Animals have started to die. The water hyacinths on the two rivers have turned black. Some Golpata trees have gone under heavy layers of oil.

One local, Abu Jafar, spotted two animals -- a monitor lizard and an otter -- dead and smeared with oil along the banks of the Shela.

Meanwhile, the authorities pulled the sunken oil tanker ashore around 11:00am yesterday, some 30 hours after the accident. But all the 3.58 lakh litres of furnace oil the tanker had been carrying already spilled into the rivers and the adjacent cannels.

Few reptiles can breathe underwater. Australia is home to one of the exceptions, the white-throated snapping turtle (Elseya albagula), which can extract oxygen from water through its backside via a process called cloacal respiration. This unusual technique, shared by a handful of other turtle and fish species, gave the turtles an evolutionary advantage for millennia, allowing them to hide from predators underwater for days at a time.

Unfortunately, breathing out of your butt requires very specific conditions that no longer exist in the turtles’ only habitat, Queensland’s Connors River and three nearby catchments. Dams, weirs, agriculture and mining have left the water sluggish and full of sediment. That makes it significantly harder for the turtles—especially vulnerable juveniles—to stay underwater. As a result, predation has increased to the point where populations have crashed. The problem has gotten so bad that less than 1 percent of eggs and young turtles survive to adulthood and the species has now been declared critically endangered by the Australian government

Iqbal has already paid bus fare and an entrance fee and given a donation to the shrine’s saint. Now she’s worried that the meat’s inflated price means she won’t have enough money to get home. The crocodiles’ caretaker, Shahan Mahmood, shakes his head sadly. He can’t afford to sell her the meat at a lower price.

“The crocodiles are starving,” he says. “No one is coming to feed them.”

In the last year, Mahmood and the rest of the shrine’s caretakers have buried two crocodiles. For two years, they say, very few of the eggs laid by the reptiles here have hatched. Iqbal forks over the change and watches as the caretaker walks to the makeshift iron fence to feed the closest crocodile. Mahmood says this is the first purchase of meat he has seen in three days.

The 19-year-old has been brought over for a new conservation project to help research ways to prevent the giants from becoming extinct in the wild and was named after one of the project’s partners.

Professor Wu is the only Chinese giant salamander in the UK and can be seen in the Land of Giants exhibit at the zoo.

The animals are classified as the world’s largest amphibian and face threat of extinction because they are being over-harvested for human consumption.

Over a decade ago, paleontologists working in the Cloverly Formation of Carbon County, Montana, unearthed the partial skull, lower jaw, and teeth of a small horned dinosaur. Previous work has shown that horned dinosaurs (or neoceratopsians) originated and diversified in the Early Cretaceous, but findings from that time period in the North American fossil record were limited to isolated teeth and bits of the post-cranial skeleton. Beloved triceratops showed up much later.

Now, based on several features—including a hook on its beak-like structure (or rostral bone) and a long, pointed cavity over its cheek—the skull belongs to a previously unknown species, according to Andrew Farke from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology and colleagues.

A stark depiction of the threat hanging over the world’s mammals, reptiles, amphibians and other life forms has been published by the prestigious scientific journal, Nature. A special analysis carried out by the journal indicates that a staggering 41% of all amphibians on the planet now face extinction while 26% of mammal species and 13% of birds are similarly threatened.

Many species are already critically endangered and close to extinction, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But also in danger of vanishing from the wild, it now appears, are animals that are currently rated as merely being endangered: bonobos, bluefin tuna and loggerhead turtles, for example.

In each case, the finger of blame points directly at human activities. The continuing spread of agriculture is destroying millions of hectares of wild habitats every year, leaving animals without homes, while the introduction of invasive species, often helped by humans, is also devastating native populations. At the same time, pollution and overfishing are destroying marine ecosystems.

“Many scientists are surprised about this discovery. People thought that it was difficult to find a new species of poison frog in this region of the country,” stated Abel Batista. “In Panama almost all areas are well investigated, and finding a such bright colored frog, gives us the impression that in Panama still a lot of research is needed, principally to investigate those remote areas, that nobody is going to do research."

“Much of the western slope of the Panamanian Caribbean has been poorly studied and is difficult to access,” Jaramillo further explained, “also, these frogs are very small, making them difficult to observe.”

The scientists celebrated the new species by naming it, Andinobates geminisae, after Marco Ponce's wife, Geminis Vargas, due to her unwavering support of his studies in Panamanian herpetology. However, celebration surrounding the discovery of this new species was short-lived as attention immediately shifted toward determining a special conservation plan to ensure the species’ survival.

“We started out with as six little old ladies,” laughs Cheryl Anderson. “Now we’ve got eight little old ladies.”

But, she adds quickly, they’ve managed to rally support from across the county — and the country — to chip in with donations toward the estimated $220,000 legal cost of the case.

They’re trying to protect the point — a former military exercise area that for decades has been left to the birds, bees, bats, butterflies and reptiles.