Animals

Italian officials spotted a deer in a nature preserve that had a single horn grown out of the middle of its head. “This is fantasy becoming reality,” Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato said. “The unicorn has always been a mythological animal.”

The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed “Unicorn” — was born in captivity in the research center’s park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said. He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

Biologists believe that the Caribbean monk seals have become extinct because of the amount of people that hunt them for research, blubber, and food. They stated that it has been decades since they have seen a sighting of one and they now fear that the Mediterranean and Hawaiian monk seals will be the next ones in line.

The last confirmed sighting of a Caribbean monk seal was in 1952 between Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service confirmed Friday that the species is extinct.

Dr. Jane Goodall is a primatologist who is proposing that the Nobel prize be given as a reward for the ability to advance medical knowledge without having to experiment with animals. The scientist who pioneered certain research projects on chimpanzees while in the wild believes that moving away from animal research is a “goal towards which all civilised nations should be moving”.

The Tasmanian devil in Australia is now on the endangered species list due to a deadly cancer that is killing them off. Scientists believe that the tumor begins in the head of the animal and slowly spreads to their face and mouth. This keeps it from being able to eat anything and and kill it in as little as two months. Because of this the population of the marsupial has decreased by close to 60%.

A rare giant turtle was discovered in northern Vietnam. Researchers from the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo discovered the turtle and have stated it as being a cultural significance and great scientific discovery. It was believed that the Swinhoe soft shell turtle was extinct in the wild. However, they have found three other turtles of the same species in captivity.

New research may show that dinosaurs were combative while in their teenage years. The fossils show that they might have had violent fights in which they butted heads. According to research the bones showed that the skulls of these younger dinosaurs have compressed and rebounded – which can happen after a serious head ram.

Global warming is affecting the weather in the Arctic Circle and melting the ice too fast putting hundreds of newborn seal cubs at risk. The World Wide Fund for Nature located in Germany noticed the ice melting and stated on Monday that the cubs could die from hunger and cold.
“In some parts perhaps not a single one of the seal cubs born in the past few weeks will survive,” the WWF said in a statement. It said hundreds of the roughly 1,500 ringed seal cubs born this month and last month were in danger.

Remember the Velociraptor, the fearsome dinosaur made famous in the Jurassic Park films. It seems that they weren’t as cary in real life as we thought they were. They had feathers and probably more closely resembled a big turkey than the killer screen dinosaur, scientists have discovered.

When you are near a pond in the summer time you must always be careful of poisonous snakes and alligators that may be lurking around in the water and the bushes. It is always a wise thing to high tail it in the other direction when you spot one. David Covington with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said the best thing for people to do when they encounter wildlife is to leave the animals alone.

A capuchin monkey at the Denver Zoo has died of plague and officials are trying to prevent an epidemic by isolating the primates and treating them with antibiotics. Zoo officials learned late Friday that the 8-year-old animal that died Wednesday tested positive for the flea-borne disease, according to a zoo statement. More than a dozen squirrels and at least one rabbit have been found dead of plague in the City Park area just east of downtown, which includes a golf course, the zoo and the Denver Museum of Nature of Science.