A species of leaf chameleon new to science, measuring less than half the length of a human forefinger, has been discovered in a tiny patch of Madagascar’s highly threatened coastal rainforests.

at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany and his colleagues were alerted to its presence by tourists posting photos of the tiny reptiles on the internet.

Vences’s Malagasy collaborators, and Alida Frankline Hasiniaina, went looking for it and collected the first sample.

Leaf chameleons, from the genus Brookesia, are miniature chameleons the colour of fallen leaves that have been breaking records for their small body sizes in recent years.

Brookesia nana, for example, , is just 22 millimetres long and is thought to be the world’s smallest reptile.

The new species, named Brookesia nofy after the Ankanin’ny Nofy tourist site where it was found on Madagascar’s eastern coastline, is only slightly bigger at around 33 millimetres long. It is the first leaf chameleon to be found living in coastal or littoral, rainforests – arguably the island’s most threatened habitat. Once extensive, only around 10 per cent remains.

It is possible B. nofy has only survived because the forest patch where it is found is part of a private reserve run by a hotel whose owners have allowed trees to regenerate over the past 20 years. The species was also photographed by a local journalist five years ago in a bigger patch of forest nearby, but when Vences and his colleagues visited two years ago, they witnessed a large part of that forest being destroyed by bushfires.

Supporting ecotourism ventures that give international tourists a chance to view Madagascar’s rare chameleons alongside lemurs probably outweighs the heavy carbon footprint needed to travel there, says Vences.

“If people don’t see an economic value in the little patches of [surviving littoral] forest, the forest will be gone,” he says.

Dozens of species of African birds of prey are in steep decline, with many now considered at risk of extinction, according to an analysis of data from across the continent.

Farming and pesticide use, poisoning by poachers and the proliferation of infrastructure like power lines that can be deadly to birds have reduced numbers of nearly all 42 species surveyed.

These include secretary birds (Sagittarius serpentarius), which declined by 85 per cent over three generations; martial eagles (Polemaetus bellicosus), which fell by 90 per cent on the same measure, and bateleurs (Terathopius ecaudatus), down by 87 per cent.

Some birds thought not to be vulnerable to extinction now are, the study found. For instance, African hawk-eagles (Aquila spilogaster), currently listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as being of “least concern”, were estimated to have declined by 91 per cent.

There are calls to move the listing of such species higher up conservation rankings to reflect the changes. “We’re definitely hoping this paper will add pressure to uplist the rest [of the surveyed species now facing threats], sooner rather than later,” says study author from The Peregrine Fund, a US-based organisation.

Data was gathered from more than 53,000 sightings of the 42 species on nearly 100,000 kilometres of surveyed roads in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Cameroon, Botswana and Kenya between 1969 and 2020.

Additional data came from the most recent Southern African Bird Atlas Project, a citizen science-led survey.

The researchers found that declines among the 42 species were more than twice as bad in unprotected areas than in protected ones, showing that well-managed national parks and reserves are critical to aiding the birds’ long-term survival.

More work to understand the fate of such birds is needed. “We should urgently increase studies that estimate raptor population trends based on modelling the loss of threatened habitats such as forests, wetlands and grasslands, or the loss or mismanagement of protected areas,” says Ogada.

Footprints preserved in stone in Lesotho appear to have been made by animals that walked on birdlike feet around 215 million years ago, long before the earliest known birds.

The earliest fossils recognised as ancestors of modern birds, including the famous Archaeopteryx, date back 150 million to 160 million years.

and both at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, studied an 80-metre-long stretch of footprints at a site called Maphutseng, as well as casts and sketches made by previous researchers at four other sites in Lesotho.

Like the other sites, Maphutseng preserves diverse footprints. The researchers focused on Trisauropodiscus, a name given to distinctively-shaped three-toed footprints left by animals whose exact identities remain a mystery.

They found the footprints could be separated into two main groups based on their shape, one of them distinctly birdlike.

“Our birdlike ones have a big wide splay in the outer digits, like a waterbird, and the toes were incredibly slender, with the central toe not really projecting far forward,” says Abrahams.

The general shape of the footprint is very comparable to other fossil bird tracks and also modern bird tracks, she says.

The second group of footprints had more rounded, robust and elongated toes that were less splayed out. They resembled another type of footprint, known collectively as Anomoepus, which are attributed to dinosaurs with birdlike hips.

The discovery of two distinct groups of Trisauropodiscus suggests that birdlike feet evolved much earlier than the first birds, and may have evolved independently in other animal groups.

But it remains unclear what the animal that made the footprints looked like. “We’re pretty sure it’s not a bird, and it’s most likely a dinosaur, but what dinosaur I’m not really sure,” says Abrahams. “We have nothing in our local fossil record that’s comparable.”