A quarter of the world's mammals are threatened with extinction, an international survey showed on Monday, and the destruction of habitats and hunting are the major causes.

Every morning Ajit Kumar Pattnaik, 45, goes into one of the six enclosures in the middle of the Nandankanan Zoological Park and touches a scaly mammal.

He then closely examines the quantity and quality of termites left as the mammal's food. The mammal, known as Indian pangolin, curls up as if in self-defence and then moves back into the burrow.

camera traps work well to estimate species diversity of medium and large mammals, a recent study says. Counting the number of mammals in dense tropical forests is difficult and rare species are often missed out. Camera traps offer a new tool for finding the number of large and medium sized terrestrial mammals. But the method is not foolproof and researchers point out the importance of having an

The germs that help cattle eat grass and gorillas gorge on leaves may have been the secret weapon that let mammals populate the planet, researchers reported on Thursday. Two separate teams of researchers reported on the bacteria living in and on the bodies of humans and other animals, and found they are surprisingly well-adapted to their hosts -- so well that they may have helped different species evolve. "We have evolved together with our bacteria," Dr. Julie Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute said in a telephone interview.

About six waves of massive extinction are known in the history of the Earth, the last one wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now, add one more to the list

Canada's annual seal hunt, the world's largest marine mammal hunt, kicked off on March 28. To curb international protests over the hunt, the Canadian government has come up with new rules, saying