Curated playlist
Animal taxa named by Carl Linnaeus
- ChickenChickens were apparently first kept for fighting, not for food. Eggs and meat came later.
- Red foxThe red fox, Vulpes vulpes, occupies a range of nearly 70 million square kilometres that stretches north as far as the Arctic Circle. It is the largest of the true foxes. It is also among the most widely distributed members of the order…
- LionLions now live in only two separate places, Africa and western India. Since 1996 the IUCN has listed them as Vulnerable.
- CattleThe word cattle comes from a Latin word meaning a sum of money. It first meant movable property, as opposed to land.
- SheepSheep can remember the faces of fifty other sheep for over two years. A 2001 study in Nature found it.
- HorseWhy can a horse sleep standing up yet collapse if it never lies down? Deep REM sleep requires lying down.
- Red deerA red deer stag's antlers can grow up to 2.5 cm a day. Each spring they regrow inside soft skin called velvet.
- MooseA bull moose regrows its antlers from nothing in three to five months.
- GoatGoats are the only ruminant that regularly climbs trees. They also have slit-shaped pupils and no tear ducts.
- HomoHomo is the genus of great apes to which every person alive today belongs. Carl Linnaeus created it in the 18th century and coined the name Homo sapiens in 1758. He never wrote down what the genus included. At the time it held only humans,…
- European badgerThe European badger has a jaw strong enough to amputate a human hand. Its heavy skull also makes it hard to hurt.
- Great white sharkThe great white shark has 300 teeth in rows, each one replaced all its life.
- TigerThe tiger's orange coat may look green to its prey. Its main prey species are colour-blind, so the fur blends in.
- WeaselEarly-modern Germany set aside three weeks just for killing weasels.
- WolfWolves have been driven from the British Isles entirely. Their range is now about one-third of its historic size.
- MallardThe deep quack people imitate as a duck sound belongs to the female mallard.
- LeopardA leopard was once seen hauling a young giraffe up a tree. The calf weighed nearly 125 kilograms.
- Brown bearThe brown bear can run down a moose, yet 90% of its food comes from plants. Adults can weigh up to 600 kg.
- Common quailEating a common quail can sometimes put you in the hospital. If it ate certain plants, its flesh can turn toxic.
- Eurasian eagle-owlAn owl once stopped a Finland-Belgium football match for six minutes.
- HaddockThe haddock wears a dark blotch called the Devil's thumbprint. Scientists named its genus after it.
- Canada gooseThe largest wild goose ever recorded was a male Canada goose. It weighed 10.9 kilograms and had a wingspan of 2.24 metres. That bird came from the giant subspecies, whose males rarely exceed 8 kilograms. This documentary follows a bird…
- CatThe oldest solid evidence of a tamed cat comes from Cyprus, not Egypt.
- Bengal tigerThe Bengal tiger, a population of the subspecies Panthera tigris tigris, was counted for decades by its footprints. Through the 20th century, Indian censuses identified individual tigers by their pug marks, a method later criticised as…
- PrimateIn 1960, Jane Goodall watched a chimpanzee fish for termites with a grass stem. Only humans were thought to use tools.
- CamelA camel's hump holds fat, not water. Its real water savings happen elsewhere in the body.
- Early modern humanRemains from the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco have been dated to about 315,000 years ago, and they are counted among the oldest known members of our own species. They belong to what scientists call early modern humans, or anatomically…
- DogA dog buried in Germany 14,223 years ago had survived distemper as a puppy.
- American bisonBy 1889, only 541 American bison were left in the United States. They once numbered an estimated 60 million.
- Capra (genus)Why can't scientists fully sort out the wild goat family tree? DNA showed look-alike ibexes are not close relatives.
- CougarThe cougar holds the Guinness record for the most names of any animal.
- DonkeyTen donkeys were buried beside one of the first pharaohs. Archaeologists found them in an Egyptian tomb in 2003.
- Golden eagleThe golden eagle spends most of the day sitting still. In Idaho, adult males perched for an average of 78% of the day.
- HippopotamusUntil 1909, naturalists grouped hippos with pigs. Their closest living relatives are whales and dolphins.
- LlamaThe llama holds a place in Aymara mythology. Its Heavenly Llama is said to drink water from the ocean and release it as rain. In Aymara belief about the end of time, llamas will return to the springs and ponds from which they came. The…
- Honey beeA honey bee queen, once she has mated, can lay up to 2,000 eggs in a single day. Around her may live tens of thousands of workers, and none of them survives alone. The honey bee is a eusocial flying insect of the genus Apis, which means…
- FalconFalcons look like hawks and eagles but are not closely related to them.
- OrcaThe orca, also known as the killer whale, is the largest member of the oceanic dolphin family. Some orcas have been seen swimming with dead salmon balanced on their heads, like odd little hats. It is a playful image for an animal with such…
- Sperm whaleThe sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus, makes the loudest sound of any animal on Earth. Its underwater clicks reach a source level of 236 decibels. That volume is only one oddity in a toothed whale that lives in every ocean and hunts…
- Wild boarIn 1749, in Hachinohe, Japan, 3,000 people died in what became known as the wild boar famine. The animal behind that name is the wild boar, Sus scrofa, also called the wild swine or the Eurasian wild pig. Its native range covers much of…
- ReindeerA walking reindeer clicks, and the sound can be heard from several hundred metres away. The noise comes from small tendons in the legs slipping over bony knobs called sesamoid bones. It happens as the full weight of a foot lands, or just…
- Grizzly bearWhen Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first described the grizzly bear, they wrote its name as grisley. That spelling can be read two ways. It can mean grizzled, as in hair tipped with grey. It can also mean grisly, something that…
- WalrusAt the Tierpark Hagenbeck, walruses easily pulled a five-pound metal plug out of the bottom of their pool, even though it sat under 1.1 metres of water. The animal behind that feat is the walrus, Odobenus rosmarus, a large marine mammal…
- RaccoonThe raccoon, Procyon lotor, has been known to live more than 20 years in captivity. In the wild, its life expectancy is only 1.8 to 3.1 years. That gap is strange for a mammal native to North America that is famous for adapting to almost…
- JaguarThe jaguar, Panthera onca, kills with a bite that drives straight through the skull between the ears and into the brain. Few big cats hunt this way, and the habit says a lot about an animal built for ambush in the forests, swamps and…
- WolverineThe wolverine known as M-56 began his famous journey as a young male, tagged by Wildlife Conservation Society officials in Wyoming near Grand Teton National Park. Researchers tracked him south for almost three months. In June 2009 the…
- StoatThe stoat, known to science as Mustela erminea, is a small meat-eating member of the mustelid family. By 2024, the Orkney Native Wildlife Project had spent £7.9m trapping more than 6,300 of them. Stoats have lived on that archipelago north…
- Common ravenA piece of meat hangs from a perch on a length of string. Five common ravens were given this puzzle in an experiment on insight and problem-solving. Four of them solved it. To do so, a bird had to stand on the perch, pull the string up a…
- House sparrowThe house sparrow, a bird about 16 cm long, has been recorded breeding in an English coal mine 640 m below ground. It has also been seen feeding at night on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Few wild animals turn up in…
- MammalA bumblebee bat and a blue whale belong to the same class of animals. Both make milk for their young.