For the first time, 62 endangered San Francisco garter snakes raised at the San Francisco Zoo have been released into the wild in San Mateo County, with 130 more babies lined up for 2027.
Minnesota’s water-filled Voyageurs National Park was named the 2026 International Dark Sky Place of the Year, thanks to star parties, winter stargazing and small towns dimming their lights.
Texas beaches hosted 697 Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nests in 2026, up 55% from last year. It’s the payoff of a bold 1978 plan to teach baby turtles a new home.
Workers repaving a parking lot at Dinosaur National Monument found a 150-million-year-old Diplodocus tail just inches below the old asphalt, and the construction crew helped dig it out.
On Nov. 5, 2026, astronauts Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk installed the eighth and final roll-out solar array on the ISS, completing a five-year upgrade that lifts power capacity from 160 to about 215 kilowatts.
In a deep, water-filled crack in the desert — a place so small you could almost miss it on a map — one of the rarest fish on Earth just got a little less rare. On October 10, 2026, biologists … Read more
A brown pelican tangled in fishing line tapped on the door of a NOAA lab in Panama City, Florida. Biologists removed the hook in about ten minutes, and it flew away free.
After three years of searching and two surveys that turned up only dead adults, conservationists found larvae of the rare short-necked oil beetle on Pembrokeshire’s Castlemartin Range, proof that Wales’ only known population is still breeding.
Seven young California condors just joined the Yurok Tribe-led flock on California’s redwood coast, including San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s 200th bird released into the wild, in the same year a condor from this flock reached Oregon for the first time since 1904.
A Puerto Rico reef that came through the 2023–2024 marine heat waves better than its neighbors is getting 30,000 new elkhorn corals by 2028, planted by hand on little domes of cement.