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In a rare and hilarious sighting, a giant snapping turtle was caught on video in the Chicago River. This video is going viral and for good reason! This isn't your average snapping turtle. This big boy has been dubbed "Chonkosaurus," and the guy who caught it on camera just made my day. Joey Santore was kayaking with his friend last weekend when they spotted the turtle sunbathing on some rusty chains and rotting logs – in pure bliss and relaxation. Santore was stunned, so he started filming, and his commentary was just perfect. Look at this guy. We got a...

One Perry resident tells KCCI she was one of two people bitten by a rabbit last Friday. Ramona Rustan said the rabbit jumped up and bit her and then hopped over to the neighbors' house. "It came around to her car and wouldn't let her out of her car," Rustan said. She called police. "The police department says it's been a rabbit that has been around terrorizing people," Rustan said. The Perry police gave KCCI a call report that details a 13-year-old girl who was also bitten by the rabbit. The 13-year-old will be getting a rabies shot. Rustan, who...

URBANA, Ill. (WTVO) — A missing emu in Central Illinois is still on the run. Illinois State Police tried to catch the animal on I-74 in Urbana on Tues day, but it got away. Experts said that it is going to be hard to catch the emu if they do not have the right resources. The bird can run as fast as 30 miles per hour, and it is in wide open space right now. The emu is believed to have been on the lam since September. Experts said that it is not surprising it has survived this long, but...

“Beer, whiskey, concerts… and monsters!” That’s what visitors can find at Thompson’s Point in Portland. Many are likely familiar with the concert venue and the drinks. That last part — maybe not so much. Tucked between Stroudwater Distilling and Bissell Brothers at 4 Thompson’s Point Road is the International Cryptozoology Museum. Cryptozoology, the study of unknown or undiscovered animals, has just one museum dedicated to the genre in the world, and it’s right here in Portland — for the time being. The International Cryptozoology Museum, a Portland institution founded by Loren Coleman, will be on the move when the lease...

By Cole Waterman | Cole_Waterman@mlive.com JEROME TWP, MI — Despite a woman’s 911 call, police have confirmed there is not in fact a mythological creature roaming Midland County. About 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 1, a 40-year-old woman called 911 to say a Chupacabra and a capybara were inside and outside her apartment in the 1900 block of West Saginaw Road in Jerome Township, said Sheriff Myron Greene. “She’s reporting an animal out back. She believes possibly it could be a Chupacabra,” says a dispatcher in a Midland County Central Dispatch recording of the call. “What’s the animal?” an officer...

A rare pink elephant was spotted with its mother at MalaMala Game Reserve in South Africa. Photo courtesy of LatestSightings.com A pink elephant goes for an afternoon swim with its mother and herd, and despite its unique color, the herd passionately cares for it. Jaco Joubert, a guide at Mala Mala Game Reserve in South Africa, captured the cute scene and shared it with LatestSightings.com. "It was late afternoon when we headed down to the river to see what we could find. Expecting to find regulars at the water's edge, cooling down from the day's heat, we were pleasantly surprised...

Wild parrots tend to fly in flocks, but when kept as single pets, they may become lonely and boredWhen humans are feeling lonely, we can call or video chat with friends and family who live far away. But, scientists asked, what about pet parrots? New research suggests that these chatty creatures may also benefit from virtually connecting with their peers. Domesticated parrots that learned to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences, such as learning new skills, researchers from Northeastern University, the University of Glasgow and MIT report this month in Proceedings of the...

A cat being cared for by the NoCo Kitties rescue in Colorado was found to be a male calico kitten, a feline so rare they are known as "unicorn" kittens. Photo courtesy of NoCo Kitties/Facebook April 25 (UPI) -- An animal rescue group said one of its volunteers is currently caring for a male calico kitten, a feline so rare they are often called "unicorn" kittens. NoCo Kitties in Loveland said the kitten and his siblings were born in a Weld County shed and were turned over to the Weld County Humane Society before coming to NoCo Kitties. Volunteer Alli...

In the film "10,000 BC," a band of hunters venture on an epic quest, overcoming prehistoric monsters to end up at a land of gods and pyramids. The fantastic creatures depicted in the movie — from the giant carnivorous birds to saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths — actually once existed. The most famous of the saber-toothed cats was Smilodon, a group of predators often dubbed saber-toothed tigers, although they were not actually close relatives of the modern tiger. Ironically, Smilodon was recently found to have had a relatively weak bite.

On the Ecological Connection Between Sabre-tooths and Hominids: Faunal Dispersal Events in the Lower Pleistocene and a Review of the Evidence for the First Human Arrival in Europe  Alfonso ArribasMuseo Geominero, Instituto Tecnológico Geominero de España. Ríos Rosas, 23. 28003 Madrid, Spain.Paul PalmqvistDepartamento de Geología y Ecología (Área de Paleontología), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Málaga. 29071 Málaga, Spain. A reconstruction of a community of the large mammals of the Grecian Pleistocene .African Species in the Lower Pleistocene of Europe …The sabre-tooth genus Megantereon shares much in common with Smilodon, and both genera form the tribe Smilodontini. The earliest...

