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In 1973, a teacher named Joan Hodgins took her students on a hike near Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon Territory. In the process, she made history for this chilly region. While exploring the tailings left behind by a now-defunct copper mine, Hodgins and her students stumbled across a few fragments of fossils -- bits and pieces of what seemed to be teeth alongside pieces of bone. The ancient fragments of teeth were so small and in such bad shape that "most paleontologists may not have picked them up," said Jaelyn Eberle, a curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado...

Chauvet-Pont D'Arc cave, in southern France, is one of the world's oldest and most impressive cave-art sites. Discovered in 1994 and popularized in the Werner Herzog documentary 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', Chauvet contains hundreds of paintings that were made as early as 37,000 years ago. Fearsome animals such as woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions and bears dominate Chauvet's imagery. But one of its innermost galleries -- named after a giant deer species, Megaloceros, that is depicted there -- also contains a series of mysterious spray-shaped drawings, partly covered by the Megaloceros painting. A nearby gallery holds similar spray imagery, as does...

About 709,000 years ago, someone butchered a rhinoceros using stone tools on the Philippine island of Luzon. That may not seem remarkable -- except that humans weren't supposed to be in the Philippines so long ago. Before this discovery, the earliest indicator that early humans, or hominins, were even on those islands had been a single foot bone from 67,000 years ago, uncovered in the Callao Cave on Luzon. That's quite a time jump. Research says that the new findings push back the date for humans inhabiting the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years. A study published Wednesday in...

A site in southwestern France found to be rich in the bones of horses and other large herbivores has provided important insights into the hunting and scavenging habits of Neanderthals. A team of archaeologists from the French archaeological agency Inrap have unearthed hundreds of bones at the Middle Paleolithic site in Quincieux dating back 35,000 to 55,000 years. The work was started due to roadworks in the area, with the outstanding discovery prompting local authorities to extend the time available for excavations. The excavation of the prehistoric site, on a hill overlooking the old bed of the Saone River, revealed...

The illegal cutting of timber and the poaching of elephants and rhinos are part of a “rapidly escalating environmental crime wave” that international governments must combat by increasing cooperation, police and environmental officials said Wednesday. Interpol and the United Nations Environmental Program are working together to stop environmental crimes that cost tens of billions of dollars a year, said Achim Steiner, the U.N. Environmental Program's Executive Director. … The demand for elephant ivory by China’s rising middle class is fueling the deaths of thousands of elephants across Africa, say wildlife experts. An estimated 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in Africa...

The preserved body of a woolly rhinoceros has revealed new insights into how this now extinct giant animal once lived. The woolly rhino was once one of the most abundant large mammals living in Eurasia, but only a handful of preserved carcasses have been found. Now an analysis of a female woolly rhino found preserved in Siberia reveals that the animal was a herbivore that grazed mainly on cereals, and was similar in size to today's Javan rhino. However, it was slow to reproduce, had a short stubby tail and ears, and was likely driven to extinction in part due...

Among those arrested were a father and son from Orange County, as well as the father's girlfriend, on charges related to trafficking in a commodity that largely has been banned by international trade laws since 1976.

The first baby rhinoceros born in Uganda in almost 30 years has been named Obama because his father is from Kenya and his mother was born in the US.

Holy Cow! Did any of you South Caroliniana or interested conservatives just see Lindsey Graham on CNNN? He was practically praising Obama for wanting to close Guantanama, with words like "the good thing about this president", and also said south carolina should accept the stimulus funds, which most s. carolinians are against. This Rhino must go!!!!!!!!!!!!

A woolly rhinoceros was just 12 years old when it died in a pool of meltwater flowing off an inland glacier in Germany. That was 460,000 years ago. Now, scientists have pieced together the skull of this extinct mega-mammal and found it to be the oldest woolly rhinoceros in Europe. The skull was discovered more than a century ago in a gravel pit at the foot of the Kyffhäuser range, near Bad Frankenhausen (a town in Germany), but it was broken into more than 50 fragments. "This is the oldest woolly rhinoceros found in Europe, and it gives us a...

A new study of Sumatran rhinos on Borneo puts the numbers of one group in the central region of the island as low as 13, a precariously small number. The population has declined due in part to poaching. "If this band of rhinos is to have a healthy future in Borneo, the poaching must be stopped immediately," said Sybille Klenzendorf, lead biologist of the World Wildlife Fund's Species Conservation Program. "Their numbers are so small that losing one or two rhinos to a poacher could upset the remaining rhinos' chances of survival." The survey was conducted in 2005 and released...