Animals
Back sometime between 1843 and 1848 a bird now called the black-browed babbler was captured by naturalist Carl A.L.M. Schwaner. Records of the find are sketchy, but it appeared the bird had been captured on the island of Java. That finding was the one and only piece of evidence of the bird's existence — it is currently labeled as "data deficient" in ornithology texts. The bird was put into storage, and for the next 170 years, there were no further reports of its existence. Over time, the bird and its history became known as "the biggest enigma in Indonesian ornithology." Most in the field assumed it had gone extinct. Then, last year, a pair of researchers, Muhammad Rizky Fauzan and Muhammad Suranto captured a bird that they could not identify on the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. They took pictures of it and sent them to colleagues, then released the bird.
The whale, which the state's Department of Natural Resources said was a Gulf of Maine humpback whale named Pivot, was found stranded Thursday night.
Officials are still working to determine what led to Pivot's death, adding Tuesday the whale's body was being removed from the surf.
In a Facebook post, the Assateague Island National Seashore urged people not to go near it, adding whales can spread diseases to humans and pets.

The male whale measured 10 metres in length and the IDWG said it was not an individual previously documented in Irish waters.
The humpback whale came ashore off Coney Island, west Roaringwater Bay yesterday afternoon.
While humpback sightings are rare, they have been increasing in recent years.
Humpback strandings are very rare, however. According to the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) only eight have been recorded in Ireland since 1893.
This is only the second such stranding of a humpback ever recorded in Cork.
The humpback whale recently washed up in Roaringwater Bay. IWDG hope to visit the stranded whale today. Images courtesy of Robbie Shelly and Helen Tilson of @SchullSeafari pic.twitter.com/N9lUDQbIN4
— Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (@IWDGnews) February 25, 2021
Millions of orange and black monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico on a 2,000-mile (3,220-km) journey each year from Canada across North America.
But the butterflies occupied only 2.1 hectares in December 2020, compared with 2.8 hectares the previous winter season, the conservationist group WWF said in a statement.

The dead hermaphrodite baby cow born with two heads in Thailand was worshipped by villagers as lucky.
A villager in Thailand appears to believe the latter as he credits his £480 win on the local lottery from luck inherited after the birth of a malformed calf with two heads.
The poor creature was born with two sets of reproductive organs and an extra ear poking out in the middle of its two heads. Because of its deformities, it couldn't breathe properly and became too weak to eat. It died half an hour after being born.
(Video here)

‘Meidum Geese’, Chapel of Itet, mastaba of Nefermaat and Itet (Dynasty 4), Meidum, Egypt.
UQ scientist Dr Anthony Romilio said the strange but beautiful bird was quite unlike modern red-breasted geese (Branta ruficollis), with distinct, bold colours and patterns on its body, face, breast, wings and legs.
"The painting,Meidum Geese, has been admired since its discovery in the 1800s and described as 'Egypt's Mona Lisa'," he said.
"Apparently no-one realised it depicted an unknown species.
"Artistic licence could account for the differences with modern geese, but artworks from this site have extremely realistic depictions of other birds and mammals."
Dr Romilio said no bones from modern red-breasted geese (Branta ruficollis) had been found on any Egyptian archaeological site.
"Curiously, bones of a similar but not identical bird have been found on Crete," he said.
"From a zoological perspective, the Egyptian artwork is the only documentation of this distinctively patterned goose, which appears now to be globally extinct."
Wildlife photographer David Arbour captured stunning photos of several alligators poking their snouts through the ice to breathe at the Red Slough Wildlife Management Area this week.
While the alligators may appear to be dead, scientists say they're not. It's a survival technique alligators use when the water starts to freeze.
Comment: Back in 2019: American alligators freeze in place to survive arctic blast in North Carolina
According to a report published Tuesday by 16 global conservation groups, 18,075 species of freshwater fish inhabit our oceans, accounting for over half of the world's total fish species and a quarter of all vertebrates on Earth. This biodiversity is critical to maintaining not only the health of the planet, but the economic prosperity of communities worldwide.
About 200 million people across Asia, Africa and South America rely on freshwater fishers for their main source of protein, researchers said in "The World's Forgotten Fishes" report. About one-third of those people also rely on them for their jobs and livelihoods.
Despite their importance, freshwater fishes are "undervalued and overlooked," researchers said — and now freshwater biodiversity is declining at twice the rate of that in oceans and forests.
Eighty freshwater species have already been declared extinct — 16 of them in 2020 alone.
Eighty-six more carcasses were found on Bazaruto Island, north of the capital Maputo, on Tuesday, after a first group was washed ashore on Sunday.
The cause of the deaths is still unknown, the country's environment ministry said, and more experts are heading to the site.
One possible experts are investigating is if a cyclone may have contributed.
Comment: This incident happened amid similar recent mass strandings of cetaceans in other regions of the world, see:
- Pod of 49 long-finned pilot whales strand on beach in New Zealand - 9 die
- 52 short-finned pilot whales die after stranding on beach in Java, Indonesia
- Beached pilot whales are a sign of the magnetic pole shift and waning magnetosphere
- New study suggests that solar storms are the cause of sperm whales beaching in North Sea

A montage of 39 photographs of the 17,300 year old kangaroo with an accompanying illustration.
The two-metre-long kangaroo is painted on the ceiling of a rock shelter on the Unghango clan estate, in Balanggarra country in the north-eastern Kimberley region, WA.
A research team led by Damien Finch from the University of Melbourne used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of mud-wasp nests below and above the painting.
"In these old paintings, the ochre pigment used is an iron oxide," says Finch. "It cannot be dated with any of the current scientific dating techniques. The alternative is to date any suitable material found directly under or on top of the painting. In our work we date mud-wasp nests that are commonly found in rock shelters in northern Australia."
The team found nests below the painting were 17,500 years old, while nests above it were 17,100 years old. This means the painting is in between these two date ranges, "most likely 17,300 years old", according to Finch.
There is older evidence of rock painting in Australia, but not "in-situ" - that is, still on a cave or rock wall. "Two very old fragments of rock with ochre or charcoal lines have been discovered in archaeological excavations in northern Australia," says Finch.
Comment: It seems something has gone awry with science because the list of creatures and plants declared extinct, which then later reappear, is growing: