Awarding Nobels decades after the original scientific discovery could lead to the coveted prize becoming irrelevant, some observers say, as ageing researchers miss out on their turn to get the long-awaited call from Sweden. 

That's what happened in 2011 when the Nobel committee announced that half the prize for medicine and physiology would go to Canadian-born biologist Ralph Steinman.

Amid fresh warnings about the depletion of Earth's treasure trove of species, governments will gather in South Korea next week to try to muster the funds and political will to protect what remains.

Just a week after conservation group WWF said wildlife numbers had halved in 40 years, nations will analyse progress since they agreed four years ago on 20 targets for stemming the tide of biodiversity loss.

The United States has struck a deal to reduce Indonesia's debts in exchange for Jakarta pledging about $12 million for programmes to protect endangered species and their habitats on Sumatra island, conservationists said Friday.

Tourists from around the world are drawn to a stretch of palm-fringed shoreline known as "Seven Mile Beach," a crescent of white sand along the turquoise waters of Jamaica's western coast. But the sands are slipping away and Jamaicans fear the beach, someday, will need a new nickname.

Each morning, groundskeepers with metal rakes carefully tend Negril's resort-lined shore. Some sections, however, are barely wide enough for a decent-sized beach towel and the Jamaican National Environment and Planning Agency says sand is receding at a rate of more than a meter (yard) a year.

In the early 1980s, the North American comb jellyfish quit its Atlantic home, hid away in the belly of a cargo ship and headed for the Black Sea.

By just over a decade later, its descendants had decimated the anchovy population in their new surroundings -- a jellyfish heaven with unlimited food in the eggs and young of other fish... and not a natural predator in sight.

Environmentalists are threatening to call a boycott of New Zealand's billion-dollar seafood export industry unless the government boosts efforts to save the world's rarest dolphin, which has dwindled to a population of 50.

The Maui's dolphin, the world's smallest and scarcest sub-species, is found only in shallow waters off the North Island of New Zealand.

The number of cheetahs in the world has dropped sharply in the past century, and humans may be to blame, according to an international study released Thursday.

A hill in southeastern Bolivia is crisscrossed by fossilized dinosaur tracks -- a total of more than 5,000 footprints, some more than a meter long, dating back 65 million years. 

At least 35,000 walruses have beached themselves on a remote Alaskan coastline in a phenomenon blamed on the melting of arctic ice due to climate change, experts said Wednesday.

Initially there had been only 1,500 of the tusked pinnipeds counted on one beach, but in recent days that number has exploded.

To the world, the Great Barrier Reef is a natural wonder and vast underwater kingdom, boasting some of the rarest animals and plants. To Aboriginal Australian Gavin Singleton, it is home.

The 26-year-old's family history -- off the reef to the far northeast coast of the continent -- goes back thousands of years.