Cat poetry (Part 2)
The famed Romantic poet Thomas Gray wrote a verse about his friend’s cat drowning in a goldfish bowl. [2 of 2]
Category: Animals
Cat poetry (Part 1)
Cat poetry has a long history: Christopher Smart wrote a Romantic religious poem featuring his cat Jeoffry while confined in a mental asylum in the 1760s. [1 of 2]
Cross-eyed white tigers
Almost all white tigers have crossed eyes.
Lasso snake
The brown tree snake can climb trees and power poles by looping itself into a lasso.
Orangutan nests
Orangutans, like all great apes, build nests. Sometimes these include pillows, blankets, and bunk beds.
Sweat genes are made of this
The human gene ABCC11 determines whether your sweat smells bad or not. It also determines whether your earwax is wet or dry.
Sky compass
Bees use sunlight polarisation patterns to navigate. We can train ourselves to detect light polarisation too.
A quadrillion fish
The bristlemouth, a small ugly genus of fish found in the ocean twilight zone, is probably the most common vertebrate on the planet – estimates go as high as the quadrillions.
Monorail elephant
In 1950 Tuffi the elephant fell 12 metres out of a suspended monorail into a river. She survived.
Glowing snails
Just one species of land snail and a few species of freshwater snail glow in the dark.
Sea life in glass
19th century glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka provided natural history museums around the world with lifelike glass replicas of marine life.
Horror frog
The Central African hairy frog can break its own bones and stick them through its skin as impromptu claws.
The house in the depths
A significant proportion of the food in the deepest ocean falls from discarded giant larvacean houses.
Shot by Australia’s first camel
The first camel in Australia shot its owner, the English explorer John Horrocks.
The rock-paper-scissors lizard
Side-blotched lizards cycle through three different colour patterns and behaviours in an evolutionary game of rock-paper-scissors.
Weirdest shark
The cookiecutter shark is easily the weirdest shark around: it uses bioluminescence to lure large predators, feeds by suction, sheds whole rows of teeth at once and swallows them, and by weight can be more than one third liver.