A colony of fairy penguins on Warrnambool's Middle Island off the south coast of Australia has dwindled dramatically due to attacks by foxes and wild dogs. However, their numbers are rising again thanks to their new bodyguards - two Maremmas, an Italian breed of sheepdog that bonds with the flock or herd of animals it is protecting.

At least 1,068 new species were identified in the Greater Mekong from 1997 to 2007 along with several thousand tiny invertebrates, the Times reports.

Annamite striped rabbits, or Nesolagus timminsi, with black and brown fur, were discovered in Vietnam and Laos in 2000 and are only the second species of striped rabbit to be identified.

Among the most bizarre to be discovered was a hot-pink, spiny dragon millipede, Desmoxytes purpurosea.

The millipedes have glands that produce cyanide to protect them from predators.

During penis fencing, each flatworm tries to pierce the skin of the other using one of its penises. The first to succeed becomes the de facto male, delivering its sperm into the other, the de facto female. For the flatworms, this contest is serious business. Mating is a fight because the worm that assumes the female role then must expend considerable energy caring for the developing eggs.

A new study of the extinct creature's skull shows it had an almighty bite, making the prehistoric fish one of the most fearsome predators of all time.

All the more remarkable, scientists say, because the crushing force came from jaws made of cartilage, not bone.

The researchers report their skull work in the Journal of Zoology.

The megalodon super-shark swam in the oceans more than a million-and-a-half years ago.

It grew up to 16m (52ft) in length and weighed in at 100 tonnes - 30 times heavier than the largest great white - and must have been one of the most formidable carnivores to have existed.

The loggerhead sea turtle is threatened worldwide and is under consideration for being reclassified as "endangered" due to diminishing populations in the Western Atlantic Ocean. We are very pleased with Dylan's progress," said Dr. Terry Norton, Director of Veterinary Services and Interim Director of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center. "She has come a long way in the last year and has been a great representative of sea turtle education and conservation, helping to spread the word about the plight of the sea turtle and the marine ecosystem. We are glad to see her depart for her real home at sea and are excited to watch her travels once she is released."

"The Georgia Sea Turtle Center is an exciting project initiated by the Jekyll Island Foundation and the Jekyll Island Authority. The Center reflects our commitment to conservation, preservation and education," said William Lattimore, Jr., Chairman of the Jekyll Island Foundation. "This is a very special event for the entire community. Dylan's release is indeed an appropriate finale for Sea Turtle Weekend, the anniversary celebration of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center."

After outgrowing her tank at the Tidelands Nature Center in Jekyll Island, a partnership was formed with the Georgia Aquarium, where Dylan was relocated in November 2005. She returned to Jekyll Island in May of 2007, arriving at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center shortly before its official public opening, becoming the second patient.

"The Georgia Aquarium's partnership with the Georgia Sea Turtle Center has been important and hugely successful," said Ray Davis, Senior Vice President of Zoological Operations at the Georgia Aquarium. "We loved having Dylan in Atlanta and were sad to see her go, but it is certainly important that she will be released and continues to educate and inspire the future stewards of our oceans."

The study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who journeyed off the coast of Indonesia found that wild octopuses are far from the shy, unromantic loners their captive brethren appear to be.

The scientists watched the Abdopus aculeatus octopus, which are the size of an orange, for several weeks and published their findings recently in the journal Marine Biology.

They witnessed picky, macho males carefully select a mate, then guard their newly domesticated digs so jealously they would occasionally use their 8-to-10-inch tentacles to strangle a romantic rival.

The researchers also observed smaller "sneaker" male octopuses put on feminine airs, such as swimming girlishly near the bottom and keeping their male brown stripes hidden in order to win unsuspecting conquests.

"Sharks are going to arrive in Antarctica as long as the warming trend continues, a bit more slowly than crabs - crabs are going to get there first," said Professor Cheryl Wilga of the University of Rhode Island (URI), US. "But once they do get there they are capable of eating the organisms that live there."

Professor Wilga said the arrival of sharks and shell-crushing bony fishes would lead to dramatic changes in the number and proportions of species found there.

Shrimp, ribbon worms and brittle stars are likely to be the most vulnerable to population declines.

