A new kind of skin-eating fungus has been killing fire salamanders in the Netherlands at an alarming rate, European researchers said Monday.

The boldly colored yellow and black salamanders have dwindled rapidly since 2010, with just four percent of their original population left.

A 350-million-year-old fossilised scorpion discovered in South Africa is the oldest known land animal to have lived on Gondwana, part of Earth's former supercontinent, a university said Monday.

The new species, named Gondwanascorpio emzantsiensis, provides tantalising clues about the development of life before Earth's continents broke apart to form the globe that is familiar to us today, scientists said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the evidence for climate change was beyond dispute but it was not too late for international action to prevent its worst impacts.

"The science is clear. It is irrefutable and it is alarming," Kerry told a climate conference in Majuro in the Marshall Islands in a video address from Washington.

Crop-damaging insects, bacteria, fungus and viruses are moving poleward by nearly three kilometers (two miles) each year, helped by global warming, a study said on Sunday.

A team at Britain's University of Exeter trawled through two huge databases to chart the latitude and dates for the earliest record of 612 crop pests.

The average height of European men rose by 11 centimeters (4.4 inches) between 1870 and 1980, an unprecedented spurt linked mainly to better health, a study published on Monday says.

The estimate is garnered from military, medical and other records from 15 countries for young adult males aged around 21.

A rocket carrying an Israeli communications satellite has been successfully launched from a Russian facility in Kazakhstan, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) said in a statement on Sunday.

It said that the AMOS-4 satellite lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome atop a Russian Zenit rocket on Saturday night.

A new species of shark that "walks" along the seabed using its fins as …

A new species of shark that "walks" along the seabed using its fins as tiny legs has been discovered in eastern Indonesia, an environmental group said Friday.

Thai customs on Friday said they had arrested two Vietnamese air passengers after finding more than 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of ivory in their luggage on a flight from Angola.

The haul, which included whole tusks, ivory beads and shaped cubes which could be used for carving, was worth around $500,000, customs said in a statement.

Oregon farmers are moving ahead with plans to start planting their next crop as questions remain about the source of a patch of genetically modified wheat in a farmer's field last spring that threatened trade between the Pacific Northwest and several Asian countries.

Speculation about the origin of the unapproved wheat found in northeastern Oregon ranges from saboteurs to a passing flock of geese. And the U.S Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said Friday their investigation is ongoing.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has launched a review of whether it should take North Pacific humpback whales off the endangered species list.

NOAA Fisheries is responding to a petition filed by a group of Hawaii fishermen saying the whale should no longer be classified as endangered because its population has steadily grown since the international community banned commercial whaling nearly 50 years ago.