Porcupine Facts When Emily in Canada asked for help identifying what species of porcupine she photographed here in NatGeo's Your Shot, we turned to Uldis Roze of Queens College at the City University of New York, who wrote the book on porcupines. If you didn't know there were different species of porcupines, never fear. In [...]
Is Pollution Not Allowing Polar Bears to Mate? A new study finds a link between chemicals and bone loss that could damage males' penises, potentially harming reproduction. In the Arctic, pollutants banned from the U.S. in 1979 but still floating around the environment seem to be affecting the strength of polar bear penile bones, possibly [...]
Did Punxsutawney Phil See Shadow on Groundhog Day? It’s déjà vu all over again. On February 2, a groundhog (Marmota monax, if you please) named Phil will poke his head out of his burrow in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and look around, as he has for the past 128 years. February 2 is Groundhog Day. If Phil [...]
Real Life Unicorn Found It looks like it just walked out of a fairy tale, but this deer with a single, unicorn-like antler is the real thing. Shot by a hunter in Celje, Slovenia (map), in August, the roe deer has an extremely rare type of antler deformity, likely caused by an injury early in [...]
How do Moose get so big just eating plants? Carnivores may be at the top of the food chain, but herbivores are often the bigger guns (or guts) on the ladder. What makes them so big? For Weird Animal Question of the Week, I took the author's prerogative to ask how plant-eaters grow so massive [...]
Polar Bear Numbers Down in Alaska A large population of polar bears in Alaska and Canada has decreased by 40 percent since the start of the new millennium, new research shows. The number of the large predators living in the southern Beaufort Sea (map) plummeted from 1,500 animals in 2001 to just 900 in 2010, [...]
Coyotes of Downtown Chicago An extreme breed of coyote is finding there's no finer place than downtown Chicago, where the predator has learned to lurk under the radar of city life, new data show. The versatile carnivore, native to middle America, has spread into nearly every corner of the U.S. in the past few decades, [...]
How Did Manatees Inspire Mermaid Legends? It's that time of year when manatees, the slow-moving aquatic mammals of the southeast coast of North America, start to migrate south into warmer waters—and often run into trouble. In Florida, many of the languid giants—also called sea cows—are killed each year in boating collisions. That's why November is [...]
Circus Lions Rescued in Peru By early next year Jan Creamer, co-founder and president of Animal Defenders International (ADI), intends to see 30 lions rescued from circuses in Peru and Colombia running free in a permanent new home in Colorado. London-based ADI, which is dedicated to stopping animal abuse and saving animals in distress, now [...]
Should Grizzly Bears Be Restored to the North Cascades? NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK—The grizzly bear looms large in the traditions of Pacific Northwest Indians, a creature both revered and almost human. It was a fixture of the natural world: a powerful predator and a source of food and stories. Today the grizzlies of the Northwest [...]