A roaring trade? Are wild lions across Africa under threat from demand for their bones and body parts?

November 8, 2017

For several years now an uneasy feeling has grown amongst lion conservationists that a new threat was evolving to further blight this increasingly threatened species. The fear was that consumptive use and trade (especially illegal) in the body parts of wild lions was proliferating.  However, not withstanding worrisome suspicions, nobody had comprehensively taken stock. That ... Read full story

Award for Cristian Bonacic of Fauna Australis

November 1, 2017

Professor Cristian Bonacic, former WildCRU doctoral student and currently Research Associate of the Unit, founded and led Fauna Australis at the Catholic University of Santiago, Chile. He is gracious in frequently branding his excellent Unit as WildCRU in South America, and this week his achievements in Science have been recognised by an award from the ... Read full story

Wildlife Conservation Course 2017 – Conservation Heroes – featured in New Straits Times, Malaysia

October 16, 2017

Threats of habitat loss, climate change and overexploitation create havoc in the world as the new Conservation Heroes emerge and battle against these evil forces. These heroes have acquired their special powers from the two-week intensive Wildlife Conservation Course taught using innovative techniques from role-play to games to theatre. The Wildlife Conservation Course, third year in ... Read full story

Life on the Edge: a remarkable collaborative paper led by Dr Marion Pfeifer of Newcastle University and in which WildCRU’s Neil D’Cruze was a co-author about disappearing forest edges

November 2, 2017

This new research identifies the winners and losers of forest fragmentation. Schoolboy geometry tells us that smaller things have more outside relative to inside, and this is true for fragments of forest. Having lots of outside could be a good thing in some circumstances, but not if you are an animal that finds living at ... Read full story

David Macdonald celebrates two weasily WildCRU wonders to mark the publication of a landmark book and an entertaining film

October 26, 2017

Musteloids, despite their odorously ominous name, are a wonderfully diverse, and rivetingly interesting super-family of Carnivores. They include such carnivoran eccentrics as red pandas, coatis and skunks, but the huge majority of them, indeed 67 of the approximately (given taxonomic wrangling) 92 musteloid species, are mustelids, that is, members of the weasel family. As variations ... Read full story

A Historic Pledge for Big Cats

October 16, 2017

Visionary Chinese philanthropist and entrepreneur Madame He Qiaonyu has joined Panthera's Global Alliance for Wild Cats, committing $20 million over the next decade to fund conservation programs devoted to protecting big cats around the world. The Beijing Qiaonyu Foundation, Panthera, and WildCRU will join forces on initiatives to save imperiled species, starting with snow leopards ... Read full story