A five-metre great white shark has kept New South Wales beaches closed for a record fifth day in a row.

A resource consent bid for a chicken egg layer farm of 310,000 birds in rural south Auckland has been rejected, because of fears it would be too stinky.

Wondering how my local beach fared after a hot day with lots of human activity, I took my dogs for a run and did a spot of rubbish collecting along the shore and rock pools.

Resembling a fierce ancestor of the Loch Ness monster, the first fossil of a shark-like reptile has been found.

Humans have been doing a lot of terrible stuff to each other lately. Some of us are evil bastards, but as a species I reckon we're generally pretty good.

Sharks enjoying the surf at a popular Coromandel holiday spot caused a bit of a stir with beachgoers yesterday.

Cats are never around when you want them most.

Andrew and Fleur the cats were rescued by the SPCA from a house overrun by animals.

Sadie was found in a paddock of horses.

If your not sure what to do with your leftover Christmas tree a zoo in England has come up with a unique solution - throw them to the lions.

Whitey the hen is especially fond of bananas. Last year Whitey joined Lompie the rooster, Panda the cat and Gustav the sheep at Bianca Hill's lifestyle block in Flat Bush, Manukau.

Losing our native species is not an inevitability but a choice - and one that could hurt New Zealand in more ways than we realise.

Five months ago, Juno came home from the SPCA to join Gerard and Liz Buckley and their two cats, Charlotte and Zeus.

This is a true underdog story, a young brother and sister duo from the foothills of Richmond.

It's party time for pests, and some holidaymakers are returning to find uninvited, hungry house-sitters lurking at home.

On Labour Weekend this year, Ashley Schomaker decided to make the holiday a memorable one.

Thousands of people have again levelled contempt at Texas cheerleader Kendall Jones over an online competition she set up to find the "hottest" male hunter.

New figures show ACC paid $49.1 million in compensation for more than 107,000 animal-related incidents in the past two years.

A hippopotamus was left lying injured on the side of the road for hours after making a panicked jump from a truck in Taiwan.

Conservationists have reintroduced the gibbons as part of an ambitious project for the "re-wilding" of Angkor Wat, a vast "temple city" that was once surrounded by forests.

The mine-strewn border between Iran and Iraq has become an unlikely sanctuary for one of the world's most endangered species of leopard.

Smokey the goat was never a likely best friend for Madelaine Young's retriever poodle, Teddy.

Two youths have been charged after police found 22 sheep crammed in a van in Gisborne this morning.

Chow Chow dogs, painted and dyed to look like panda bears, have been seized from an Italian circus.

The move to grant an orang-utan in Argentina some legal rights enjoyed by humans could open the floodgates to thousands of similar cases.

A newly discovered beetle has been named after television naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

There are aliens living amongst us, not little green men but foreign animal species from ecosystems far away, writes Sally Hibbard.

An Argentine court has granted "habeas corpus" to a female orangutan at the Buenos Aires Zoo and recognised basic rights for her as a "non-human individual" to live in semi-freedom with other large primates.

A rare native bird has been released back into the wild a month on from a stormy rescue by a Hamilton police officer.