Sabertooth cats and other super-toothy predators apparently possessed mighty arms that they used to help them kill. The beefy arms would have served to pin down prey and protect the ferocious-looking teeth of the feline predators, which were actually fragile enough to fracture, scientists find. The finding also may hold for other knife-fanged prehistoric carnivores; long before sabertooth cats evolved, a number of now-extinct toothy hunters once roamed the Earth. These included the nimravids, or false sabertooth cats, which lived from 7 million to 42 million years ago alongside a sister group to cats known as barbourofelids, which lived from...

archaeologists say could be the biggest fossil find in Pinellas County in nearly a century... The jaw and tooth weigh 65 pounds and are about a yard long. Sarti-Sweeney took the bones home and, after some online research with her older brother, determined the football-sized rock was actually the tooth of a long-extinct mammoth. Paleontology and archaeology experts have confirmed the find, and recent digging at the site has turned up teeth and bones from a second mammoth, giant sloths, camels, turtles with shells up to 6-feet-long, saber-toothed cats and giant armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Scientists believe the...

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen in north-central Germany is famous for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden weapons or artifacts uncovered there by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Hartmut Thieme between 1994 and 1998 at an open-cast lignite mine. Deposited in organic sediments at a former lakeshore, they were found in combination with the remains of about 16,000 animal bones, including 20 wild horses, whose bones featured numerous butchery marks, including one pelvis that still had a spear protruding from it. The finds are considered evidence that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits as early as...

...the First Evidence of the Prehistoric Predator Roaming the State at the End of the Ice Age Between 13,605 and 13,460 Years Ago.The sabertoothed cat (Smilodon) is one of the best-known genera of the machairodont, an extinct subfamily of carnivoran mammals of the family Felidae (true cats). They are popularly referred to as "sabertoothed tigers", although they are not closely related to tigers (Panthera).The genus was named in 1842 based on fossils from Brazil; the generic name means "scalpel" or "two-edged knife" combined with "tooth".Researchers discovered the remarkably well-preserved skull in Page County, southwest Iowa...The skull belonged to a subadult...

The ancient sabretooth is not directly related to modern day cats, according to a new DNA analysis. Large cats such as the sabretooth roamed North and South America toward the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. The puma, also known as a mountain lion or cougar, and the jaguar are the only remaining large cats in the Western Hemisphere. Paleontologists have closely studied the extinct American cats based on their bone structure, but the proposed relationships remain contentious. To refine the branches of the feline family tree, Ross Barnett of the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre...

Sabre-toothed tiger was just a pussycat By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 12:01am BST 02/10/2007 It may have had some of the most ferocious teeth ever seen on a mammal but scientists say that the much feared sabre-tooth tiger was actually a bit of a pussycat. Smilodon, the sabre-tooth tiger, roamed across North and South America until 10,000 years ago Powerfully built, with upper canines like knives, the sabre-tooth tiger was a fearsome predator of Ice-Age America's lost giants, such as bison and horses, perhaps even mammoths. But while Smilodon ("knife tooth") may have had an impressive set of...

A rat king, or “roi de rats” in French, is a collection of rats whose tails are intertwined and bound together. It typically occurs when young rats, sleeping together in close quarters, get their tails entangled, forming a knot. The tied tails are prone to being encrusted by dirt, or stuck together by substances such as sap, sebum, blood, food, faeces or urine. When the rats wake up and attempt to scurry away from each other, the knot then tightens, trapping them.

Bizarre blue blobs have washed up en masse on beaches across South California—but they aren't jellyfish or Portuguese Man O' War as one might expect. Photographs of the strange gathering were uploaded to social media by Point Reyes National Seashore, which stated that these creatures are actually Velella velella, also known as By-the-Wind Sailors. This was also backed up by Rita F. T. Pires, a research assistant at the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere. "The species usually forms large agglomerations when beached, as pictured, so it seems it could be the case," she told Newsweek. Velella velella are hydroid...

Spending time outside in nature has its perks, and wildlife encounters can certainly be one of them. Some visitors in the Rio Grande Valley State Park had a different kind of encounter, though, when their trail camera caught something on film that they couldn't identify. They sent the tape to the Texas Parks and Wildlife team, who then released it to the public in a popular Facebook post. As you can imagine, the mystery creature has everyone talking. Guesses are pouring in front left and right as to what animal it is, though some of our favorite guesses are more...

A small band of searchers rousts itself each morning from a secret camp deep in the woods of a forgotten northwest Florida swamp. They have endured freezing nights, foul drinking water, long stints without showers and an outhouse with only one wall, all in a search for a ghostly creature that may not even exist. They are on a quest to find and photograph an ivory-billed woodpecker to show the world the bird is not extinct. They have invited me along for a two-day glimpse into a mission that is as inspiring as it is mundane. In the past few...