What's common among them?

This month, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) released the Red List of Threatened Species for 2007. The western lowland gorilla, the freshwater dolphin and the Egyptian vulture are some of the latest additions to the list of endangered animals. Since 2006, the annual assessment of the planet's imperiled wildlife has grown by more than a thousand species and now totals 41,415. Many great apes end up on the list, as their habitat is continually under threat from human activities. The Western lowland gorilla populations in central Africa have collapsed due to the commercial bushmeat trade and the Ebola virus; and in Indonesia, orangutans are critically endangered because of forest logging and clearing land for palm oil plantations.

The 'baiji', or Chinese river dolphin— deemed "functionally extinct" by a team of scientists in December 2006—has been downgraded from "endangered" to "critically endangered (possibly extinct)" on the IUCN's 2007 Red List. Populations of the light blue-gray animal, which lives in China's polluted Yangtze River, have plummeted over the last 30 years. A possible sighting in August 2007 is currently being investigated by Chinese scientists, but even if one or two dolphins are found, the baiji is almost certainly doomed. “Freshwater dolphins are very vulnerable, because rivers tend to be heavily used by humans and there is nowhere else for the dolphins to go,” says Caroline Pollock, a Red List program officer.

The Egyptian vulture, a new addition to IUCN's 2007 Red List, has declined along with many other vulture species. Five species of vulture, including the Egyptian, have been reclassified to a higher threat level since 2006. Asian vultures have declined rapidly over the last eight years due to the use of a livestock drug called diclofenac. African vultures are struggling due to habitat loss, a lack of food, and collisions with power lines. The scavengers are also being killed by insecticide-laden carcasses, which have been deliberately baited to poison livestock predators such as hyenas.

Mexico's Santa Catalina Island rattlesnake has been classified as critically endangered on the 2007 IUCN Red List. The snake, found on just one island, sports highly desirable patterned skin that has made it a collector's item for hunters. New reptile surveys are revealing the fragile nature of many reptile populations. For instance, a major survey of North American reptiles has bumped up the region's Red List reptile species to a total of 738. The main culprit behind their decline is habitat loss due to expanding cities.“Unlike birds and mammals, we haven't assessed all the reptiles on the planet,” Pollock added.

The Banggai cardinal fish's popularity as a pet for the home aquarium has landed it on the 2007 IUCN Red List. In the wild, the striped fish is only found in the Banggai Archipelago off Indonesia. Human pressures such as the aquarium trade are the main reason for the fish's decline, with habitat loss and climate change also posing major threats. Fish stocks are in free-fall all over the world, both from overfishing and the aquarium trade. Scientists estimate current extinction rates are at least a hundred to a thousand times higher than natural rates.

Reptiles such as the gharial are becoming more prominent on the IUCN's Red List each year. Despite its fearsome appearance and lengths of up to 19 feet (6 meters), the Indian gharial is not a man-eater and prefers to eat fish. Its long, thin snout, which makes it easily distinguishable from a crocodile, also allows it to quickly capture fish. Habitat loss and poaching is driving this animal toward extinction.

For the first time, corals are added to the Red List. A recent scientific survey on the Galápagos Archipelago has added ten corals to the list, including the Floreana coral. In the 1980s, frequent El Niño weather patterns—which made ocean temperatures fluctuate—likely led to the poor state of the Galápagos corals. Some scientists worry that global warming may make El Niño events more regular and prevent corals from recovering. Until recently, scientists had not properly assessed the health of the world's tropical corals. Coral reefs in the Indian and Pacific Ocean, for example, are vanishing faster than rain forests and scientists estimate that human activities such as pollution, global warming and sedimentation could kill 30 percent of reefs in the next three decades.


Source: The National Geographic

Did you know?

Black mambas use their incredible speed to escape threats, not to hunt prey. They get their name not from their skin color, which tends to be olive to gray, but rather from the blue-black color of the inside of their mouth, which they display when threatened.

BLACK MAMBA

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Order: Squamata
Suborder: Serpentes
Family: Elapidae
Genus: Dendroaspis
Species: Polylepis

Black mambas are fast, nervous, lethally venomous, and when threatened, highly aggressive. They have been blamed for numerous human deaths, and African myths exaggerate their capabilities to legendary proportions. For these reasons, the black mamba is widely considered the world’s deadliest snake.
Black mambas live in the savannas and rocky hills of southern and eastern Africa. They are Africa’s longest venomous snake, reaching up to 14 feet (4.5 meters) in length, although 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) is more the average. They are also among the fastest snakes in the world, slithering at speeds of up to 12.5 miles per hour (20 kilometers per hour).
Black mambas are shy and will almost always seek to escape when confronted. However, when cornered, these snakes will raise their heads, sometimes with a third of their body off the ground, spread their cobra-like neck-flap, open their black mouths and hiss. If an attacker persists, the mamba will strike not once, but repeatedly, injecting large amounts of potent neuro- and cardiotoxin with each strike. Before the advent of black mamba antivenin, a bite from this fearsome serpent was 100 percent fatal, usually within about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, antivenin is still not widely available in the rural parts of the mamba’s range, and mamba-related deaths remain frequent.
The black mamba has no special conservation status. However, encroachment on its territory is not only putting pressure on the species but contributes to more potentially dangerous human contact with these snakes.

I am safe :)

Shading her eye with an ear, an elephant rests lying down, a sign that she feels safe. Once called the Valley of Elephants, Luangwa suffered a poaching onslaught during the 1970s and '80s, when nearly 100,000 animals were killed. Today they number perhaps 10,000 and are generally holding their own. In a few game management areas outside the parks, trophy hunting resumed in 2005, raising fears that the last few mature bulls in the valley could be shot.

