Curated playlist
Extant Pleistocene first appearances
- ElkEarly English colonists gave the elk a name that belonged to the European moose. Shawnee and Cree called it wapiti.
- TigerThe tiger's orange coat may look green to its prey. Its main prey species are colour-blind, so the fur blends in.
- MallardThe deep quack people imitate as a duck sound belongs to the female mallard.
- PronghornThe pronghorn can run 55 miles per hour over half a mile, faster than any other American land animal.
- 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…
- Capra (genus)Why can't scientists fully sort out the wild goat family tree? DNA showed look-alike ibexes are not close relatives.
- 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…
- CheetahIn under three seconds, a cheetah can accelerate from a standstill to 97 kilometres per hour. The animal is Acinonyx jubatus, the only living member of its genus and the fastest land animal on Earth. Yet in 2021 the global population was…
- 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…
- BonoboThe bonobo, known to science as Pan paniscus, lives in the wild in just one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its home is a region of roughly 500,000 square kilometres in the Congo Basin. Primary forest, secondary forest and…
- LemurMadame Berthe's mouse lemur weighs about 30 grams, which makes it the smallest primate in the world. Lemurs also once included Archaeoindris, an extinct giant that rivaled a gorilla in size. Both belong to one group of wet-nosed primates…
- ZebraCharles Darwin once wrote that "a female zebra would not admit the addresses of a male ass until he was painted so as to resemble a zebra." He wrote that in 1871, and it shows how much attention the animal's coat drew from naturalists.…
- Guinea pigThe guinea pig, known to science as Cavia porcellus, is a rodent that gets almost everything about its name wrong. It is not native to Guinea, and it is not closely related to pigs. Breeders prefer the word cavy, pronounced KAY-vee, while…