Dr Sven Thatje of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, UK, said animals living in shallow water in Antarctica were unique on Earth today because they evolved in a very cold environment over tens of millions of years.

A giant spitting cobra, measuring nearly nine feet and carrying enough venom to kill at least 15 people, has been discovered in Kenya, a conservation group said on Friday.

WildlifeDirect said the snake it described as the world's largest had been recognized as a new species and named the Naja Ashei after James Ashe, who founded a snake farm on Kenya's coast where the massive serpents are found.

"A new species of giant spitting cobra is exciting and reinforces the obvious — that there have to be many other unreported species but hundreds are being lost as their habitats disappear under the continued mismanagement of our planet," said the group's chairman, Kenyan environmentalist Richard Leakey.

Alex, the world renowned African Grey parrot made famous by the ground-breaking cognition and communication research conducted by Irene Pepperberg, Ph.D., died at the age of 31 on September 6, 2007. Dr. Pepperberg's pioneering research resulted in Alex learning elements of English speech to identify 50 different objects, 7 colors, 5 shapes, quantities up to and including 6 and a zero-like concept. He used phrases such as "I want X" and "Wanna go Y", where X and Y were appropriate object and location labels. He acquired concepts of categories, bigger and smaller, same-different, and absence. Alex combined his labels to identify, request, refuse, and categorize more than 100 different items demonstrating a level and scope of cognitive abilities never expected in an avian species. Pepperberg says that Alex showed the emotional equivalent of a 2 year-old child and intellectual equivalent of a 5 year-old. Her research with Alex shattered the generally held notion that parrots are only capable of mindless vocal mimicry.

In 1973, Dr. Pepperberg was working on her doctoral thesis in theoretical chemistry at Harvard University when she watched Nova programs on signing chimps, dolphin communication and, most notably, on why birds sing. She realized that the fields of avian cognition and communication were not only of personal interest to her but relatively uncharted territory. When she finished her thesis, she left the field of chemistry to pursue a new direction-to explore the depths of the avian mind. She decided to conduct her research with an African Grey parrot. In order to assure she was working with a bird representative of its species, she asked the shop owner to randomly choose any African Grey from his collection. It was Alex. And so the 1-year old Alex, his name an acronym for the research project, Avian Learning EXperiment, became an integral part of Pepperberg's life and the pioneering studies she was about to embark upon.

Over the course of 30 years of research, Dr. Pepperberg and Alex revolutionized the notions of how birds think and communicate. What Alex taught Dr. Pepperberg about cognition and communication has been applied to therapies to help children with learning disabilities. Alex's learning process is based on the rival-model technique in which two humans demonstrate to the bird what is to be learned. Alex and Dr. Pepperberg have been affiliated with Purdue University, Northwestern University, the University of Arizona, the MIT Media Lab, the Radcliffe Institute, and most recently, Harvard University and Brandeis University.

Alex has been featured worldwide on numerous science programs including the BBC, NHK, Discovery and PBS. He is well known for his interactions with Alan Alda in an episode of Scientific American Frontiers on PBS and from an episode of the famed PBS Nature series called "Look Who's Talking." Reports on Alex's accomplishments have appeared in the popular press and international news from USA Today to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The Science Times section of the New York Times featured Alex in a front-page story in 1999. That same year, Dr. Pepperberg published The Alex Studies, a comprehensive review of her decades of learning about learning from Alex. Many other television appearances and newspaper articles followed.

Alex was found to be in good health at his most recent annual physical about two weeks ago. According to the vet who conducted the necropsy, there was no obvious cause of death. Dr. Pepperberg will continue her innovative research program at Harvard and Brandeis University with Griffin and Arthur, two other young African Grey parrots who have been a part of the ongoing research program.

Alex has left a significant legacy-not only have he and Dr. Pepperberg and their landmark experiments in modern comparative psychology changed our views of the capabilities of avian minds, but they have forever changed our perception of the term "bird brains."

If you choose to help support this research, please consider making a donation in Alex's memory to The Alex Foundation, c/o Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Department of Psychology/MS-062, 415 South Street, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454.

After nearly disappearing from most of the U.S., the bald eagle is now flourishing and no longer needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act. The nation’s symbol has recovered from an all-time low of 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to an estimated high of 9,789 breeding pairs today, and will be removed from the list of threatened and endangered species.

