Neighbors in Gauhati say the leopard attacked a 50-year-old lawyer as he talked on his cellphone Saturday evening outside his house. He was rushed to a hospital where he died Sunday.

Four other people were injured, including a man who had part of his scalp torn off in a dramatic attack captured by a local newspaper photographer.

Gauhati wildlife official Utpal Bora says authorities plan to release the animal at a wildlife park 120 miles (200 kilometers) west of the city.

Conservationists say deforestation is increasingly pushing leopards into populated areas.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/dissecting-the-cave-lion-diet.html?ref=wp

A quarter larger than today’s lions, the European cave lion was one of the biggest cats around 12,000 years ago. Now, an unusually sophisticated analysis of its bones is revealing what these creatures ate—and why they may have disappeared.

Although they were certainly massive cats, the term “cave lion” is a bit of a misnomer. Unlike today’s lions, males probably didn’t have manes, and they appear to have been solitary hunters. What’s more, though their bones are best preserved in caves, they probably lived in the open. But they did have one thing in common with their modern relatives: they appear to have worried humans. The big cats show up in ice age cave paintings and in ivory figurines, suggesting that they were a major concern for our ancestors.

To figure out what these lions hunted, biogeologist Hervé Bocherens and colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany, analyzed bone samples from 14 cave lions—found in four caves in France and central Europe—that lived between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago. The team focused on the chemical content of the bone collagen, which is often well-preserved, even in bones tens of thousands of years old. By incinerating a tiny fragment of preserved bone—usually less than a milligram—researchers can identify the molecules inside it and determine an animal’s diet.

Scientists have perfected the technique over the years. It was used recently to look at the diet of Neandertals, but this is one of the first studies to use it to look at a nonhuman predator—and the analysis is now sensitive enough to look several steps down the food chain. This enabled Bocherens to determine not only what cave lions ate but also what their prey ate. And that made it possible to tell, for example, whether lions were targeting full-size cave bears or their more vulnerable cubs, because adults and babies eat different diets themselves. “There’s a difference between the [chemical] signal of adults and babies,” Bocherens says. “Babies drink the milk of the mother.”

As it turned out, this distinction was important. Bocherens’s analysis, reported in the 6 December issue of Quaternary International, revealed that the cave lions occasionally ate bear cubs but not adults. Their favorite food, however, was reindeer, which Bocherens and his team determined consumed massive quantities of lichen, much as their modern descendants did. The cave lion diet, Bocherens says, appears to have been much more finicky than that of today’s lions, which eat just about anything they can catch.

The results may provide new insights into why cave lions died out. When Europe’s climate began to warm about 19,000 years ago, the landscape gradually changed from chilly, open steppes to denser forests. That would have made an inhospitable habitat for reindeer and for the cave lions that depended on them for food. (Cave bears were also dying out at the same time.)

Experts say the ability to dissect ancient diets so thoroughly is a tantalizing tool but that this particular study is too geographically limited to be conclusive about cave lions. “It’s quite astonishing that you can quite convincingly demonstrate what predators were eating tens of thousands of years ago,” says Anthony Stuart, a biologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom. “One obvious thing to do is extend the study to a wider area” to see how diets might have varied geographically. Cave lions, he notes, “ranged from Spain across Europe and Siberia all the way to the northwestern part of North America.”

Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke, a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Weimar, Germany, says the increasing precision of isotopic analysis may also provide a window into a larger question, namely, what kind of world our earliest ancestors inhabited. Knowing not only what extinct predators ate but also what the animals they ate consumed could help scientists build a sort of ancient food chain they don’t currently have. It could also tell us more about the plants and vegetation of the environment. “If we can detect the environmental conditions under which prey lived,” Kahlke says, “we can decide what conditions allowed humans to spread.”

LINTON — When a Greene County man shooed a hunter off his property on Nov. 13, the man replied that had just “shot a mountain lion.”

He had in fact killed a female bobcat, a violation of Indiana law that resulted in the hunter and another man who owns property nearby each being charged with a misdemeanor that could land them in jail for up to 60 days. They also could be fined $500.

Mike Gregg, a conservation officer with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, investigated the poaching complaint. He found evidence of the kill in the woods, and discovered the bobcat’s carcass alongside a nearby road in southwestern Greene County.

Andy J. Dyers, 28, of Indianapolis, and Joe E. Whitehead, 48, of Linton, were charged with illegal harvest of a protected furbearer. The charge is a misdemeanor. The law allows not only the fine and jail time, but also the seizure of guns or other equipment used to kill the protected species.

Indiana law classifies bobcats as protected fur-bearing mammals. Because more bobcat sightings have been reported in recent years, state wildlife managers changed the animal’s status from “endangered” in 2005 to its more recent classification as a “species of special concern.”

It is currently illegal to hunt bobcats in Indiana. According to a DNR statement, it’s possible that a limited bobcat hunting season might be established in the future. But for now, hunting and trapping bobcats is against Indiana law.

“More and more people are seeing bobcats. As bobcat numbers slowly increase, the possibility of trappers accidentally trapping these protected cats become a greater likelihood,” Gregg said in a news release about the bobcat killing. “It is important for trappers to take every necessary precaution to avoid accidentally trapping these protected cats, as well as other non-target species.”

Bobcats are solitary and nocturnal, preferring rugged, isolated and rocky terrain. They once roamed the state, until forest clearing and the establishment of cities and towns greatly reduced their numbers. Indiana declared the bobcat an endangered species in 1969.

Over the years, the bobcat has made a comeback. DNR reports 38 confirmed bobcat sightings since 1989, nearly all in south-central Indiana. The cats stand about two feet high, weigh 20 to 30 pounds and are reddish brown with white beneath, with black spots and streaks. They eat rabbits, squirrels, mice and small deer.

***** After a search you can the sort the images by date. Look in the upper left area.

Complicated searches on Flickr can be easy.

• Dash (- ) immediately in front of a word means NOT.
• OR can be used between two words.
• ( ) can be used? It seems to work.
• Year can be included in the search of EFRC images.

Here’s an example:
(parker OR parkers OR tao OR tucker)

If you wanted Max but not Kisa you could enter:
Max -Kisa

If you want all of Max and/or Kisa:

(Max OR Kisa)

If you want all that have Max and Kisa:
Max AND Kisa

If you want Max or Kisa, 2009 or 2010:
(Max OR Kisa) AND (2009 OR 2010)

Just make sure you’re searching inside my images. Or … add StephenDMcCloud. Example:

(Max OR Kisa) AND (2009 OR 2010) AND (StephenDMcCloud)