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Zanzibar, Tanzania — Eight children and an adult died after eating sea turtle meat on Pemba Island in the Zanzibar archipelago, while 78 other people were hospitalized, authorities said Saturday. Sea turtle meat is considered a delicacy by Zanzibar's people even though it periodically results in deaths from chelonitoxism, a type of food poisoning. The adult who died late Friday was the mother of one of the children who succumbed earlier, said the Mkoani District medical officer, Dr. Haji Bakari. He said the turtle meat was consumed Tuesday.

The Jefferson County coroner has confirmed that a 34-year-old Colorado man died this month, days after being bitten by one of his two pet Gila monsters. "I think this case highlights that any venomous animals should be respected," said Dr. Nick Brandehoff, a medical toxicologist and expert in reptile bites with the Asclepius Snakebite Foundation, who was consulted on the Lakewood Gila monster case. Gila monsters are venomous reptiles found in the southwestern United States. While their bites can be painful, they are normally not fatal to humans. Experts say that the last report of a human dying from a...

Dr Valentina Rossi of University College Cork, Ireland, who led the research team which discovered that a 280-million-year-old lizard fossil is, in part, a forgery. (Image credit: Zixiao Yang) A 280-million-year-old fossil that has baffled researchers for decades has been shown to be, in part, a forgery following new examination of the remnants. The discovery has led the team led by Dr Valentina Rossi of University College Cork, Ireland (UCC) to urge caution in how the fossil is used in future research. Tridentinosaurus antiquus was discovered in the Italian alps in 1931 and was thought to be an important specimen...

Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have been sued by two former employees who allege that they faced sexual harassment and discrimination from their colleagues and did not receive all wages owed to them during their time working for the couple's family household.Both complaints — filed last month in San Francisco County Superior Court and first reported by Insider — name Zuckerberg, the 37-year-old CEO of Facebook, and Chan, a 36-year-old pediatrician and philanthropist, as defendants alongside several other corporate entities related to the family, according to court documents obtained by NBC News.One complaint was made on behalf of Mia...

Video taken by a guest shows an unidentified handler at Scales & Tails Utah, in suburban Salt Lake City, talking to some adults and children about the alligator Saturday when it bit her hand and dragged her into the water. Shane Richins, the company’s owner, said...this time the reptile “got a little extra spunky.” One of the guests, later identified as Donnie Wiseman, yelled “We’ve got trouble in here!” before jumping into the water and climbing on top of the reptile. Wiseman got the alligator pinned, and the handler calmly gave him and another man, Todd Christopher, instructions to help...

No, I don’t know where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got his medical degree and license either, yet there he sits atop the social media food dictating who can say and know what about the Chinese Wuhan virus pandemic and its treatments and possible cures. He now says he knows more than board certified medical doctors about the drug hydroxychloroquine, for example, and will deny you access ti what they say, calling their judgments and pronouncement based on their studies and actual experience treating patients as “harmful misinformation. Dr. Zuckerberg has spoken and he will not let us hear a second...

America has a food diversity problem. Chicken, pork, and beef account for many of the animal proteins found on our dinner table—the product of decades of agricultural industrialization—and this has left us with cheaper but more limited options at the butcher’s counter. Once a year we all sit down to eat turkey, but when was the last time you had snipe, mutton, or rabbit? Perhaps the mightiest protein to fall out of favor, though, is turtle. From the earliest colonial days, Americans were smitten with this four-legged reptile, and turtle soup—its most common preparation—was a restaurant norm into the 1970s...

A peculiar, 220-million-year-old species of burrowing reptiles that evaded scientists has been found, fossilized. A team of National Park Service interns are credited with its discovery. Hidden in a once-vibrant part of Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park, the burgeoning paleontologists unearthed fossils of the Skybalonyx skapter, an "anteater-like reptile" that probably predates dinosaurs, according to findings published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It's a new species of a reptile previously thought to only live in trees. The unusual Skybalonyx skapter belongs to the group Drepanosaur, often considered the ugly duckling of reptiles (perhaps partly because they bore...

One of the four albino anoles, alongside a non-modified example(Credit: University of Georgia) ============================================================ Although they're commonly known as brown anoles, there are now four Anolis sagrei lizards at a University of Georgia lab that are actually a pale pink color. They're albinos, and are the result of what is reportedly the world's first successful attempt at producing a genetically modified reptile. The research could have implications for human medicine. Lead scientist Douglas Menke chose brown anoles for the study because isolated populations of the lizards are known for independently evolving distinctive traits, on various islands in the Caribbean. Genetically...

Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House adviser to former President Barack Obama, writes in her new book that she still hasn’t accepted President Trump won the 2016 election. "Since the night Donald Trump became president of the United States, I’ve been going through the five stages of grief, sometimes all five in the same day,” Jarrett writes in Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward. "In the beginning, denial and anger were high on the list; I still haven't embraced acceptance,” she writes. Jarrett, a longtime adviser to Obama and his wife Michelle, said...

Three-fourths of Utah’s Democratic voters plan to vote for Jenny Willson in next month’s U.S. Senate election, according to a new Salt Lake Tribune-Hinckley Institute of Politics poll. But that’s where the good news for Wilson ends, as the poll shows her opponent Mitt Romney winning among men, women, all age groups, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, for an overall lead of 59 percent to Wilson’s 23 percent

Dinosaur Eggs Not Bird-Like After All by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Evidence for Creation › Evidence from Science › Evidence from the Life Sciences › Life Was Created Fully Functional › Variation Is Limited within Kinds Prevailing secular theory considers birds to be living dinosaurs, but new science is hatching to support the stark differences between these creatures. The data demonstrate dinosaurs were more likely cold-blooded like all modern reptiles. Dr. Gregory Erickson of Florida State University and his colleagues from the University of Calgary and the American Museum of Natural History recently published their findings on dinosaur incubation periods...

Roll Over Gene Simmons Are we the only ones to have noticed how often John Kerry pushes his tongue out of his mouth when he speaks? Not that there's anything wrong with that. We were watching a recording of Kerry's appearance on Letterman and actually found ourselves distracted by the constant flicking and probing of the senator's red yahzik. We eventually decided to take a few screenshots and post them up. Trying to take screenshots at first was like a game of whack-a-mole. But after a while there was a certain zen to it all -- we could feel...

Repeat after Jeb Bush: He is not angry. Not even a tiny bit. Florida’s Republican former governor is happy — joyful even. And campaigning throughout Orlando Monday the merriest of presidential candidates reminded supporters over and over again that he is nothing like some of his churlish counterparts in the GOP primary. “Here’s the deal: I don’t have anger in my heart,” he told about 200 people at a community center in Maitland Monday evening. “We shouldn’t be scolding people. We shouldn’t be saying outrageous things that turns people off to the conservative message.” “I’m not a grievance candidate,” he...

John Key: 'I'm not a reptile' He's been to a doctor and a vet just to make sure, but Prime Minister John Key is adamant he's not a shapeshifting reptilian alien. Mr Key was unusually forced to deny any previously non-declared extraterrestrial connections to reporters after an Auckland man put in an Official Information Act (OIA) request asking for proof he might be one. "To the best of my knowledge, no. Having been asked that question directly, I've taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both have confirmed I'm not a reptile," a...

A man in Zimbabwe got the surprise of his life when he discovered an eight-foot crocodile lying under his bed. Guy Whittall slept through the night at a Humani lodge, where he also works, without any idea what was lying beneath him. It was only after he got out of bed to eat breakfast and heard the screams of a housekeeper that he saw the crocodile.

It's the talk of at least one part of Columbia and it all started Tuesday with a phone call from a concerned neighbor. Heathwood resident Andrew Philson got a call about a snake in his backyard and thought he'd be finding a small garter or black snake, but got the shock of his life when he saw the beast slithering up one of his trees. That snake has slithered his way into the national spotlight. First, WIS, then CNN, Fox, even the Drudge Report. Why? Well, it's a big snake and who knows how long it had been sneaking --...

Herpetologists from the California Academy of Sciences and University of Texas at El Paso discovered a single specimen of the Bururi long-fingered frog (Cardioglossa cyaneospila) during a research expedition to Burundi in December 2011. The frog was last seen by scientists in 1949 and was feared to be extinct after decades of turmoil in the tiny East African nation. For biologists studying the evolution and distribution of life in Africa, Burundi sits at an intriguing geographic crossroads since it borders the vast Congo River Basin, the Great Rift Valley, and the world's second largest freshwater lake, Lake Tanganyika. Many of...

John King, CNN: "You make your case there passionately for President Obama. But also understand that this is a tough reelection climate for any president, Democrat or Republican in this economy. Because of your history with Speaker Gingrich, what goes through your mind when you think of the possibility, which is more real today than it was a week or a month ago, that he would be the Republican nominee and that you could come back here next January or next February with a President Gingrich?" Rep. Nancy Pelosi: "Let me just say this. That will never happen." King: "Why?"...

A snake with two heads, each able to think and eat separately and even steal food from each other, has become a popular attraction at a Ukrainian zoo. The small albino California Kingsnake, now on show in the Black Sea resort of Yalta is quite a handful, zoo workers told AFP. The snake's two heads are fiercely independent, are not always in agreement and like to snatch food from each other, said keepers of the private zoo, called Skazka, or Fairy Tale. "Sometimes one head wants to crawl in one direction and the other head in another direction," zoo director...