Galapagos tortoises at London's zoo lumbered around impassively as famous French pianist Richard Clayderman serenaded them with music from his latest album, "Romantique."

The music — an attempt Thursday to put the reptiles in the mood to mate — appeared lost on the slow-moving giants.

Even a rousing rendition of "Chariots of Fire" did little to lift the tortoise's spirits. They only seemed to perk up when zookeepers brought them some carrots.

Exhibitors at State Fair Park said they were just starting to pack up Saturday night at the Great Lakes Pet Expo when the incident happened.

Cindy Steinle runs the reptile exhibit and said a volunteer was showing a corn snake to a boy when the boy's father walked off with the snake.

"In the 20 years I've been doing education like this, we've never had someone steal an animal and leave a child behind," Steinle said. "He (the volunteer) had given the snake to the child to pet and to hold, and the child handed the snake off to his father and his father left, leaving his child behind."

Organizers said the snake is only worth about $40 so they were baffled by the theft.

Whether in the deep sea of the Antarctic, in the rainforests of Laos or in domestic, pastoral landscapes -- scientists from the ten Senckenberg institutes have discovered new species of plants and animals everywhere. They have even made new discoveries in allegedly familiar research collections -- either by studying previously unidentified material or using new research methods. "The objective always is to record and preserve the diversity of life on earth, in other words, biodiversity," explains Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Volker Mosbrugger, Director General of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung.

491new species from all parts of the globe were described in the last two years by Senckenberg scientists. The extent of new discoveries ranged from colourful island crabs to the Yellow Dyer Rain Frog and fossilised woodpeckers to the first eyeless huntsman spider. Some of the animals have barely been discovered and are already threatened with extinction.
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The head of Molecular and Biomedical Science at the University of Adelaide, Professor David Adelson, led the project and says it involved comparing dozens of DNA sequences from different species.

"There was an observation backs in the '80s that snakes and cows shared a segment of DNA that looked to be quite similar in sequence and that was found to be a repetitive sequence," he said.

"We basically went and scoured all of the databases for sequence, and did sequencing of our own across some species where there was no available information, and put all of that together."

Professor Adelson says the DNA sequence shared by cows and reptiles is known as Bov-B.

Around 15,000 crocodiles escaped from a farm in South Africa following heavy rain.

The crocodiles sprung from the Rakwena Crocodile Farm in the far north of the country when owners were forced to open the gates to prevent a storm surge after the nearby Limpopo river rose.

A number have since been recaptured, but at least half remain on the loose, scattered far and wide.

When Colin Kaepernick was a child of just 10 years old, he got a pet tortoise. However, unlike the reptiles ...of many children which have since been flushed down the toilet, Sammy — as the tortoise is named — is still very much alive, and has grown to a whopping 115 pounds over the years.