch, but one crew from southern Labrador managed just that last week.

Three rangers have been killed in separate countries in a deadly month for wildlife defenders. A ranger at Serra da Capivara national park, in Brazil’s north-eastern Piaui region, was killed by hunters on 18 August. Edilson Aparecido dos Santos and two other colleagues were patrolling the park when they were ambushed by a group of four armed men who are believed to have been hunting in the park illegally. Dos Santos was killed in the shootout that followed, while the other two rangers were injured.

There are still people out there who don't believe in evolution, and frankly, we don't want to start that argument. Instead, we'd prefer to just point to those moments when natural selection made itself suddenly, dramatically known.

Joao Pereira de Souza is a 71-year-old retired bricklayer who lives on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He’s also a part-time fisherman, which is how he ended up becoming friends with Dindim, a South American Magellanic penguin. It seems like an odd friendship, but Dindim owes the fisherman his life.

Civil war, deforestation, disease and poaching have driven the mighty mountain gorilla to the brink of extinction. Conservation efforts have helped boost population numbers, but humans are still their greatest threat. By Eva de Vries.

Ghana is facing calls to update its laws on wildlife crime after fears the country has become a transit route for the illegal trade in pangolin scales. More than 31,000 kilograms (68,000 pounds) of scales from the nocturnal mammal have been seized across the world this year, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). In May and June, two major seizures were made in Malaysia, with at least 700 kg found to have been shipped through Ghana.

Warning: Gross pics contained within. By Leanne Louie.