This may be the biggest turtle that ever lived

By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor 5 days ago

This jaw-droppingly huge specimen is the largest known complete turtle shell on Earth.

An 8-million-year-old turtle shell unearthed in Venezuela measures nearly 8 feet (2.4 meters) long, making it the largest complete turtle shell known to science, a new study reported. 

This shell belonged to an extinct beast called Stupendemys geographicus, which lived in northern South America during the Miocene epoch, which lasted from 12 million to 5 million years ago. 

S. geographicus weighed an estimated 2,500 lbs. (1,145 kilograms), almost 100 times the size of its closest living relative, the Amazon river turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus), and twice the size of the largest living turtle, the marine leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), the researchers wrote in the study.

Its impressive shell makes this ancient creature "one of the largest, if not the largest turtle that ever existed," study senior researcher Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra, the director of the Paleontological Institute and Museum at the University of Zurich, said in a statement. 

The species likely achieved its colossal size thanks to the warm wetlands and lakes in its habitat, Sánchez noted.

Continued

Venezuela crisis: population eats lizards, pigeons and anteaters to survive – via Herp Digest

In the midst of a severe economic crisis, desperate people flee from the drama of hunger by eating any animal.

U.S. Blastingnews.com, 2/22/17 by Raquel Oliver

"The diet of Maduro makes you hard". The comic phrase in Spanish spoken by the President of the Republic in September last year, when he mocked the thinness of a Venezuela, does not awaken today a humorous tone for the rest of the population of the country. 

In the midst of a severe economic crisis, with inflation in the three digits, famine has been severely scourging the Venezuelans. According to Encovi, an institution that verifies living conditions in the country, on average, Venezuelans lost 8.7 kg of their weight, uncontrolled only in the last year.

To escape the drama of hunger, the population has been feeding on any kind of animal: dogs, cats, lizards, donkeys, anteaters and even flamingos, which are protected by law in order to survive. 

Not infrequently, one finds carcases of these animals in the garbage of the city. "Sometimes we only find heads, guts and legs of the animal. We are used to seeing a bit of this in the past, but now this practice is out of control and on the rise, "Robert Linares, a waste disposal worker, told the Miami Herald. 

The lack of food has gained the name of 'Mature Diet'. In the words of Doris Rubio, CEO of the Association for the Protection of Animals, there is a synthesis on the suffering of the population subjugated to the notorious diet: "We find these deaths grotesque, but how can we be critical of someone who hunts a pigeon, a dog, a cat or any other animal because he or she is hungry People used to hunt lizards for sport.Now they do it out of necessity.  

The collapse of the country's economy has made it difficult to import basic goods such as food and medicines, creating scarcity across the country. Faced with a lack of resources, the population has been looting supermarkets in desperate search for food. 

Besides the opprobrium experienced by the population, there are still risks of consuming wild animals unfit for human consumption, where the ingestion of bacteria from these animals are human health hazards.

Rare Amazonian butterfly named after British national treasure Sir David Attenborough

Date:December 1, 2015

Source:Pensoft Publishers

A beautiful new Black-eyed Satyr species has become the first butterfly named in honour of the popular naturalist and TV presenter Sir David Attenborough. Although not the first animal to be named after the British national treasure, the butterfly is so rare that it is known only from lowland tropical forests of the upper Amazon basin in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. The study, conducted by an international team of researchers, led by Andrew F. E. Neild, Natural History Museum, London, and Shinichi Nakahara, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and Entomology & Nematology Department, University of Florida, is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The presently described Attenborough's Black-eyed Satyr, scientifically called Euptychia attenboroughi, has such a restricted distribution that all of its known sites lie within 500 kilometres from each other in the north-west of the upper Amazon basin.

Best known for scripting and presenting the BBC Natural History's 'Life' series, Sir David Attenborough is also a multiple winner of the BAFTA award and a president of Butterfly Conservation.

Continued ...

Newfound South American Predator Snacked on Little Dinosaurs

by Charles Q. Choi | October 07, 2014 07:22pm ET

A puma-sized predatory dinosaur that may have snacked on its smaller cousins while stomping about an ancient rift valley dotted with erupting volcanoes has been discovered in Venezuela. The finding could shed light on the evolution of all carnivorous dinosaurs, researchers say.

The newfound fossil, from a dinosaur named Tachiraptor admirabilis, was unearthed from the northernmost branch of the Andes Mountains at the western border of Venezuela. The only bones from the dinosaur found so far are its shinbone and part of its hip bone, but these are enough to reveal that the beast was relatively small compared with its later, giant relatives, measuring about 4.9 to 6.5 feet (1.5 to 2 meters) long.

This two-legged species is the first predatory dinosaur unearthed in Venezuela. Its name derives from three sources: Táchira, the Venezuelan state where the fossil was discovered; raptor, Latin for thief, referring to the dinosaur's probable predatory habits; and "admirabilis," for Simón Bolívar's Admirable Campaign, which freed Venezuela from Spanish control, and in which La Grita, the town close to where the bones were found, played a strategic role. The fossils were discovered in early 2013, "near where a road was cut out of La Grita," said lead study author Max Langer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Continued ...

New study could change the traditional view of how species come about

A team of researchers from the City University of New York working on the Península de Paraguaná in Venezuela have made a discovery that could revolutionise our understanding of how the origin of a new species takes place.

Up to now it has been accepted that the primary drivers in a species becoming isolated, and consequently developing sufficiently separate characteristics to become genetically distinct, are physical in nature – the uplift of mountains, the formation of islands, the change in the course of a river, creating barriers.

The findings of the study of two species of mouse opossums, Marmosa xerophila and Marmosa robinsoni, have now added interactions among species as another way that populations can become geographically isolated, which could promote the formation of new species.

read on ...

Experts discover first Venezuelan dinosaur - via The Anomalist

11th August 2014 

An international team of experts, including scientists from the Natural History Museum and the University of Zurich, have discovered the first new dinosaur species in Venezuela. It's also the first found in the northern part of South America. La Quintasaura - as it's named - was around the size of a small dog, and had a diet of green ferns and the occasional insect.

They're hundreds of millions of years old, yet new species are still being discovered each year.

Continued

Venezuela Bans Shark Finning, Establishes Shark Sanctuary

Some much-needed good news for sharks has come from Venezuela this week: The South American country announced it is banning shark finning in its waters and has established a new shark sanctuary.

The country became the last in the Americas to outlaw the practice of cutting off the fins of live sharks and tossing the animals back into the ocean to slowly die.  

The country also has created a sanctuary where several important shark species breed, outlawing commercial shark fishing there. The sanctuary consists of 1,440 square miles (3,730 square kilometers) of the Caribbean Sea surrounding the Los Roques Archipelago, a popular tourist destination with pristine beaches and coral reefs, according to a statement from the Pew Environment group.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/21118-venezuela-bans-shark-finning.html