Federal and state officials are investigating the death of another endangered Hawaiian monk seal on Molokai.

It is the sixth monk seal found dead on the island since the start of this year.

NOAA said this is an unprecedented number of deaths and a joint state and federal investigation has been launched.

Officials said a young female monk seal was found dead on the south shore of Molokai on Sunday. The seal was identified as "L11,″ which was one of the pups that was born on the island in 2020.

Officials say 'care will be taken to remove only animals exhibiting unusual behaviors' after woman, boy and dog are bitten

Residents of Anchorage, Alaska, used to living alongside moose and bear now face a threat from a more diminutive creature: the humble river otter.

On Friday, the Alaska department of fish and game alerted residents to a pack of aggressive otters which have attacked dogs, children and adults near creeks, rivers and lakes.

Humans are river otters' only significant predator. Attacks the other way are not common, officials said. Nonetheless, a spate of reported incidents prompted the official warning.

"Because of the risk to public safety, efforts will be made to locate this group of river otters and remove them," authorities said. "Care will be taken to only remove the animals exhibiting these unusual behaviors."

A 50-year-old tour guide died after he was attacked by an elephant while conducting a game drive.

The incident took place at a game reserve in Gravelotte, Limpopo, on Thursday morning.

ER24 paramedics said when they arrived on the scene, they found bystanders performing CPR on the man.

"We took over and assessed the man, but unfortunately, he showed no signs of life. He was declared dead at the scene," said ER24's Ineke van Huyssteen.

At least five people, including women and children, were killed in Sindh's Tharparkar district after being struck by lightning during thundershowers, ARY News reported on Saturday.

According to details, four people were also injured in different incidents of thunderbolts in parts of the Tharparkar region amid rainfall with the thunderstorm.

The injured and dead bodies were shifted to nearby hospitals, rescue officials said.

Moreover, 80 animals were also reported killed in different areas of Tharparkar district due to unprecedented incidents of lightning bolts.

While elephants taking part in everyday prayer rituals in Kerala temples is not unusual, a pachyderm left devotees in a state of turmoil after it got agitated and yanked off a man sitting on it. Now, the video of the man narrowly escaping from being trampled under the animal's feet is going viral.

The video doing rounds on social media shows the animal vigorously shaking its body and head, forcing the mahout to fall to the ground. The visibly irked tusker then turned to attack the man, trying to stamp him, however, the man gathered himself and managed to run away quickly.

Footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years.
Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico provide the earliest unequivocal evidence of human activity in the Americas and provide insight into life over 23,000 years ago.

The findings are described in a Science journal article co-authored by University of Arizona archaeologist Vance Holliday.

"For decades, archaeologists have debated when people first arrived in the Americas," said Holliday, a professor in the UArizona School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences. "Few archaeologists see reliable evidence for sites older than about 16,000 years. Some think the arrival was later, no more than 13,000 years ago by makers of artifacts called Clovis points. The White Sands tracks provide a much earlier date. There are multiple layers of well-dated human tracks in streambeds where water flowed into an ancient lake. This was 10,000 years before Clovis people."

Researchers Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, with the U.S. Geological Survey, used radiocarbon dating of seed layers above and below the footprints to determine their age. The dates range in age and confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years.

This corresponds to the height of the last glacial cycle, during something known as the Last Glacial Maximum, and makes them the oldest known human footprints in the Americas.

Shell beads found in a cave in Morocco are at least 142,000 years old. The archaeologists who found them say they're the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of human communication.

The necklace, nametag, earrings or uniform you chose to put on this morning might say more than you realize about your social status, job or some other aspect of your identity.

Anthropologists say humans have been doing this - finding ways to communicate about themselves without the fuss of conversation - for millennia.

But shell beads recovered from a cave in western Morocco, determined to be between 142,000 and 150,000 years old, suggest that this behavior may go back much farther than previously thought. The finding, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, was made by a team of archaeologists that includes Steven L. Kuhn, a professor of anthropology in the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The beads, Kuhn and his colleagues say, are the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of nonverbal human communication, and they shed new light on how humans' cognitive abilities and social interactions evolved.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," Kuhn said. "They're the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait. They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

How does this ancient form of communication show up today? It happens often, Kuhn said.

"You think about how society works - somebody's tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, 'What's your problem?'" Kuhn said. "But if you see they're wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it's a police officer pulling you over."

Kuhn and an international team of archaeologists recovered the 33 beads between 2014 and 2018 near the mouth of Bizmoune Cave, about 10 miles inland from Essaouira, a city on Morocco's Atlantic coast.

A southeast Alabama man was killed in a dog attack while he was out walking.

Phenix City police were dispatched at 2 a.m. Tuesday to the 100 block of 17th Avenue on a report of a dog bite, said Capt. Darryl Williams. When officers arrived on the scene, they found the 70-year-old victim on the ground with a serious injury to his left arm.

Frank J. Cobb was treated on the scene and then transported to Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital. He was later moved to an Atlanta hospital where he died.

Two members of a nomadic family were injured while over 400 goats and sheep died when the lightning struck the upper reaches of Naranag in Kangan area of Ganderbal district Tuesday night, officials said.

Some nomadic families had camped at Laman Naranag area on their way back home from the seasonal pastures in the higher reaches when the lightening struck them.

An official said that the injured family members were brought to Trauma Hospital Kangan for treatment.

He said that both were stable and had sustained minor injuries.

An unprecedented spate of fatal tiger attacks in a forest range of Gadchiroli district has struck terror in 18 villages in the region.

A sub-adult tiger, aged just about two years, is suspected to have killed seven persons, all men, in the Porla range within a month. Such a spate of attacks is unprecedented, say wildlife officials.

Officials, however, have confirmed that only four of the attacks are by the two-year-old tiger. They are still unsure about whether the other three victims, too, had died due to an attack by this tiger.

The earlier known instances of attacks by Pandharkawda tigers Avni, which was shot dead in 2018, and Rajura tiger RT1, were spread over one-and-a-half years.

Gadchiroli Conservator of Forest Ashok Mankar told The Indian Express, "A two-year old tiger, who was separated from its mother a couple of months ago, has killed at least four persons, beginning August 15. We have the camera trap evidence for the same."