The Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently acquired Japanese giant salamanders given to the Zoo by the City of Hiroshima Asa Zoological Park. This donation will be the foundation of a new long-term breeding program in the United States and may play an important role in saving amphibians around the globe. [...more]
There are several hypotheses about how amphibian chytrid has spread around the world, but the trade in amphibians for food, bait, pets and laboratory animals has been identified as the most likely mode of spread [...more]
Each year thousands of vacationers enjoy the scenery along Virginia’s Skyline Drive, little knowing that for a few brief moments they are passing through the territory of an endangered holdout from the Pleistocene that few humans have ever seen—the Shenandoah salamander (Plethodon shenandoah). Steep rocky slopes on the north sides of just three mountains in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park make [...] [...more]
This fossil represents a new genus and species of extinct aneuretopsychid, Jeholopsyche liaoningensis, recently described in a paper in the journal ZooKeys by Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dong Ren and ChungKun Shih of the College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing. The aneuretopsychidae are a family of long-proboscid insects that lived in Asia from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. The paper documents the first formal record of fossil Aneuretopsychidae in China. The new fossils reveal previously unknown and detailed structure of the mouthparts, antennae, head, thorax, legs and abdomen of this distinctive insect lineage.
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