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"When you have radical ideas like this, people think you're a crackpot," says Paul Lister. The Scottish landowner is a man on a mission. He plans to wind back the clock at his estate in the Highlands by repopulating the land with a raft of animals that have not been seen in Britain for hundreds of years - including brown bears, lynx and wolves. "What I'm aiming is to create a wilderness and wildlife reserve similar to those that exist in Southern Africa; something that is controlled, managed and fenced," he told BBC News. "It is nothing like Britain or...

UPPER TOWNSHIP — The Township Committee is trying to determine whether mountain-lion sightings in the area are fact or phantom. Mayor Richard Palombo this week publicly urged residents who have seen a large cat — maybe a mountain lion or a big bobcat — to notify the township's animal-control officer. “At this point, we're making everyone alert about it. The animal-control officer is looking at it if anyone sees an animal,” the mayor said. Liam Hughes, who handles animal control in parts of Atlantic and Cape May counties, said there are no confirmed lion sightings. Nor could anyone find scat...

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday. Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out. Several well-preserved mammoth carcasses have been found in the permafrost of Siberia, and scientists estimate that there could be millions more. Last year a Canadian team demonstrated that it was possible to...

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday. Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out...

Intermittent expeditions on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, from 1994 through 2004, resulted in the compilation of eyewitness testimonies that substantiated a hypothesis that pterosaurs may not be extinct. Long Beach, Calif. (PRWEB) July 20, 2006 -- The conflict between evolution and creation took a new form with an investigation of reports of a pterosaur-like creature in Papua New Guinea. According to standard models of science, all pterosaurs became extinct by about 65-million years ago, but traditional interpretations of the Bible suggest that they lived in human times. According to Jonathan Whitcomb, a forensic videographer who interviewed native islanders in...

Decoding extinct genomes now possible, says geneticist A McMaster University geneticist, in collaboration with genome researchers from Penn State University and the American Museum of Natural History has made history by mapping a portion of the woolly mammoth's genome. The discovery, which has astounded the scientific world, surpasses an earlier study released today by Nature that also concerns the woolly mammoth. Hendrik Poinar, a molecular evolutionary geneticist in the department of anthropology and pathology at McMaster University, says his study involves the vital nuclear DNA within a Mammoth rather than the lesser mitochondria, on which the Nature study is based....

(snip) Most scholars now agree that hunters—more than climate change or a mystery epidemic—are what doomed the mammoths. Whatever the cause, by 11,000 years ago the king of the Pleistocene was a goner. (snip) If a group of devotees has its way, this shaggy ice-age mascot—and a host of other bygone megafauna besides—may yet walk again. (snip) The scientists, in other words, had managed to assemble half the woolly-mammoth genome; they claimed that in three years they could finish the job. That would put scientists within striking distance of an even greater feat: repopulating the earth with creatures that vanished...

DENVER (AP) - Lions stalking deer in the stubble of a Nebraska corn field. Elephants trumpeting across Colorado's high plains. Cheetah slouching through the West Texas scrub. Prominent ecologists are floating an audacious plan that sounds like a Jumanji sequel - transplant African wildlife to the Great Plains of North America. Their radical proposal is being greeted with gasps and groans from other scientists and conservationists who recall previous efforts to relocate foreign species halfway around the world, often with disastrous results. The authors contend it could help save Africa's poster species from extinction, where protection is spotty and habitat...