To ensure that eagles continue to thrive, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will work with state wildlife agencies to monitor eagles for at least five years. If it appears that bald eagles again need the protection of the Endangered Species Act, the Service can propose to relist the species. The Service is also making the draft post-delisting monitoring plan available and is soliciting public comment for 90 days.

Bald Eagle - credit USFWSThe bald eagle first gained federal protection in 1940, under what was later named the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The law curbed illegal hunting and shooting of eagles for their feathers, but they soon fell victim to another threat: DDT. The widespread use of the pesticide DDT after World War II caused eagle populations to plummet towards extinction. When DDT washed off into waterways, it was absorbed by aquatic plants and animals. When eagles ate contaminated fish, they would then be poisoned. DDT prevented the proper formulation of calcium necessary to produce strong eggshells. Consequently, the thinned eggshells cracked when an adult bird tired to incubate them. Widespread reproductive failure and a precipitous decline in numbers followed. As a result, the bald eagle was protected in 1967 under the precursor to the Endangered Species Act. The eagle continued to be protected when the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was enacted.

The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive.

Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.

The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education.

"The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project.

"[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level."

The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.

Chimpanzees were observed jabbing the spears into hollow trunks or branches, over and over again. After the chimp removed the tool, it would frequently smell or lick it.

In the vast majority of cases, the chimps used the tools in the manner of a spear, not as probes. The researchers say they were using enough force to injure an animal that may have been hiding inside.

However, they did not photograph the behaviour, or capture it on film.

In one case, Pruetz and Bertolani, from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, UK, witnessed a chimpanzee extract a bushbaby with a spear.

They set up a careful experiment to allow the birds to cache food in a certain way if they were indeed planning, and found the birds were up to the task.

Their study, published in the journal Nature, adds to several others that show animals such as great apes and certain birds can plan ahead in much the same way as people do.

"Knowledge of and planning for the future is a complex skill that is considered by many to be uniquely human," Nicola Clayton and colleagues at the University of Cambridge wrote.

"We show that the jays make provision for a future need, both by preferentially caching food in a place in which they have learnt that they will be hungry the following morning and by differentially storing a particular food in a place in which that type of food will not be available the next morning," they added.

Yet another rare-freaky sea creature has made a rare-freaky video appearance - courtesy Japanese marine researchers - before being promptly declared dead.

At the end of last month, we wrote about video images of a live giant squid - the almost mythic creature that is occasionally found dead but almost never alive. The squid was videotaped off the Ogasawara Islands after Japanese researchers snagged it on a hook, and it fought off being reeled toward the side of the boat.

Now it seems that a rarely-seen, prehistoric-looking goblin of the deep - the frilled shark - was pulled from shallow waters by researchers at the Awashima Marine Park in Shizuoka, south of Tokyo, after they were tipped off by a fisherman at a nearby port, who reported "an odd-looking eel-like creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth," according to Reuters.

Last week a 16-year-old boy in Sydney died from a bite by an Eastern Brown, one of the world's deadliest snakes.

Many parts of Australia have been hard-hit by the drought, described as the worst for more than 100 years.

Experts have warned that an army of snakes is on the move, looking for water. Driven by extreme thirst they have been discovered in gardens, bedrooms and even Australian shopping centres.

Hospitals have reported a rising number of snakebites. Toxicologists have said there have been 60 serious cases since September.

An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team's leader saying one of the world's oldest species was effectively extinct.

The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction.

A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China but not in sufficient numbers to breed and ward off extinction, said August Pfluger, the Swiss co-leader of the joint Chinese-foreign expedition.

"We have to accept the fact, that the Baiji is functionally extinct. We lost the race," Pfluger said in a statement released by the expedition. "It is a tragedy, a loss not only for China, but for the entire world. We are all incredibly sad."

A Scottish team from Aberdeen University and the Scottish Agricultural College found that the number of harbor porpoises dying from starvation rose to 33 percent in 2002 and 2003-up from 5 percent in previous years.

The study, reported in the journal Biology Letters, was based on autopsies of beached harbor porpoises, Europe's smallest whale.

