Non-human ‘doctor’: In a first, male Sumatran orangutan ‘Rakus’ recorded using medicinal plant to heal his wound

Finding shows medical wound treatment may have possibly arisen in a common ancestor shared by humans and great apes

North Dakota: 200 wild horses related to Custer’s Last Stand can stay in park where Teddy Roosevelt spent formative years

Herd had been considered risk earlier, with tendency to trample or overgraze vegetation used by native wildlife species, contribute to erosion …

‘Heavenly Horses’: Heard of the Akhal-Teke? Turkmenistan will hold a beauty contest for them today

Last year, the art of breeding the Akhal-Teke horse and the traditions of horse decoration were included in the UNESCO Representative List of the …

Earth Day 2024: Bhutan will host global meet today to mobilise finance for tiger conservation across Asia

World needs to invest $1 billion over next decade to conserve tigers and their habitats across the continent  

Protect India’s scrublands to save the caracal: Dharmendra Khandal & Ishan Dhar

Down To Earth speaks to Dharmendra Khandal and Ishan Dhar of Tiger Watch about their new book on the caracal

California’s 1st fatal cougar attack in 20 years: These tips can help in encounters with the Americas’ apex felid

Don’t run, bend or crouch; if a cougar attacks, fight back with whatever is at hand, even your bare hands

Is the tiger still ‘rajah’ of Java’s jungles? New study raises hopes

A single hair strand found in a village on the island in 2019 found to be genetically belonging to subspecies

Frans de Waal showed non-human species are more complex than they are given credit for: Anindya Sinha

Down To Earth spoke to Sinha, one of India’s leading primate experts, about the legacy of the Dutch-American primatologist, who passed …

A giant dolphin once resided in the Peruvian Amazon. Its closest living relatives today inhabit the Indus and Ganga

At 3.5 metres long, the Pebanista yacuruna was the largest river dolphin that ever existed  

Centre contemplating ban on wolf dogs. But what about the hybrids roaming India’s wilds?

We hardly know about people breeding wolf dogs in India; but we do know they are prevalent in the wild, say experts

Bizarre, serious, jocular

Janaki Lenin captures the animal (and human) world in all its mystique and charm

Panthera Tigris: The puzzle that is tiger taxonomy

The jury is still out on how many types of tiger are found across Asia

WWF confirms the presence of gharials in Pakistan’s Punjab

Gharials may have been in Okara and Head Sulemanki nearly a year ago

Are langurs and rhesus macaques really sworn enemies of each other?  

Science does not see this relationship in terms of black-and-white

A leonine tale for Holi: Could the Asiatic Lion have inspired the figure of Narasimha?

Religious iconography cannot be mapped onto modern taxonomy, say experts

Shark & ray meat consumption no longer restricted to India’s tribal & coastal peoples: Paper

Tourists and middle- & upper-class domestic consumers emerging consumption classes for elasmobranch meat  

How robust is India’s tiger census?

Government officials and independent experts help decode the riddle of tiger estimation

Tigers in the Terai’s sugarcane fields are developing into an ecotype of their own: Rahul Shukla

Down To Earth speaks to conservationist who has documented and written about tigers growing up and surviving in the Terai landscape of northern India

Snow Leopard: Enigmatic big cat of High Asia now National Symbol of Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyz president Sadyr Zhaparov signed decree on December 30, asking his Cabinet to safeguard the species and promote it  

Blame Stamford Raffles: How the British ended the Malayan tiger’s reign over Singapore

Island has lost 37% of its biodiversity in the 200 years since it was first colonised, says new study; this includes the Malayan tiger  

India lost 204 tigers in 2023, most of them in Maharashtra: WPSI

India’s tiger population increased by 200 from 2018 to 2022, according to new figures released this year

Miracle on the Steppe: The Saiga has beaten extinction for now, finds new IUCN Red List

Only 6% of the population was left in 2003, a decade after the break-up of the Soviet Union

Tasmania whales stranding: Climate change ‘among other factors’ can cause such events, say experts

Experts say whale stranding tend to recur at the same locations across the world

Another species extinct: This time the Yangtze giant soft shell turtle

The last surviving female dies in a Chinese zoo

Female turtle returns to Maldivian atoll to lay eggs, finds runway instead

The turtle laid her eggs on the runway of Maafaru airport itself, on Noonu Atoll