How was the Española population of giant tortoise saved? The Galapagos Islands National Park Service began a program of captive breeding and reintroduction in 1973. Using an enclosure on another island to help some of the remaining tortoise to focus on breeding, they were successful in reintroducing more than 1500 of the captivity-raised giant tortoise offspring on the island of Española.

For this effort to be successful, the non-native goats had to be culled, and eventually exterminated. Otherwise, the life-sustaining catci could never have recovered:

"[The goats] would feast on the roots... and chew away at the bark, and eventually that would topple these cacti. And then they had an incredible buffet of maybe 500-1000 years of cactus growth, demolished in a week or two," explained Professor Gibbs, from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York.

Twice as long as the longest snake alive today, Titanoboa was discovered in 2009 by a team of scientists working in one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines at Cerrejón in La Guajira, Colombia. Fossil plants, giant turtles and crocodiles found with it deep underground reveal the earliest known rainforest, teeming with life and dating to the Paleocene, the lost world that followed the demise of the dinosaurs.

"Titanoboa is a bigger, badder boa, and it will simply knock your socks off," said Jennifer Sontchi, Academy director of exhibits.

Turtle rescues happen every year in late fall in the Northeast, but for reasons not yet known what's happening this year is "epic," said one of the nearly two dozen volunteers passing boxes of turtles like a bucket brigade.

"Statistically, I feel like we are out on Pluto," said Tony LaCasse, spokesman for the New England Aquarium's marine-animal hospital in Quincy, Mass., who fears the number of cold-stunned turtles could quadruple.

"We've been rescuing sea turtles for 25 years, and we are just absolutely shocked," LaCasse said.

Colleen Farmer used it to study how an iguana breathes.

She threaded an endoscope—a tube with a light and a camera at the end—into the lizard’s nose, while allowing it to inhale the artificial smoke from a fog machine. The smoke, though harmless, contained small particles, and the camera could detect these they worked their way into the iguana’s lungs.

And to Farmer’s surprise, no matter whether the lizard breathed in or out, the smoke particles only moved in one direction.

To achieve their goal, the environmentalists filed a petition with the Department of Environmental Conservation, citing several reasons why the eastern hellbender should be provided protection allocated for other endangered species.

"Hellbenders face numerous threats in New York, including sedimentation, low water quality, lack of habitat, and disease. Significant declines in hellbender populations in both the Allegheny and Susquehanna watersheds suggest that this species, without protection, could become extirpated in the near future in the Susquehanna drainage, and may also disappear from the Allegheny drainage," summarized the petition.

Endemic to New York, the eastern hellbender was given the "special concern species" status by the state's conservation officials back in 1983.

The tiny turtle was thrown into the air by the predator, but managed to slip from its mouth and back into the water thanks to the wet surface of its shell.

Later, the lucky terrapin was spotted chilling out on a nearby rock after its near miss.

South African safari guide Mario Moreno, 49, snapped the exhilarating incident when visiting Lake Panic in Kruger National Park.

Every year as a part of what’s called a “Head Start Program,” a team of researchers from Sonoma State collect turtle eggs from a pond, hatch the babies and send them to Turtle Bay, the San Francisco Zoo and the Oakland Zoo. Crews care for the babies until they’re big enough to avoid becoming another animal’s lunch.

“It gives them a bit of a push out there, a little more of an advantage because there’s so many invasive species of turtles that are pushing them out because they’re so much bigger than them,” Turtle Bay animal trainer Adrienne John said.

“The turtles were all dead,” an official of the Ministry of Public Security’s environmental police department, Le Hong Thai, said. “They were meant to be processed into handicrafts for export to China,” he added.

“The case is under investigation, so we cannot reveal the number of detainees or any other details,” he said.

Vietnamese law protects five native marine turtles, making it a criminal offense to hunt, trade, or store them.

To track the tortoises and study their habits, biologists attach small VHF transmitters and GPS data loggers to the shell of each tortoise they find. They also paint a unique number on the tortoise’s shell, and file a small notch through one of the keratin scutes at the thin rear edge of the shell, which has a consistency similar to a human fingernail. All this is done after an examination of the tortoise’s health and weight.

Coaxing one of the creatures out of their shelters can be a challenge: if they feel threatened, they oftentimes wedge themselves against the rear wall and ceiling of their miniature caves, which can be yards deep.

“They’re shockingly strong,” said Hillary Hoffman, a herpetologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department who has been coming to YPG since 2009. “If they don’t want to come out, they’re not coming out.”

A team of scientists, including researchers from the California Academy of Sciences, has reconstructed a detailed "tree of life" for turtles. The specifics of how turtles are related—to one another, to other reptiles, and even to dinosaurs—have been hotly debated for decades. Next generation sequencing technologies in Academy labs have generated unprecedented amounts of genetic information for a thrilling new look at turtles' evolutionary history. These high-tech lab methods revolutionize the way scientists explore species origins and evolutionary relationships, and provide a strong foundation for future looks into Earth's fossil record.

Research results, appearing in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, describe how a new genetic sequencing technique called Ultra Conserved Elements (UCE) reveal turtles' closest relatives across the animal kingdom.

The scary encounter was to celebrate the launch of the zoo’s search for an Irish Junior Conservation Hero.

The new initiative is to help raise awareness about the rapid rate of extinction that is wiping out unique species across the planet.

“If you see one hurt ... it’s best to be cautious and call an expert.