Source: The National Geographic (Photograph by Frans Lanting).

Nature's art or ...

Image: The underside of a skate shimmers off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. Related to rays, skates look similar but don’t have the ray’s barbed tail and are harmless to humans.

SOURCE : Kaleidoscopic Cousin, From Visions of Earth, National Geographic, May 2007.

New dinosaur species found in India

A new species of dinosaur is announced by Indian and American scientists: a 30-foot (9-meter), horned carnivore that hunted other dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A reconstruction of the dinosaur's skull (see photo ) may shed light on how the continents drifted into their present positions and what might have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
When paleontologists Paul Sereno and Jeff Wilson arrived in India in 2001 to study a mixed collection of dinosaur bones gathered by Indian scientists 18 years earlier, they found the bones spread out on an office floor. Sifting through the collection, they separated out the bones of a theropod, or meat-eating dinosaur. When they found the center part of a skull, they recognized a horn resembling those of dinosaurs found in Madagascar. Their search continued, yielding a left hip, then a right hip, then a sacrum. Sereno and Wilson consulted detailed, hand-drawn maps drafted by their Indian counterparts and discovered the bones had been buried next to each other, as if they had been connected.
"There was a Eureka! moment when we realized we had a partial skeleton of an undiscovered species," said Sereno, a paleontology professor at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.


65-Million-Year-Old Bones :
The bones were collected in 1983 by Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and Ashok Sahni, a paleontologist at Punjab University, during a search for dinosaur eggs and nests. Srivastava drew a detailed map to document the position of the fossil bones as they lay in the field. The scientists then stored the 65-million-year-old bones at a GSI office, where they stayed until Sereno and Wilson arrived. Working with Indian experts, Wilson and Sereno reconstructed the skull of the new species, a stocky, 30-foot-long (9-meter-long) carnivore named Rajasaurus narmadensis, which means "regal dinosaur from the Narmada," the river region in western India where the bones were found. The project was supported in part by the National Geographic Society.
"We knew of fragments and bones [in India]," said Sereno, who has discovered new dinosaur species on five continents. "But this skull reconstruction offers the first glimpse into the lost world of the Indian dinosaur."
"We know that there were carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs in India through individual bones, but we really don't know just how they looked because no two bones can be reliably said to belong to one individual," said Wilson, who is of the University of Michigan. "Rajasaurus is important because it represents a partial skeleton and preserves many details that clue us into its evolutionary relationships."
The reconstructed skull is missing some parts, but it has the most important pieces: the jaws and the brain case. Between 25 and 30 feet (7.6 and 9 meters) long, the Rajasaurus was heavy and strong, and walked on two legs.
"There are several anatomical details that make Rajasaurus a new species," said Wilson. "Perhaps the most striking is the horn it bears on its head. The horn was probably rather subtle. It may have been low and rounded."


A Carnivorous Family :
The carnivorous Rajasaurus, which lived in the Cretaceous Period at the end of the dinosaur age, preyed on long-necked titanosaur sauropods, herbivorous dinosaurs that also roamed the Narmada region. Bones from both dinosaurs were found together.
Indian paleontologists recently found coprolites (fossilized dung) that provide additional clues to the diet of those titanosaurs.
"Large theropod eggs have also been described by our group from the area where the skeleton of Rajasaurus has been recovered, but it's difficult to relate the theropod eggs specifically to Rajasaurus," said Sahni.
The scientists believe the Rajasaurus is related to a family of large carnivorous dinosaurs, most of which had horns, that roamed the southern hemisphere land masses of present Madagascar, Africa, and South America.
"People don't realize dinosaurs are the only large-bodied animal that lived, evolved, and died at a time when all continents were united," said Sereno.

The Continental Drift :
The Rajasaurus was likely like its contemporary, Tyrannosaurus rex—one of the last species to live before a catastrophe occurred some 65 million years ago. What exactly caused the death of the dinosaurs is a matter of great debate. But the burial site of the bones found in India could provide a clue.
"The sediments in which these dinosaurs were found are closely associated with one of the biggest volcanic activities recorded in the last 500 million years on planet Earth," said Sahni.
As much as a third of India's land mass is covered with lava. That makes it particularly difficult to find dinosaur bones. The task is made even more difficult because India is so heavily populated.
"The best place for a paleontologist to work is an empty desert," said Sereno.
Dinosaur discoveries could also help researchers improve their relatively scant knowledge of how India separated from Africa, Madagascar, Australia, and Antarctica and later impacted Asia to form the Himalaya.
"The details of the timing and route of India's northward migration are not well resolved," said Wilson. "Dinosaurs are good organisms to study the effects of continental drift because they cover continent-scale distances. That is, they seem to record connections between continents fairly well."
The new species will be described in the August issue of the Contributions of the Museum of Paleontology of the University of Michigan. Casts of the dinosaur's skull will be donated by the team to Punjab University and the Geological Survey of India.



Source: The National Geographic channel

National Geographic

Splendor of ruins

Baalbek, Lebanon, Date Unknown (Photograph by George F. Mobley)

"Awe-inspiring even in ruin, the splendor of Baalbek [40 miles (64 kilometers) northeast of Beirut] must have defied description in its time of glory. Rome began erecting the huge sanctuaries in the first century A.D., on a site previously dedicated to the Canaanite god Baal."

(Text from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Lebanon: Little Bible Land in the Crossfire of History," February 1970, National Geographic magazine)