Residents of the bucolic towns of Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda have long known to guard their pets and backyards from coyotes prowling in the shadows, behind trees and around garbage bins.

"They howl behind my house every night," said Melodi Dewey, a Lafayette resident. "There's a pack of them on the other side of my fence. I have to keep my dogs from going outside at night."

But Dewey and others in the Contra Costa County area dubbed Lamorinda are warier than ever these days and just as surprised as wildlife officials after a string of coyote attacks this year left three people bitten and injured, the latest one Tuesday behind Diablo Foods in Lafayette.

And what's particularly alarming is that the same coyote is responsible for all three attacks, according to authorities. Lab results showed Thursday the DNA in the saliva around the latest victim's wounds matched the DNA found in previous attacks.

Although California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials have trapped and killed four coyotes in the area within the past couple of weeks, they have not yet caught the culprit in Tuesday's attack and those on Dec. 4 at Campolindo High School in Moraga and in July not too far from Moraga Commons Park.

A 74-year-old Italian woman died after her five half-wolf dogs mauled her inside herown apartment.

Mariangela Zaffino, a pensioner who stays mostly in her flat in Grugliasco town, which is near Turin in Italy, was found dead by her daughter in her own apartment. The investigation pointed to her five pet Czechoslovakian wolfdogs as the culprits behind her death.

The old woman was attacked by her pets for reasons still unknown to investigators. Her daughter said that her mother's dogs were a cross between German shepherds and wild wolves, and that they have many wolfish characteristics. She told The Telegraph that the five dogs did not show any signs of aggression before.

About four decades ago, reindeer in the high alpine Nordfjella region of Norway began to engage in a bizarre, new behavior: They would eat each other's antlers.

Termed osteophagia, the act actually isn't all that rare amongst hoofed mammals. Animals have been known to gnaw on shed antlers to make up for mineral deficiencies in their diets. However, in this case, reindeer were eating antlers straight off their herdmates' heads!

In 1984, surveys suggested that about 8% of Nordfjella reindeer showed signs of having their antlers gnawed. In 2009, that rate climbed to 72 percent. In a new survey published Thursday to the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research found that 97 percent of reindeer had had their antlers eaten. And that's for both males and females - reindeer and Caribou are the only two members of the Cervidae (deer) family in which both sexes grow significant antlers.

Adding to the mystery of this rampant antler cannibalization is the fact that all of the roughly 2,000 reindeer in the region are now dead, culled between August 10, 2017 and May 1, 2018 because the herd had become infected by Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a contagious, lethal disease caused by a misfolded form of a normal protein called a prion.

In a tragic incident, a forest guard watcher and a volunteer were killed in an elephant attack in the Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve on Thursday. The two were part of a team of forest personnel that had set out into the reserve to carry out a wildlife census.

The team, consisting of guard watchers and volunteers, had entered the dense reserve and begun the survey under the guidance of a guard watcher. However, a lone elephant attacked them leading to the death of a forest guard watcher and a volunteer while another forest guard watcher sustained injuries.

The deceased were identified as forest guard Satheesh Kumar (24) and volunteer Muthu Prabhakara Serapandiyan. Guard watcher Ponganeshan sustained grievous injuries and is currently undergoing treatment at a government hospital.

Eden. Atlantis. Punt. These long-lost places have existed mostly in myth and legend rather than on a map, but an unlikely creature is now revealing the ghost of one of them.

The exact location of Punt has been a mystery for over 150 years. Mummified baboons from ancient Egypt — which are not endemic to Egypt — are telling scientists more about where this exotic land where they came from. Tracing the baboons' geographic origins by analyzing chemicals in their mummies is showing the path to Punt, which used to trade luxuries like spices and resins (and baboons) with Egypt. Ancient Egyptian reverence for these animals is already known from funerary art showing them as pets in life and even deifying them in death.

What led the Egyptians to worship an animal that didn't even originate near the life-giving waters of the Nile is still a mystery, though the sun god Ra may have had something to do with it.

"There is no evidence but some speculation," anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy, who led a study recently published in eLife, told SYFY WIRE. "Some Egyptologists have argued that Baboons vocalize toward the rising Sun at dawn, which would have resonated with Egyptian religious practices. It is possible that ancient Egyptians witnessed this natural behavior and distinguish them as worthy of veneration. When you look closely at the status of baboons in Egypt, they are always facing east towards the rising Sun with arms raised, which is called the posture of adoration."

