Wild Nature

In a sea of flapping black and white flippers, Ricky is hard to miss: He's got spiky yellow feathers, a flamboyant character, and he's the only rockhopper among the dozens of penguins living in the London Zoo.

Officials say they have broken up a smuggling ring in which narwhal tusks from the Canadian Artic were brought to Maine in a trailer with a secret compartment and then illegally sold to American buyers.

Even four times as deep as most scuba divers venture, the Great Barrier Reef blooms. A new exploration by a remote-operated submersible has found the reef's deepest coral yet.

Though some reports suggest jellyfish are taking over the world’s oceans, long-term records of these gelatinous animals fail to show a global increase in jellyfish blooms likely caused by pollution, warming, coastal development and other human influences.

Most people know Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose — but why? Medical researchers say they've now found the answer

Beelzebub's bat, a walking catfish and a frog that sounds like a bird are among 126 species introduced to science in just a year in the incredibly diverse Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia, according to a report released this week by the conservation group World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Incredibly detailed scenes of larva brains, butterfly scales and mini-crustacean claws — all captured through light microscopes — took some of the top prizes in the 2012 Olympus BioScapes competition, officials announced this week.