Endangered by Research

Poachers mine the scientific literature for the locations of newly discovered animals

By LILA GUTERMAN

The gecko could have sprung from the mind of Dr. Seuss: It had black spots. It had white spots. It had stripes upon those spots. The nine-inch-long lizard with bright-orange eyes was new to science in the late 1990s, when L. Lee Grismer, a professor of biology...