The porpoises rely heavily on sand eels, which make up to 80 percent of the mammals' diet in the spring, said Aberdeen University's Colin MacLeod, who led the study.

"We didn't really find other species of fish in their stomachs," he said. "If the sand eels aren't there, then there isn't any alternative food for them."

Wildlife officers are baffled by the "catastrophic" event, which the Department of Environment and Conservation said began well before last week's freak storm.

On Monday, Esperance, 725km southeast of Perth, was declared a natural disaster zone.

District nature conservation co-ordinator Mike Fitzgerald said the first reports of birds dropping dead in people's yards came in three weeks ago. More than 500 deaths had since been notified. But the calls stopped suddenly last week, reportedly because no birds were left.

"It's very substantial. We estimate several thousand birds are dead, although we don't have a clear number because of the large areas of bushland," Mr Fitzgerald said.

Birds Australia, the nation's main bird conservation group, said it had not heard of a similar occurrence. "Not on that scale, and all at the same time, and also the fact that it's several different species," chief executive Graeme Hamilton said. "You'd have to call that a most unusual event and one that we'd all have to be concerned about."

Colorado launched a hay lift Tuesday to try to save thousands of cattle stranded by 10-foot-high snowdrifts left after back-to-back blizzards paralyzed life on the Plains.

"These cattle have already gone a number of days without food and water. They're just going to lay over dead if we don't do something soon," said Department of Agriculture Executive Director Don Ament.

Last week’s storm dumped as much 3 feet of snow on the already hard hit mountains and Plains, and state and municipal crews from the Rockies to the Oklahoma Panhandle to Nebraska were still digging out highways and trying to reach isolated homes on Tuesday.

The captured squid was caught using a smaller type of squid as bait, and was pulled into a research vessel "after putting up quite a fight," Kubodera said.

"It took two people to pull it in, and they lost it once, which might have caused the injuries that killed it," he said.

The squid, a female, was not fully grown and was relatively small by giant squid standards. The longest one on record is 60 feet, he said.

Kubodera and his team had been conducting expeditions in the area for about three years before they succeeded in making their first contact two years ago. Last year, the team succeeded in taking a series of still photos of one of the animals in its natural habitat -- also believed to have been a first.

Until now, the earliest identified gliding mammal was a 30-million-year-old extinct rodent. The first known modern bat, which is capable of powered flight, dates to 51 million years ago, but it is assumed that proto-bats were probably gliding much earlier.

Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, lived about 145 million years ago, though scientists are not sure if it could flap its feathered wings in fully powered flight. But it lived about the time birds did take off in flight.

The mammal discovery, described in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, was made last year in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China. Farmers found the delicate fossil, embedded in sandstone, and brought it to the attention of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

On a visit there late last winter, Jin Meng, an associate curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, examined the specimen. He saw the sharp and diverse teeth of an insectivore. He then detected striations in the fossil - clear traces, he said, of hair covering a stretch membrane from fore to hind limbs that was the airfoil to support and give lift for the animal to glide.

"This was just totally out of nowhere," Dr. Meng said in an interview at the museum this week, while pointing to the fossil’s telling features.

The heads of the dolphins were held back and towels wrapped around their teeth so Mr Bao could not be bitten.

He then extended his 1.06m-long arm into the mammals' stomachs.

Chen Lujun, manager of Royal Jidi Ocean World, said Mr Bao was successful and the dolphins were "in very good condition now".

Local doctor Zhu Xiaoling told the state media agency Xinhua: "Some very small plastic pieces are still left in the dolphins' stomachs.

"However the dolphins will be able to digest these and are expected to recover soon."

The extinct creature, Dunkleosteus terrelli, could bring its jaws together with a remarkable force of 5,000 Newtons (1,100lbs-force).

This performance surpasses all living fish, including today's great white shark, and puts it up with some of the most powerful bites in all animals.

Details appear in the UK Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

US researchers Mark Westneat and Philip Anderson tell the journal that higher bite forces have only been reported for some large alligators and dinosaurs.

T. rex, for example, could clamp down on its meal with a crushing force of 13,000 Newtons (3,000lbs-force); but a modern spotted hyena, by comparison, exerts a force of only 2,000 Newtons (500lbs-force) when it cracks bones in its mouth.