‘Highway of death’: animals pay ultimate price on Brazil’s most dangerous road for wildlife

More than 3,000 animals die on the country's BR-262 road each year, but legal action by activists is forcing authorities to take notice

The last time Schwartz's tracking monitor registered his location, he was standing at the edge of the highway of death". A massive male giant anteater, he was roaming his habitat in the Brazilian Cerrado - a vast tropical savanna that neighbours the world's largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal - when he disappeared next to the federal highway officially known as the BR-262. No more GPS datapoints, collected every 20 minutes, were recorded.

But biologists and veterinarians from the Institute for the Conservation of Wild Animals' (ICAS) Anteaters and Highways Project, who had placed the collar on him, were sure of what happened.