A 46-year-old Joliet man is dead after being mauled by a pit bull terrier Thursday night.

Erick J. Quinn was visiting friends when the attack occurred. Quinn stepped in to calm the dog, which became agitated when two women in the home Quinn was visiting began arguing about money, said Joliet Police Sgt. Dwayne English.

"He stepped in to calm the dog and that's when the dog turned on him," English said.

Joliet police were called to the home, located in the 1200 block of Arthur Avenue, at 6:21 p.m. Thursday. When police arrived at the home, Quinn was unresponsive and had "extensive injuries to his body," according to a news release from the Joliet Police Department.

In a new paper published in Stem Cell Reports, Bhanu Telugu and co-inventor Chi-Hun Park of the University of Maryland (UMD) Department of Animal and Avian Sciences show for the first time that newly established stem cells from pigs, when injected into embryos, contributed to the development of only the organ of interest (the embryonic gut and liver), laying the groundwork for stem cell therapeutics and organ transplantation. Telugu's start-up company, Renovate Biosciences Inc. (RBI), was founded with the goal of leveraging the potential of stem cells to treat terminal diseases that would otherwise require organ transplants, either by avoiding the need for transplants altogether or creating a new pipeline for growing transplantable human organs. With the number of people who suffer from organ failures and the 20 deaths per day in the U.S. alone purely from a lack of available organs for transplant, finding a new way to provide organs and therapeutic options to transplant patients is a critical need. In this paper, Telugu and his team are sharing their first steps towards growing fully transplantable human organs in a pig host.

"This paper is really about using the stem cells from pigs for the first time and showing that they actually can be injected into embryos and only go to the endodermal target organs like the liver, which is very important for delivering safe therapeutic solutions going forward," says Telugu. "This is an important milestone. It's a pipe dream in a way because a lot of things need to work out between here and full organ transplantation, but this paper sets the stage for all our future research. We can't really just go and start working with humans in work like this, so we started with pig-to-pig transfer in this paper, working with the stem cells and putting them back into other pigs to track the process to make sure it is safe for liver production as proof-of-concept."

Telugu and his team pitched this work at UMD Bioscience Day on behalf of his company, RBI, and received the Inventor Pitch Award and the UMD Invention of the Year Award in 2018. In order to protect the intellectual property, Telugu worked with the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) to secure patents and open the work up for additional fundraising to carry this technology through the preclinical and clinical stages. The Maryland Stem Cell Foundation provided some funding to advance this work, and Telugu is thankful that Maryland funds technologies in the human stem cell space.

A Komodo dragon has brutally savaged a worker at a 'Jurassic Park' inspired resort under construction in Indonesia, it was reported.

Elias Agas, 46, was working at the £4.8 million site on Rinca Island when the 90kg beast "tore several parts of his body".

He was then frantically whizzed off the island by speedboat to a nearby hospital as the bite from a Komodo can be deadly if not treated quickly.

Staff at the park claim that they responded immediately to the incident when they heard what had happened.

The park's head of security Julius Buki told local media: "Upon receiving this information, fellow rangers ... were at the location immediately [and] managed to evacuate the victim."

A herd of wild elephants on Sunday evening wreaked havoc on Kalapahar village under Ranikor Civil Sub-Division, leaving two houses destroyed.

General secretary of All Khasi Hills Achik Federation (AKHAF), John D Sangma, informed that the incident took place on Sunday around 7:30 pm when a herd of seven wild elephants attacked the village and levelled the houses.

However, no one sustained injuries during the course of the incident as some vigilant villagers were quick to shoo the elephants away.

Sangma said that due to the presence of seven wild elephants at a place just a kilometre away from Kalapahar village, the locals are apprehensive of another possible elephant attack.

An Irula tribal woman was trampled to death by an elephant in a reserve forest of Segur range falling under the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) - buffer zone in the Nilgiris on Tuesday.

M Sarasu, 65, a resident of Anaikatty village in the range, went to the forest around 1pm to collect fodder for cattle, a forest official said. Sarasu, who was accompanied by her son Balan, 42, and her sister Mathi, 55, encountered an elephant and its calf when she was some 3km away from her home.

"The elephant charged at them. While Balan and Mathi managed to escape, Sarasu was attacked by the elephant. She died on the spot," said L C S Srikanth, deputy director, MTR-buffer zone.

Police retrieved the body and sent it to the Ooty government hospital. The postmortem will be conducted on Wednesday as the body reached the hospital late in the evening.