So long, Mary; hello, Terry. Cleveland zoo tortoise, thought female for 50-plus years, turns out to be male

A tortoise's zookeepers in Cleveland are the ones feeling slow because after more than 50 years, they've discovered "Mary" is actually a male. Officials at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo say it can be tough to establish the sex of a giant Aldabra tortoise because the reproductive organs normally aren't visible. But Mary's maleness was unexpectedly revealed earlier this month during a routine exam.

Spokesman Tom O'Konowitz said Wednesday that the zoo has decided to rename the tortoise Terry.

When the 400-pound reptile arrived at the zoo in 1955, it was assumed he was a she because of a flatter shell, shorter tail and all-around smaller size than most males.

The tortoise is estimated to be between 75 and 100 years old.

-- Associated Press

Photo: Mary, now Terry, at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.  Credit: Associated Press

Tammy the Turnpike Turkey, we hardly knew ye: Wayward wild turkey caught on New Jersey Turnpike

A wild turkey that's taken up residence at a New Jersey tollbooth and spends its days scooting around 18-wheelers won't have to dodge Thanksgiving traffic. State Fish and Wildlife officials netted the bird Wednesday after failed attempts during the weekend.

The turkey had been trotting around the busy toll booth since the spring, weaving around traffic at the 14B interchange in Jersey City.

"Apparently, this turkey decided to make Jersey City her home, alongside of one of the top five busiest toll roads in America," said turnpike spokesman Joe Orlando. "She didn't want to leave, she was a regular, and to be honest with you, she probably had better attendance than a lot of the employees."

Wildlife officials believe the 11-pound female turkey may have taken a wrong turn out of Staten Island and become disoriented. She spent her days causing stunned truck drivers to slam on their brakes and prompting some spectators to run across several lanes of traffic to pose for pictures with her.

Commuter cat goes for a bus ride

>Cat owners often wonder where their pets go when they're outside (some to the point of obsessively strapping a shutter-happy camera to their kitties).

Casper, a black-and-white cat living in the U.K., enjoys the occasional bus ride.

BBC News posted an absolutely absurd video in which a reporter follows Casper around as he boards public transportation and relaxes for a trip around part of the coast before returning home.

The bus driver tells the BBC that Casper regularly shows up for a ride and lies patiently in a seat near the front. But that little freeloader has never paid the bus fare.

Unleashed commends the U.K. for its species-integrated busing system, and we look forward to riding alongside the traveling feline. But make sure that scrappy cat pays his dues.

-- Mark Milian

twitter.com/markmilian

Photo: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

It pays to be a cute animal: New Zealand town cancels dead rabbit throw, proceeds with pig hunt

The tiny New Zealand town of Waiau's social calendar is a bit lighter after an outcry prompted organizers to cancel a planned dead-rabbit-throwing contest for children.

The contest is an annual affair that signals the start of another non-animal-friendly town event -- a pig hunt.  The events have apparently been held in tandem without incident for years.

But this year, all that changed when the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals learned of the rabbit throw. RNZSPCA officials argued that throwing dead rabbits for fun was not only cruel, but also set the stage for future cruelty by sending a message to children that playing with dead animals can be a form of recreation. Animal cruelty inspector Charles Cadwallader likened the spectacle to throwing "your dead grandmother around for a joke," but the rabbit throw's organizer, Jo Moriarty, insists it was intended to be an innocent affair. 

Canceling the rabbit throw is an example of out-of-control political correctness, Moriarty told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She denies that tossing dead rabbits about has had any detrimental effect on the kids' compassion, insisting that "[the] children in this community are fantastic, they love their animals." 

The pig hunt went on as planned late last month. Score: Rabbits: 1; Pigs: 0.

-- Lindsay Barnett

Photo: Los Angeles Times file photo

West Africa's last giraffes make surprise comeback

Koure, Niger — A crisp African dawn is breaking overhead, and Zibo Mounkaila is on the back of a pickup truck bounding across a sparse landscape of rocky orange soil.

The tallest animals on earth are here, the guide says, somewhere amid the scant green bush on one side, and the thatched dome villages on the other.

They're here, but by all accounts, they shouldn't be.

A hundred years ago, West Africa's last giraffes numbered in the thousands and their habitat stretched from Senegal's Atlantic Ocean coast to Chad, in the heart of the continent. By the dawn of the 21st century, their world had shrunk to a tiny zone southeast of the capital, Niamey, stretching barely 150 miles (240 kilometers) long.

The numbers of the Western subspecies dwindled so low that in 1996, they numbered a mere 50.

Instead of disappearing as many feared, though, the giraffes have bounced miraculously back from the brink of extinction, swelling to more than 200 today.

It's an unlikely boon experts credit to a combination of concerned conservationists, a government keen for revenue, and a rare harmony with villagers who have accepted their presence - for now.

Florida College Republicans group hosts meaty barbeque to protest PETA

A Republican students' group at the University of Florida used barbeque to voice its opposition to PETA's principles on Wednesday -- and encouraged students to bring their pets to the event. Why that last part? Well, to prove that the group's members love animals, of course.

Wait, what?

