poaching Archives - Science HeathenScience Heathen

Brink Of Extinction — Giant Leatherback Sea Turtle, Siberian Tiger, Mountain Gorilla, North Pacific Right Whale, & Philippine Eagle

With human expansion continuing at its relentless pace — and deforestation, soil erosion, species extinctions, and climatic changes, accompanying it — there are a significant number of animals nearing the brink of extinction.

While listing all of them here would be impossible — there are far, far too many — I still think that it’s worth going over some of the more prominant of the many critically endangered animals in the world today.

And, to that end, the article below will highlight 5 of those critically endangered animals — the Giant Leatherback Sea Turtle, the Siberian Tiger, the Mountain Gorilla, the North Pacific Right Whale, and the Philippine Eagle.
Read the rest of this entry →

Bili Apes — Giant Lion-Eating Chimp (Chimpanzee) Subspecies

January 11, 2015 in Animals & Insects, Humans

Off in one of the few remaining relatively primeval natural environments of the world — the Bili Forest of the far-northern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — lives a band of very large chimpanzees that possess a number of very strange qualities and behaviors.

The local folk-stories of the surrounding region make note of massive ape-like creatures that kill and hunt lions, catch fish, and — the stories go — howl at the moon. With many local hunters mentioning an animal that looks something like a cross between a chimpanzee and a gorilla — an animal that apparently, according to the stories, is unaffected by poison darts, as the other apes are.

While you may be now making the assumption that such stories can’t possibly be true, you’d actually be wrong — a fair amount of research has gone into this subspecies of chimpanzee over the last few decades, and there is apparently quite a lot of truth to the stories.

Read the rest of this entry →