Zimbabwe hunter who helped kill Cecil the lion, in court on fresh charges

Theo Bronkhorst has been re-arrested and stands accused of ‘conspiracy to smuggle’ and ‘unlawful movement of animals’

AFP in Beitbridge

Tuesday 22 September 2015 19.55 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 22 September 201521.22 BST

The professional hunter who helped an American dentist kill Zimbabwe’s popular lion Cecil has appeared in court on new charges of planning to smuggle sable antelope out of the country.

Theo Bronkhorst, 52, was initially arrested on Monday last week in Zimbabwe’s second largest city of Bulawayo, after he was linked to a plot to smuggle 29 sable into neighbouring South Africa.

Prosecutors withdrew the charges when he appeared in court on Wednesday, his lawyer Perpetua Dube told AFP.

He was re-arrested on Monday on new charges of “conspiracy to smuggle” in breach of customs laws and “unlawful movement of animals”.

A court in Beitbridge ruled that he be remanded in custody until a decision on his bail application is made on Wednesday.

Three South Africans are facing charges of trying to smuggle the 29 sable – a rare and expensive breed of antelope – out of Zimbabwe into South Africa.

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Back into the wild: Is it time for wolf packs to roam the Highlands again?

Conservationists are calling to 'rewild' parts of Britain by restoring species

JAMIE MERRILL

Thursday 17 September 2015

To the untrained eye the rugged mountains and ancient woodlands of the Coigach and Assynt wilderness in the far northwest of Scotland look like the perfect place to reintroduce extinct predators like the lynx and wolf.

The possible reintroduction of the once native predators to Scotland has again caused controversy after warnings this week that lynx would endanger the future of sheep farming.

This comes at a tense point for many in the conservation movement amid calls for the "rewilding" of parts of Britain, with conservationists calling for the species, hunted to extinction hundreds of years ago, to be returned to the Highlands.

Read on ...

In north-west Pakistan, big cats are more feared than global terrorists

Osama bin Laden hid out here for months, if not years. But in the hills surrounding Abbottabad in north-western Pakistan, residents say they face a far scarier menace than terrorists.

With descriptive stories that bring to mind mythological tales of man against beast, Abbottabad residents claim to be locked in a terrifying battle against Pakistan’s endangered population of leopards. The big cats – referred to as common leopards to distinguish them from their smaller cousins, snow leopards – lurk in the Himalayan foothills.

At dusk, common leopards slink from the mountains into the villages that have been steadily encroaching deeper into Pakistan’s forests. Then, residents say, they pounce – killing at least four people and injuring several others over the past four years.

“The leopard just sucked the blood out of her, and then she was dead,” said Zakir Abbasi, 36, recounting a leopard attack in January that killed his seven-year-old niece, Saba Noor.

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Chimpanzees get excited by TV shows featuring humans dressed up as apes

By admin - 

Sep 21, 2015 

Fumihiro Kano of Kyoto University, Japan, said in a press release: “We were giving juice while showing the videos to them, but some of them even forgot to drink juice and stared at the movies!”

Kano created two short films. The first film feature an aggressive person in an ape suit, who comes out from one of two identical doors. In the second film, a human actor grabs one of two objects and attacks the ape-like character with it.

An eye tracker showed that the mammals anticipated the events in the movie, even after watching it only once.

They directed their view towards the door on the second viewing of the film, where they knew the human in an ape suit would appear.

When they re-watched the second film, they looked towards the object that would be used as a weapon, even if it was placed in a different place.

This means that they stored knowledge of the films into their long-term memory, much like humans do, and can use that information to anticipate events.

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World's Oldest Sea Turtle Fossil Discovered

by Lindsay Dodgson, Live Science Contributor | September 18, 2015 12:31pm ET

The world's oldest sea turtle fossil shows the ancient animal swam the oceans at least 120 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, according to a recent analysis.

The now-extinct Desmatochelys padillai turtle skeleton was found in Villa de Leyva, Colombia, and is 25 million years older than the Santanachelys gaffneyi turtle from Brazil that previously held the record for the world's oldest sea turtle fossil.

The D. padillai specimen was dug up by hobby paleontologist Mary Luz Parra and her two brothers in 2007. However, it wasn't until Edwin Cadena, a researcher at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Germany, and James Parham, an assistant professor of geological sciences at California State University, Fullerton, inspected it that the fossil was determined to be the oldest sea turtle specimen in the world, dating back to the Cretaceous period, between 145.5 million and 65.5 million years ago. 

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