Curated playlist
Herbivorous mammals
- CattleCattle have the largest biomass of any animal species on Earth, roughly 400 million tonnes of living flesh. That places them ahead of Antarctic krill at 379 million tonnes and ahead of humans at 373 million tonnes. There were over 940…
- SheepSheep recognize and remember the faces of fifty other sheep for over two years. That finding, reported in 2001 by Kenneth M. Kendrick and colleagues in the journal Nature, sits oddly against the animal's reputation. Across the English…
- HorseThe horse, Equus ferus caballus, travels on the same bones a human would use to walk on tiptoe. It carries an average weight of 500 kg on a single toe per foot, capped in keratin no different from a fingernail. This one-toed, hoofed mammal…
- ElephantElephants are the largest living land animals on Earth, and yet a single one of them can crack open a peanut shell with its trunk without breaking the seed inside. That combination of enormous scale and extraordinary precision sits at the…
- African buffaloThe African buffalo carries two nicknames that say everything about its reputation: "the Black Death" and "the widowmaker." Wounded animals have been documented ambushing and attacking the hunters who shot them, and for good reason the…
- GoatThe goat was one of the first animals humans ever domesticated. The earliest remnants of domesticated goats, dating back 10,000 years, were found at Ganj Dareh in Iran. By 2022 their descendants numbered more than 1.1 billion, scattered…
- ElkElk, known to science as Cervus canadensis, stand as the second largest member of the deer family. A mature bull can weigh close to 500 kg, carry antlers that alone tip the scales at 18 kg, and unleash a bugling call that reaches a…
- PronghornThe pronghorn can run 55 miles per hour over half a mile, faster than anything else on land in the Americas. It outpaces every predator that lives alongside it today, by a wide margin. Antilocapra americana is not an antelope, though…
- RabbitRabbits have been sentenced to death by a name. On the Isle of Portland in Dorset, older residents still refuse to say the word "rabbit" aloud, substituting "long ears" or "underground mutton" to avoid the bad luck they believe the…
- GiraffeA giraffe can land a blow with its head powerful enough to break another giraffe's jaw, snap its neck, or kill it outright. The weapon is the neck itself, swung in arcs during contests that can last more than half an hour. This is the…
- HippopotamusThe hippopotamus - whose name comes from the Ancient Greek for "river horse" - is one of the stranger animals alive on Earth today. At first glance, it looks something like a very large pig. But its closest living relatives are whales and…
- Giant pandaThe giant panda relieves itself as many as forty times a day. That is one clue to a stranger fact. This animal's body still runs like a meat eater's, even though it almost never eats meat. Native only to China, it wears an unmistakable…