Shark in the Driveway

0:03 Hey there, I'm Johnny Mac with five good news stories. Here in New Jersey, we recently had a pretty bad nor'easter that pushed water across the barrier islands in Ocean County, New Jersey. Streets flooded, driveways flooded, and in Surf City, there was a shark in the street. Now, this wasn't AI. I know you've seen that in the past. This actually happened. Drew filmed it. We see the shark moving through the floodwater in his driveway. and heading, as far as anyone could tell, in the direction of Barnegat Bay, where I've been known to swim. Hmm. Greg, a shark biologist, reviewed the footage and identified the animal as a smooth dogfish, a common coastal species not dangerous to humans. Good to know. These kind of sharks live in exactly the kind of waters that surround the Jersey Shore barrier islands. The shark appeared healthy in the footage. It was swimming purposefully. And Barnegat Bay, where it was headed, is home to smooth dogfish, so the shark wasn't lost. It was just taking an unusual route. In 2004, Andres, a graduate student, was on an expedition in Mongolia's Gobi Desert when he found something in the rock. It was small, six to seven inches long, and had been there for about 66 million years. He brought it back, he set it with his collection, and it stayed there until researchers at Stony Brook University took another look. What they found when they examined the whole skeleton, rather than just the teeth, was they were dealing with something that didn't fit where it had been placed. For 40 years, a small group of Cretaceous mammals called Gelestids had been classified based on their teeth, which looked like the teeth of early hoofed mammals, the ancestors of horses and elephants and rhinos. The dental similarity had driven a

1:36 longstanding theory that modern hoofed mammals had originated in Asia. This skeleton told a different story. Its skeleton didn't match what you'd expect from an ancestor of a hoofed mammal. The teeth were similar, but the rest of the animal wasn't. As for what they are, you'd have to ask the scientists. And we all remember that horrible incident back in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School when a gunman killed 20 children and six staff members. Nicole's six-year-old son Dylan was one of the children. She became a founder of Sandy Hook Promise, an organization built around a specific idea that school shootings are often preventable because attackers almost always tell someone what they're planning. They send messages. They make statements. They give warnings. The organization built the Say Something Anonymous reporting system, a tip line that allows students to report threats safely, without fear of retaliation, 24 hours a day.

2:24 Since 2018, the system has helped prevent more than 20 school shootings. In August of this year, a tip to the system in Arkansas led authorities to intervene before a planned attack at a local school. In late September, a white-tailed deer wandered through the neighborhoods of Midland Park, New Jersey. Everybody who saw the deer knew something was wrong. The deer had a wooden pole tangled in its antlers. Along with netting, he apparently had gotten into someone's garden equipment, something like a tomato cage, something like that, and he couldn't get it free. The deer kept moving. The pole went with him. Residents tracked his movements. He showed up in yards, driveways, the edges of properties, carrying his cargo. People called animal control. They took pictures. New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife officers eventually located the deer, tranquilized the deer, removed the pole and the netting. The deer woke up and walked away. Good news if you're a tiger.

3:10 Back in 2009, Nepal conducted a census and counted 121 wild tigers in the country. The number was already being worked on. Rangers were protecting their habitats. Anti-poaching patrols were running. Communities near the tiger territory were being brought into conservation planning rather than being pushed out of it. The country had committed back in 2010 to double the tiger population by 2022, which was the next Chinese year of the tiger. They doubled it ahead of schedule. Now, this September, they took a census. The current population is 429. That's more than triple from 2009. Nice job. And more than four times the historic low that set off the conservation response in the first place. Nepal is roughly the size of Arkansas.

3:51 It has lost a lot of forest cover to agriculture over the decades. But the rangers did the work and the communities chipped in. And good news for the tigers. And those are your five good news stories for today. You have an awesome day.