Curated playlist
Apex predators
- LionLions now live in only two separate places, Africa and western India. Since 1996 the IUCN has listed them as Vulnerable.
- 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.
- LeopardA leopard was once seen hauling a young giraffe up a tree. The calf weighed nearly 125 kilograms.
- Eurasian eagle-owlAn owl once stopped a Finland-Belgium football match for six minutes.
- Bull sharkThe bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, has been found as far up the Mississippi River as Alton, Illinois. That is about 700 miles from the ocean. A shark that size, in a muddy American river, sounds like a mistake. Yet the bull shark is a…
- CougarThe cougar holds the Guinness record for the most names of any animal.
- Golden eagleThe golden eagle spends most of the day sitting still. In Idaho, adult males perched for an average of 78% of the day.
- African wild dogThe African wild dog, Lycaon pictus, makes some of its biggest decisions with a sneeze. In the Okavango Delta, researchers have watched packs gather in a restless huddle before a hunt. Whether the huddle breaks up and the dogs set off…
- Tiger sharkThe tiger shark, Galeocerdo cuvier, has been found with automobile license plates, oil cans, tires and baseballs in its stomach. People call it the garbage can of the sea. The nickname is a joke, but it points to a real puzzle about how…
- 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…
- Saltwater crocodileThe saltwater crocodile, known to scientists as Crocodylus porosus, has jaws that can be held shut with several layers of duct tape. That detail sounds almost comic for the largest living reptile, an animal some people simply call the…
- 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…
- 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…
- American crocodileIn 1875, William Temple Hornaday and C. E. Jackson traveled to Florida to collect alligator hides. Word reached them of a "big old gator" living in Arch Creek, at the head of Biscayne Bay. Hornaday and his companions went looking for it.…
- Peregrine falconThe peregrine falcon has been credited with a dive of 389 kilometres per hour. A National Geographic television program reported in 2005 that a falcon recorded by Ken Franklin reached that speed. Radar tells a more cautious story. The…
- Sea otterThe sea otter, Enhydra lutris, carries up to 150,000 strands of fur on a single square centimetre of its body. That is the densest coat of any animal. The sea otter is a marine mammal native to the coasts of the northern and eastern North…
- Bald eagleBy the 1950s, only 412 nesting pairs of bald eagles remained across the 48 contiguous states of the United States. In the early 18th century, the population is estimated to have stood between 300,000 and 500,000. The bald eagle, Haliaeetus…
- Snow leopardThe snow leopard, Panthera uncia, belongs to the genus that includes the lion, the tiger and the leopard, yet it cannot roar. Its vocal folds are only 9 mm long and offer little resistance to airflow. So it meows, grunts and moans instead,…
- GharialThe gharial is a fish-eating crocodilian from the rivers of the northern Indian subcontinent, and its numbers have collapsed within living memory. In 1946 the wild population was estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 animals. By 2006 fewer…
- DingoThe dingo, a lean wild dog of Australia, first appears under that name in 1789, in Watkin Tench's Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. Tench wrote: "The only domestic animal they have is the dog, which in their language is called…
- HumanAny two humans share over 99% of their genetic code. That makes people more uniform than chimpanzees.
- Komodo dragonThe Komodo dragon, known to scientists as Varanus komodoensis, is the largest living species of lizard. Males can reach 3 m in length and weigh up to 150 kg. Its home is a short chain of Indonesian islands: Komodo, Rinca, Flores, Gili…
- King cobraThe king cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, is the longest venomous snake in the world. The longest individual on record stretched 5.85 metres. Adults usually measure between 3.18 and 4 metres, and the species also ranks among the heaviest…
- Greenland sharkThe Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, was tagged off the coast of Greenland in 1936 and caught again in 1952. In those sixteen years its growth was tiny. Measurements from the two captures suggest the species adds only half a…