UF's College Republicans organization staged the event, which it termed the People Eating Tasty Animals Barbeque, to draw attention to what its members say are the extreme stances of that other PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.  "I think it's the best thing ever," Nick Galyon, a junior at UF, told the student-run newspaper the Independent Florida Alligator. "I am a big supporter of eating animals. I think PETA is just ridiculous. It's liberal propaganda."

College Republicans President Bryan Griffin (no relation to the fictional, talking dog from TV's "Family Guy") echoed Galyon's sentiment in an interview with the Gainesville Sun's Chalkboard blog.  "We're against radical environmental extremism," Griffin said. 

Oklahoma couple sideswipes escaped circus elephant with their SUV

It's not unusual to see a deer or a cow crossing Oklahoma's rural highways. But an elephant?

An Oklahoma couple driving home from church nearly slammed into a pachyderm that had escaped from a nearby circus late Wednesday.

"Didn't have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road," driver Bill Carpenter said today. "At the very last second, I said, 'Elephant!' "

Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his SUV at the last second and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female Asian elephant on U.S. 81 in Enid, about 80 miles north of Oklahoma City.

"So help me Hanna, had I hit that elephant, not swerved, it would have knocked it off its legs, and it would have landed right on top of us," he said. "We'd have been history."

The couple, who own a wheat farm, weren't injured. But the 8-foot, 4,500-pound elephant was being examined today for a broken tusk and a leg wound. A local veterinarian said it appeared to have escaped major injury.

Strange bedfellows: Glenn Beck, PETA join forces to give Al Gore what for

A day has dawned that we never thought we would see: conservative Fox News commentator Glenn Beck (who recently shocked viewers with his throwing-a-seemingly-live-frog-in-boiling-water gag) has publicly expressed his admiration for controversial animal-rights group PETA.

All right, so Beck's strange leap onto PETA's bandwagon just so happens to give him some ammunition against another of his regular targets, former Vice President Al Gore.

PETA has long held that Gore, whose work on behalf of the environment is well-known and who has apparently become the world's first "carbon billionaire," is remiss in failing to promote vegetarianism as an effective means of helping the environment.  ("Gore should have named his movie Sorta-Inconvenient Truths if he didn't want to cover the environmental destruction that his meaty diet causes," PETA blogger Shawna Flavell wrote earlier this year.)  Odd as it may sound coming from him, Beck says he agrees.

The Fox host explained last week that he's "siding with PETA on this one -- once again asking Al Gore: If you really want to save the planet, put down the cheeseburgers and pick up the veggie burgers. Time for soy milk and [Tofurky]. No more delicious chocolate cookies -- how about a nice bean-thing. That is, if you want to save the planet."  (Apparently Beck hasn't tried the host of delicious and widely available chocolate cookies that are free of animal products, but we digress.)

Bizarre baldness strikes female spectacled bears in Leipzig zoo

It's a tough time to be a spectacled bear at the zoo in Leipzig, Germany -- at least, it's a tough time to be a female spectacled bear.  Veterinarians are struggling to determine why the zoo's female spectacled bears have suddenly lost nearly all their fur, which is typically shaggy for both females and males of their species.  There has been speculation that a genetic defect could be responsible, but beyond the obvious hair loss and its accompanying itchiness, no other symptoms have been noted in the affected bears.

The U.K.'s Daily Mail reports that zoogoers have turned out in droves to see the bizarre, as-yet-unexplained sight of the balding bears.  Dolores, above, and Lolita, another female, have retained tufts of fur around their faces and chests.  Meanwhile, according to the Sun, keepers have contacted a number of other zoos worldwide to ask for advice on the bizarre malady.

Spectacled bears are native to South America and are sometimes called Andean bears, after the mountain range they occupy.  They are South America's only native bear, and they're typically distinguishable (though you wouldn't know it from the photo of poor Dolores here) by eyeglass-shaped markings on their faces. 

In honor of Halloween: Real-life things that go bump in the night

Some Halloween enthusiasts will spend our most ghoulish holiday celebrating fictional beasts (werewolves and the like) and famous, fictional freaks (classics like Frankenstein, newfangled ones like Pinhead). 

Those Halloween enthusiasts -- and we won't name any names -- are missing out.  Like the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction, and a number of animal oddities are actually far more creepy than anything Mary Shelley ever imagined or Hollywood ever dished out.  At right, for instance, meet one of the world's largest rats, weighing 3 pounds (sure, he looks docile in the hands of mammalogist Martua Sinaga, but we'd probably view him in a rather different light were we to meet him in a dark alley).  The creature was discovered in New Guinea's Foja mountain range.

Hungry (okay, poor choice of word) for more?  Check out The Times' photo gallery of odder-than-your-typical-ghoul members of the animal kingdom.  Spoiler alert: You'll find the big-mouthed and fanged Khorat frog; the so-called "hairy frog," which can poke the sharp bones in its toes through the skin to attack a predator; the prehensile pangolin, toothless but covered in razor-sharp scales; and the barreleye fish, whose transparent head contains tubular eyes that rotate to help it make the most of dim light deep below the surface of the ocean.

We've saved the best for last: The blue-eyed Vampyroteuthis infernalis, whose name translates to "vampire squid from hell."  You don't get much more rock 'n roll -- or more Halloween -- than that.

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-- Lindsay Barnett

Photo: Bruce M. Beehler / AFP/Getty Images