PhysOrg

While reports of species going extinct are sadly becoming common, an international team of scientists has identified a new species of bird living on the Southern coast of China, that diverged from their Northern relatives around half a million years ago. View the full article

The generation of species-specific singing in songbirds is associated with species-specific patterns of gene activity in brain regions called song nuclei, according to a study published November 12 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Kazuhiro Wada of Hokkaido University in Japan, and colleagues. According to the authors, the findings could be a promising step toward a better understanding of the contribution of multiple genes to the evolution of behaviors. View the full article

The concept of a canary in a coal mine – a sensitive species that provides an alert to danger—originated with British miners, who carried actual canaries underground through the mid-1980s to detect the presence of deadly carbon monoxide gas. Today another bird, the emperor penguin, is providing a similar warning about the planetary effects of burning fossil fuels. View the full article

Millions of scavenging seabirds survive on fish discarded by North Sea fishing vessels, new research shows. View the full article

Around the world, animals and plants are disappearing at alarming rates. In May 2019, a major U.N. report warned that around one million species were at risk of extinction—more than at any other time in human history. View the full article

Across an entire desert or ocean, migratory birds make some of the most extreme journeys found in nature, but there are still huge gaps in our understanding of how they manage to travel these vast distances and what a changing climate means for their migration patterns. View the full article

Flying into the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Midway Atoll appears out of the vast blue Pacific as a tiny oasis of coral-fringed land with pristine white sand beaches that are teeming with life. View the full article

Beyond downed power lines and damaged buildings, major storms such as hurricanes uproot the lives of fish and wildlife as well, according to research conducted at the University of Georgia. View the full article

The grasslands of the Canadian Prairies are a hidden gem for bird watchers, with millions of migratory birds passing through the area each year. But they are also one of the most transformed landscapes in the world, vanishing more quickly than the Amazon rainforest, as they are swallowed up for other uses, such as agriculture and industry. View the full article

A new study has shown that Britain's puffins may struggle to adapt to changes in their North Sea feeding grounds and researchers are calling for better use of marine protection areas (MPAs) to help protect the country's best known seabirds. Britain's coasts support globally important populations of many species of seabird, but they face many challenges as their established habitats change. View the full article

Gannets, the largest seabirds in the North Atlantic, can travel hundreds of miles from their homes just to catch food for their chicks. However, with around a million square miles of ocean to choose from, it has always been a mystery how they decide where is best to search for fish. View the full article

Research on zoo animals focuses more on "familiar" species like gorillas and chimpanzees than less well known ones like the waxy monkey frog, scientists say. View the full article

Swinburne and Museums Victoria have announced the discovery of several theropod bones, including a 20 centimeter long hand claw, from the Otway Coast of Victoria. View the full article

People from New England to Texas are building fake chimneys as nesting spots and migration motels for chimney swifts, little birds that are dwindling in number as the nation's architectural landscape changes. View the full article

Abundant dinosaur footprints in Alaska reveal that high-latitude hadrosaurs preferred tidally influenced habitats, according to a study released October 30, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Anthony Fiorillo of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Texas and colleagues. View the full article