Lonesome George wants you to get off his lawn. (Photo by A. Davey.)

Lonesome George, the last of the tortoise subspecies Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni from Pinta island in the Galapagos, has died at age 100. Previously known as the world's rarest tortoise, old George is survived by his girlfriends Becki and Becki (I assume) of subspecies C. nigra becki -- conservationists tried breeding George with similar tortoises in hopes of perpetuating the Pinta genes, but even when mating was successful, the eggs all failed to hatch. Still, if you have to go, this isn't a bad way to do it: famous, old, and surrounded by exotic women.

Photo by Just Chaos.

Staten Island's Freshkills Park, a former landfill that's being transformed into a public parkland and "laboratory for green practices," is engaging in job creation -- for goats. Twenty Anglo-Nubian goats are nibbling away at invasive weeds called phragmites, as one step of the wetlands restoration process that will turn Freshkills less killy and more fresh. And what are the goats getting for the privilege of eating tasty weeds, which they would probably do anyway? Oh, only $3,437.50 a week, which would work out to $178,750 a year.

Hey, remember that video with the slow loris being tickled? The one that used to make me laugh until I peed?

Yeah, well, get ready to never want to watch it again, after you watch this video of a Jakarta animal market selling lorises and other exotic and domestic pets.

Photo courtesy of Sirocco the Kakapo's Facebook page.

New Zealand's kakapo is probably the best parrot. It has the face and personality of Walter Matthau. It likes to sit in a hole and make loud noises. It regularly tries to get it on with human heads. What's not to like? NOTHING, so we're really glad it's managing to struggle back from the brink of extinction.

Conservationists are taking a page from the U.S. government in the fight against poaching -- they're sending in the drones.

Already in use in Indonesia and soon to be in the air in Nepal, the drones can monitor protected areas where endangered species are hanging out. If they see a poacher, they leap into action.

Unlike the U.S. government’s drones, though, they do not send quantities of explosives down to blow up a wedding destroy the enemy. They merely alert humans to go check out the situation.

Taizhou lies 190 miles south of Shanghai and has 6 million people, putting its size at “somewhere in between Los Angeles and New York City” on a U.S. scale and “just some town” on a Chinese one. One day recently, though, the streets were filled not with cars, scooters, or pedestrians, but with ducks. Thousands upon thousands of ducks:

Photo courtesy of Naturmuseum Senckenberg.

Scientists in Germany have found fossils of turtles mating that are nearly 50 million years old. That makes them the oldest fossils of vertebrates going at it that we've found so far. I think this sort of thing needs more exposure in schools. Hey, kids: go into paleontology, and your big discovery could be ancient turtle porn!

Photo by nottsexminer.

We know that more people than like to admit it troll Facebook to check out ladies, but scientists have actually created a social network that they use for nothing but looking at tits.

Our more astute and wildlife-oriented readers will have guessed that the tits scientists are ogling are wild great tits -- a type of bird biologists often study, probably because it has a funny name. The lead researcher on this study says that using a new data-crunch approach, his team found that they could accurately map social relationships among the birds, identifying not just birds that happened to meet each other in passing but those who had actually formed friendships:

What we have shown is that we can analyze data about individual animals, in this case great tits, to construct a 'Facebook for animals' revealing who affiliates with who, who are members of the same group, and which birds are regularly going to the same gatherings or 'events.'

A plane drops retardant in Arizona. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service.)

Colorado's High Park forest fire has burned nearly 60,000 acres. According to the Forest Service, 189 homes have been lost and 1.3 million gallons of water dropped on the blaze.

Planes are also dropping hundreds of thousands of gallons of fire retardant, a mix of chemicals intended to slow the fire's spread. From a report by the Denver Post:

So far this fire season, air tankers called to suppress wildfires have been dropping the fire retardants (the mix is called LC95A) at a record pace. As of Friday, more than 401,450 gallons had been dropped on Colorado forests this year, including 320,553 gallons on the lightning-sparked High Park wildfire west of Fort Collins, according to Forest Service records.

LC95A is good for slowing fires. But the slurry is also toxic.

C'sar, a 38-year-old bull elephant living in North Carolina, could become the first pachyderm to wear contact lenses. Because nothing looks nerdier than an elephant in glasses.

"An elephant has never been fitted with corrective lenses," the Associated Press reports. (One elephant once had a contact put in his eye, but it was just to keep some gunk in, not to help his vision.) To give you a sense of the scale here, C'sar weighs 12,000 pounds and has eyes about the same size as a horse's. His contacts would need to be 1.5 inches in diameter -- about three times the size of the ones humans stick in their eyes. They would need to be changed every three months. And given how hard it is to convince people to stick pieces of plastic in their eyes, we do not envy the person who has the job of sticking their fingers in a six-ton elephant's eye, even if he is sedated.