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Orangutan launches possum out of enclosure at zoo — as horrified visitors scream

"The View" co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin declared the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center was a "huge win" for Donald Trump and said it "kills" the Mar-a-Lago case. "Absolutely no one's going to like this take, but I'm going to go there anyway," Farah Griffin, a former Trump administration aide, began. "I want to be clear the facts are different then the Trump case, however I think this is a huge win for Trump. Because if you're Merrick Garland, who is already extremely cautious and doesn't want to break the longstanding precedent of not indicting a president,...

Gemma Copeland is a keen traveler and she didn’t want to end her journeys just because she had a child. She also wanted her son to explore the world from an early age. So, Gemma and her partner took him to Vienna, Austria. However, the mother didn’t expect this trip would change her own perception of the world. But it did. All thanks to an empathetic great ape who took the time to engage with Gemma and her child during a very intimate moment. While the guys were visiting the Schönbrunn Zoo, Gemma’s boy got hungry. She sat down by...

Researchers from James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, chose the bat poo in their quest to answer to a long-standing question: why is there some much biodiversity on the islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java, when not so long ago (geologically speaking) they were all part of one vast continent? One theory has been that the former continent (Sundaland) was dissected by a savanna corridor. "That might explain why Sumatra and Borneo each have their own species of orang-utan, even though they were linked by land for millions of years," Dr Chris Wurster said. "The corridor would have divided the...

A MAN I KNOW, NED MARKOSIAN, teaches a doctrine called presentism. In presentism the past and the future don't exist. Aristotle is dead; therefore, there was no Aristotle. We meet to talk about this over coffee, maybe the ultimate nonpresentist drink. He has applied for and gotten tenure, and writes and publishes, hurling himself into that unreality, the future. I have been thinking about presentism lately, and consciousness, and language. Linguist Derek Bickerton wrote, "Only language could have broken through the prison of immediate experience in which every other creature is locked, releasing us into infinite freedoms of space...

Tree-dwelling apes in Europe strode upright around 5 million years before members of the human evolutionary family hit the ground walking in Africa. That’s the implication of fossils from a previously unknown ape that lived in what’s now Germany about 11.6 million years ago, say paleontologist Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen in Germany and her colleagues. But the relation, if any, of these finds to the evolution of a two-legged stride in hominids by perhaps 6 million years ago is hazy (SN: 9/11/04). Excavations in a section of a Bavarian clay pit produced 37 fossils from the ancient...

One Russian man was arrested at a Bali airport for attempting to smuggle a drugged baby orangutan in his luggage out of the air hub and back to his home country. The tourist now faces up to $7,000 in fines and five years in prison. On Friday night, Andrei Zhestkov was detained at Ngurah Rai International Airport before boarding a flight back to Russia, The Independent reports. Officials found the 2-year-old orangutan fast asleep in a basket, evidently drugged with allergy pills, after a routine security screening. Zhestkov, 27, reportedly told officials that he had been given the protected primate...

Orangutans are among the most intelligent primates. They have human-like long-term memory, routinely use a variety of sophisticated tools in the wild and construct elaborate sleeping nests each night from foliage and branches. ..." “The hook-bending task has become a benchmark paradigm to test tool innovation abilities in comparative psychology,” said co-author Dr. Alice Auersperg, a scientist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.“Considering the speed of their hook innovation, it seems that orangutans actively invented a solution to this problem rather than applying routined behaviors.”“In the study, we confronted Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) with a vertical tube containing...

Orangutans are dressed up and made to box each other to entertain visitors at a Thai zoo leading to animal rights activists demanding it is shut down A zoo in Thailand is profiting from 'orangutan boxing' where apes appear to fight for the amusement of locals and tourists. The supposed good-natured show - which takes place at Safari World in Bangkok - has been criticised by animal rights activists who say it should be shut down. One tourist who saw the display condemned the zoo for exploiting the incredibly intelligent primates.

BORENO — An animal charity that rescues orangutans in Borneo has released heartbreaking footage of a baby orangutan that was dumped in a filthy cardboard box and left out in a backyard in the sun to die.The baby, who has been named Gito by the team from International Animal Rescue (IAR) who saved him, was so lifeless when they reached him that at first they thought he was dead. He was lying corpse-like with his arms folded across his chest and this, along with a lack of hair and grey flaking skin, made him look almost mummified in his cardboard...

Results from research conducted by a team of scholars and scientists on the dietary lives of orangutans in tropical Borneo have given possible clues to how very early human ancestors may have adapted, survived and changed millions of years ago. In addition, the results may help scientists better understand eating disorders and obesity in human populations today. Led by evolutionary anthropologist Erin Vogel of Rutgers University (pictured below, right), the research team analyzed samples of compounds and byproducts in Orangutan urine over a 5-year period to determine the effects of protein recycling in their dietary, or eating behavior. What they...

New evidence underscores the theory of human origin that suggests humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science. Reporting in the June 18 edition of the Journal of Biogeography, the researchers reject as "problematic" the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence.

Evidence for the orangutan being the closest living relative of modern humans is based on at least 35 known characters that appear to be either exclusive to humans and orangutans or largely absent in outgroups.

...for use in genetics-based population divergence studies. Abstract: The length of the human generation interval is a key parameter when using genetics to date population divergence events. However, no consensus exists regarding the generation interval length, and a wide variety of interval lengths have been used in recent studies. This makes comparison between studies difficult, and questions the accuracy of divergence date estimations. Recent genealogy-based research suggests that the male generation interval is substantially longer than the female interval, and that both are greater than the values commonly used in genetics studies. This study evaluates each of these hypotheses in...

The scientific community is atwitter about recent reports documenting the sharp rise in retractions of articles published in scientific journals. To wit, The New York Times published a chart this week showing that such retractions have increased from a mere three instances in 2000 to a whopping 180 in 2009. The chart indicated that 235 of the articles retracted over that ten-year span were attributable to “scientific mistake.” Another 196 were attributable to “fraud or fabrication.” And the remaining 311 to “other.” That brings to mind what arguably is history’s most glaring example of scientific mistake, fraud and fabrication all...

Conservationists have discovered a new population of orangutans in a remote, mountainous corner of Indonesia - perhaps as many as 2,000 - giving a rare boost to one of the world's most critically endangered great apes. A team surveying forests nestled between jagged, limestone cliffs on the eastern edge of Borneo island counted 219 orangutan nests, indicating a "substantial" number of the animals, said Erik Meijaard, a senior ecologist at the US-based The Nature Conservancy. "We can't say for sure how many," he said, but even the most cautious estimate would indicate "several hundred at least, maybe 1,000 or 2,000...

Orangutans Facing Extinction Logging has been increasing in recent years, moving away from the river edges into the interior of the forests where the orangutans live, Cheryl Knott said in a telephone interview. Knott studies orangutans in Indonesia's Gunung Palung National Park, home to about 2,500 of the animals, about one-tenth of those in the world. Orangutans live only in Indonesia and Malaysia, said Knott, whose work is sponsored by the National Geographic (news - web sites) Society. While the government of Indonesia has a commitment to protect orangutans, sending in national police periodically, the loggers return when the police...