Henry: His own bad self.
Courtesy KeresHWe live in exciting times, Buzzketeers, exciting times! Never before has the population of the world been so thrilled to see a 111-year-old get it on.

I’m talking sex here, folks. Sex.

Yes, the world has carefully peeled its eyeballs from now-damp television screens across every continent, forgoing the stale gender isolation that is the summer Olympics for the steamy, primordial, and sexy land of iniquity we call Middle Earth. I mean New Zealand.

This feisty Casanova had everything going against him and his love live. Aside from his formidable age, he only recently got out of 17 years of solitary confinement, a punishment given for an aggression problem that culminated in him giving a serious bite to a lady—the very lady that would become his baby’s momma all these years later! Why do we love the ones that hurt us the most? On top of all this, the centenarian, name o’ Henry, has scaly lizard skin, and was born with a third eye. Also, he had a tumor on his butt until the recent past. And he’s a lizard, which can’t help things.

Or not a lizard, precisely, but a tuatara. Tuatara made an appearance on Science Buzz not long ago, regarding their status as not-exactly-lizards, and potential their inability to survive in our spicy hot new world.

Well, Henry the tuatara and his 70-something lady friend, Mildred, are doing their best to prove us wrong (about the viability thing, not the lizard thing). Henry, never before observed mating in his long life, is now the father of 11 eggs. How many of these eggs actually hatch remains to be seen, of course. Whether they yield a healthy ratio of males-to-females (see the Buzz link above) may be up in the air too, although the fact that they were laid in captivity probably means that they’re being carefully incubated in the appropriate temperature range for developing embryos of both sexes.

Oh, gold medals all around!

Tags : tuatara, captivity, breeding, oldest

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Humorous naming possibilites abound for a new breed of bear discovered in the tundra of the Candian province of Nunavut. DNA tests have confirmed that the bear, shot by a Canadian hunter, is a previously-undiscovered cross between a Polar Bear and a Grizzly Bear. The hunter’s guide, Roger Kuptana, had noticed that the bear had a brown, spotty coloration and the slightly humped back of a grizzly, but not until last week did a DNA test confirm that a new hybrid had been discovered.

The possibility of a grizzly-polar bear hybrid has been known for years, and successful crossbreeds have been born in captivity. The range of the polar bear and the grizzly bear overlap slightly, and the breeding season of the two species are similar as well. However, no crossbreed had ever been found in the wild.

The DNA results are good news for the hunter, Jim Martell. He had been granted a permit to kill one wild polar bear, and the penalty for taking an grizzly bear without a permit is up to a year in jail. Now that the bear’s lineage has been established, Martell will not face any penalty and will be allowed to keep the bear as a trophy. He has dubbed it a “polargrizz.”

The crossbreed may indicate that there is a problem for both species. Both the Polar Bear and the Grizzly bear are considered threatened species, and the existence of hybrids might mean that the bears are having a difficult time finding mates. Additionally, wildlife geneticist David Paetaku (in an interview with CNN), expressed concern that the crossbreeding may water down the breeds of two already threatened animals.

Tags : hybrids, pizzly, grizzlar, polar bear, grizzly bear, hunting, breeding

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