The Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle, an endangered species that nests between South Padre Island and Chambers County, was approved as the state’s official sea turtle by the Texas Senate Thursday. The resolution had already garnered approval by the Texas House.

Students at Galveston’s Oppe Elementary School, a coastal studies magnet campus, brought the bill to Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, after studying the animal, which is the smallest sea turtle in the world.

“They were told that the best way they could help is by simply making the public aware of how important the sea turtle is,” Taylor said.

A snake slid its way into the wedding ceremony at a Jacksonville Beach hotel, twice. The first time it slithered its way to the flower girl's feet.

"And she looked down and she yelled 'snake' and threw her hands in the air and before you know it everyone was running around," said Gubbini.

Gubbini says the snake disappeared and then came back right after the rings were exchanged, but not to object, the newlyweds think it had a message.

"It was circling around us into a little circle...as it was doing that somebody was taking a snapshot and it made a heart," added Gubbini.

The snake looks like it shaped itself into a heart, an unforgettable wedding day, just like the day Gubbini says he proposed.

The European passion for frogs’ legs is driving an international massacre of the reptiles which is endangering species and harming natural environments across south-east Asia. [...]

The “Frogmageddon” has prompted questions from the European Parliament about what the European Commission is doing about the problem, and about the cruel way in which the reptiles are parted from their limbs.

It turns out that, surprisingly, turtles are not primitive reptiles as previously thought. Instead, they are related to the group that is made up of birds and crocodilians and also includes extinct dinosaurs. It's likely that the turtles split from this group about 250 million years ago during one of the largest extinction events on the planet.

"Turtles are interesting because they offer an exceptional case to understand the big evolutionary changes that occurred in vertebrate history," said Naoki Irie from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in a news release. "The work not only provides insight into how turtles evolved, but also gives hints as to how the vertebrate developmental programs can be changed to produce major evolutionary novelties."

The event, which took place at Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown, allowed people to drop off illegal animals, no questions asked. Only reptiles and amphibians were accepted, and no penalties were given to individuals who handed over illegal reptiles, as the primary goal of the event was to prevent people from letting unwanted illegal reptiles or amphibians loose on Long Island.

The event was particularly valuable in that three alligators ended up in the safe hands of the SPCA. The alligators were 3 feet, 3.5 feet, and 4.5 feet long. Keeping an alligator is illegal, and includes a fine of up to $250, but releasing an alligator into the wild is a misdemeanor that can lead to jail time.

Just last week, four alligators were fished out of the Peconic River in Calverton near a boat ramp. The 2- and 3-foot-long alligators were sent to the Long Island Aquarium and Exhibition Center.

At least nine alligators were found on Long Island last fall, including two alligators that were found in a supermarket parking lot in Baldwin, one found on a golf course in Wading River, and another found in the parking lot of an Applebee’s in Shirley.

To better understand how the sea turtles' flippers work on land, researchers at Daniel Goldman's CRAB Lab (Complex Rheology and Biomechanics) at Georgia Tech studied the movements of just-hatched sea turtles on the beach of Jekyll Island, a coastal island of Georgia.

The researchers noticed that the sea turtles were able to maintain the same speed on both sandy and firmer terrain, by bending their wrists on sandy ground and keeping their wrists rigid when running on hard ground.

In order to study their movements more closely without bringing baby sea turtles into the lab, one of Goldman's students built FlipperBot, a robot model of a baby sea turtle that has the ability to bend its wooden flipper wrist or keep it rigid.

After putting FlipperBot through a number of tests, the scientists found that Mother Nature, and the baby sea turtles, have got it right. The robot was able to traverse a manufactured poppy seed terrain more quickly when it was allowed to bend its wrist. They also found that the robot, as well as the baby sea turtles, slowed down when they encountered previously disturbed poppy seeds or sand.

So, why does this matter? Well, the research can help engineers design robots that can successfully traverse many types of terrain. It might also help turtle conservationists understand what conditions can slow down baby turtles during that all-important first run, and finally, it may even help answer some evolutionary questions.

The... genus has been christened ‘Mercurana’ to commemorate Freddie Mercury, late iconic lead singer of the British rock band Queen. Mercury (his pen name) was of Indian Parsi origin and had spent major part of his childhood in India in Panchagni, located in the northern part of the mountain range, where the frog now bearing his name has been discovered.

While the ‘Beddomixalus bijui’ was found in the swamp forests of the Anamalai and high ranges of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, ‘Mercurana myristicapalustris,’ is restricted to highly fragmented and threatened low land ‘Myristica’ swamp forests in the foothills of the Agastyamalai hills in Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts.

A five foot boa constrictor was found crawling around a Super Shuttle Airport van at Tampa International Airport on Sunday afternoon.

Lt. Natalie Brown with Tampa Fire Rescue volunteered to catch the snake after hearing the call go out over the Airport Police radio. Lt. Brown went to the cell phone lot at TIA and found the snake outside of the shuttle. She captured the snake with a pillow case borrowed from a co-worker's bed.

"I do not like snakes," said Brown, "I am just glad that the snake is safe. It was dangerous, the snake was in the parking lot and could have been run over."

"It is a beautiful snake," said Brown who believes it could be somebody's pet.

On Tuesday, a group of fishermen operating a monofilament gillnet caught a large leatherback turtle at Gwadar near Surbandar village. Since the turtle was stuck inside their net, the fishermen brought the turtle to the beach, after which the World Wildlife Fund – Pakistan (WWF-P) helped them rescue it and release it back into the sea.

According to WWF-P technical adviser on marine fisheries Muhammad Moazzam Khan, leatherback turtles are very rarely found in the coastal areas of Pakistan. They have been spotted four or five times before but they were all dead.

“It is our luck that leatherback turtles exist in our sea as these are signs of the existence of life in natural position,” Khan said.

WWF-P has trained the fishermen, who venture out into the sea, to make sure they don’t harm the wildlife that is not of interest to them, such as turtles and whales. “We are happy that our fishermen now have a sense of the value of marine life.” The young fishermen had no recollection of leatherback turtles, but the older ones remember seeing them.