“Also, try and look out for them on the roads. They tend to move slowly across the road when they want to warm up or look for food.”

Lead author Dr Tyler Lyson of Wits University's Evolutionary Studies Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science said: "Tortoises have a bizarre body plan and one of the more puzzling aspects to this body plan is the fact that tortoises have locked their ribs up into the iconic tortoise shell. No other animal does this and the likely reason is that ribs play such an important role in breathing in most animals including mammals, birds, crocodilians, and lizards."

Instead tortoises have developed a unique abdominal muscular sling that wraps around their lungs and organs to help them breathe. When and how this mechanism evolved has been unknown.

In snakes and lizards, the external genitals get a little funkier. These reptiles have paired external genitals, even though they only use one at a time during mating.

But all of these genitals spring out of the same embryonic structure, called the cloaca. This structure sends out signals to the cells around it in the embryo, telling them to turn into genitals.

Scientists have wondered why these structures — which are triggered to grow by the same genetic mechanisms during embryonic development, and have the same function in adulthood — develop so differently.

Laophis crotaloides measured between 10 and 13 feet (3 and 4 meters) long and weighed a whopping 57 lbs. (26 kilograms). Today's longest venomous snakes, king cobras (Ophiophagus hannah), can grow to be about 18 feet (5.5 m) long. But at typical weights between 15 and 20 lbs. (6.8 to 9 kg), king cobras are scrawny compared to Laophis.

What makes Laophis even stranger was that it achieved this bulk not in the tropics, where most large reptiles live today, but in seasonal grasslands where winters were cool.

Cortada said his goal was to have a dynamic service to honor the fallen croc, but at the same time to bring ecological awareness to community members, and teach them how to coexist with nature.

Florida International University biology students said the death of a South Florida animal is not rare. They cited the manatee, the sawfish, the Key Largo mouse and the indigo snake.

“Why are we here lamenting Pancho when we have killed so many Panchos in the last 100 years?” Cortada said, adding that humans are at fault for the reptile’s death after invading his natural habitat. “I just wanted to cry real tears and have a real conversation about our reptilian friend. We love you, Pancho.”

Faced with growing concerns about the hunting of freshwater turtles in the United States for Asian food markets, federal officials this week proposed adding four species to an international list of plants and animals designed to manage commercial trade in the reptiles.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday said that listing the common snapping turtle, Florida softshell turtle, smooth softshell turtle and spiny softshell turtle would allow it to better monitor exportation of these species, particularly to Asian nations, where turtle populations have been wiped out due to high demand for their meat.

Bringing the species under the protection of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora would require exporters to obtain a permit before shipping turtles overseas. That would help the federal agency determine the extent of legal and illegal exportation and decide whether additional conservation efforts were needed.

You ask, "shouldn't they be equipped with fishing poles and nets instead of intimidating weapons?" If you are after fish, then the answer is yes. However, if your desire is to legally kill a timber rattlesnake, northern copperhead, snapping turtle or any other unlucky native reptile and amphibian then, these uncharacteristic slaying instruments were recommended to me by Thomas Burrell, Waterways Conservation Office Manager of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

Immediately, several questions come to mind, like:

Are you serious? Can you kill reptiles and amphibians, especially with machetes and clubs in this day and age? Can someone be guilty of cruelty to animals? Isn't the timber rattlesnake protected and is the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission's goal to ensure that it stays off of its endangered species list?

Chappuis and his colleagues collected samples from the fang wounds of 749 people at three health centres in Nepal, amplified the DNA and sequenced it. They then looked for matches in a publicly available reference bank of DNA sequences.

They managed to identify the snake species responsible for 194 bites, 87 of which were from species whose venom is harmful to people – most commonly the spectacled cobra and the common krait.

The new species, which biologists are calling the Atlantic Coast leopard frog, was hiding in plain sight. Besides its croak, the new species is nearly indistinguishable from several other frog species living in the area. As detailed today in PLoS ONE, the researchers were able to make the identification after comparing the DNA, appearance, and croaking noises of hundreds of frogs.

The authors, led by Jeremy Feinberg of Rutgers University, first announced their suspicions of the new species in 2012, when they reported that familiar-looking frogs with unfamiliar croaks were hopping around the wetlands near Yankee Stadium. Although the coloration of the Atlantic Coast leopard frog is very similar to that of other leopard frogs, its distinctive croak, which sounds like a simple, repeated “chuck,” sets it apart.

Crews were called to a terraced house in Bolton, Greater Manchester, just before 11am this morning when a fire began behind the fridge-freezer.

When firefighters arrived they found a woman outside with her two husky dogs, who told them her pet lizard was still inside as smoke poured from the kitchen.

They found the bearded dragon in its tank and took it out to the fire engine where medics treated it with oxygen therapy.

Below, take a look at every animal (except insects, which are extremely difficult to catalogue but which you can find here) that went extinct in just the last 100 years. The list is based on research provided by the Sixth Extinction, a website created to “enhance free public access to information about recently extinct species,” and in order of their approximate date of extinction. We’ve included all the animals confirmed extinct by the IUCN, and added a few more declared extinct by other credible individuals and organizations.

Ancient Egyptians didn't prepare only human bodies for the afterlife; cats, baboons, crocodiles, canines, and birds have all been found mummified. But there's something particularly delightful about this long and skinny coffin for snake.

This coffin is part of the Brooklyn Museum's collection and it's dated 664-30 BCE, sometime during the Late Period to the Ptolemaic Period.