The Columbia Basin Pigmy Rabbit is the smallest and perhaps the rarest rabbit breed in the world. It is native to just one part of the Washington State Area, and weighs under 500 grams.

There are plenty of tiny domestic rabbit breeds to choose from if you’re looking for an adorable pet rabbit, but the tiniest of them all is actually a wild breed that doesn’t make a great pet. The Columbia Basin Pigmy Rabbit is skittish and nervous, but the main reason why you’ll most likely never own one is its critically endangered status. The breed was declared extinct in the wild in 2001, when the last 14 specimens were scooped up from their native habitat and put into a captive breeding program.

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Gregorio Romero, an 84-year-old man from Mexico’s Sonora state, owes his life to his pet dog, El Palomo, who led rescuers to him after becoming lost in the desert for a week.

On November 27, Gregorio Romero left his home in Moctezuma to go for a walk, but he didn’t come back. His family wasn’t concerned at first, as the octogenarian sometimes used to visit nearby villages in the area and return a few days later. However, after four days, the man’s niece, Ramona, alerted the authorities about his disappearance, and a search party was put together. They searched the area around Romero’s home, but a week after his disappearance, the octogenarian was nowhere to be found. In the end, it was the man’s faithful pet dog that saved the day.

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Cheetahs are famous for their speed, but they don’t even come close to the world’s faster animal, a falcon that swoops on its unsuspecting prey at speeds of over 300 km per hour.

The peregrine falcon is one of the most efficient predators on Earth, and it owes much of that efficiency to its unrivaled speed. During its characteristic dive, this majestic creature reaches an average speed of 320 km/h, but the highest measured speed of a peregrine falcon is actually 389 km/h (242 mph), which makes it faster than the vast majority of commercially available cars. And it’s obviously much faster than the cheetah’s 64 mph record.

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Honeypot Ants, or honey ants, are specialized workers of several species of ants whose sole job is to gorge on nectar until they become living honey-storage.

Did you know that honeybees aren’t the only insects capable of producing the sweet, viscous, and brown-to-golden-colored natural product we know as honey? Several other species of bees, as well as bumblebees and even wasps are known to produce the sugary treat, but perhaps the most unusual insect able to convert nectar into honey is the honeypot ant. Belonging to a number of ant species, the most common of which is Camponotus inflatus, honeypot ants are specialized workers that act as living storage for their colonies when food is scarce.

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Measuring around 10 cm, with a diameter comparable to that of a cooked spaghetti, the Barbados Threadsnake (Tetracheilostoma carlae) is by far the smallest snake in the world.

Spotting a Barbados threadsnake for the first time, you could swear it was an earthworm. They are actually comparable in size and diameter, with the largest specimen ever found measuring only 10.4 centimeters, and are also blind. They also typically weigh under one gram and are small enough to coil on an American quarter. The species was officially discovered slithering beneath a rock near a patch of Barbadian forest in 2008 by evolutionary biologist S. Blair Hedges, but little has been discovered about its ecology and behavior since.

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Using their large feet and fast stride, the Western and Clark’s grebes can run as far as 20 meters on water, making them the only bird and the heaviest animal on Earth capable of doing so.

If you exclude Jesus Christ, whose biblical feat of walking on water is literally considered a miracle of the New Testament, only a handful of creatures are known to be able to walk or run on water. Most of them are small insects, but there is also a small basilisk nicknamed the Jesus Christ lizard for very obvious reasons, but the largest of them all are two bird species – the Western and Clark’s grebes. They can run on water for up to 7 seconds and distances of about 20 minutes as part of an impressive mating ritual.

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Dexter, a 7-year-old Brittany Spaniel from Colorado, has become an inspiration for many around the world after he taught himself to stand up and walk on his hind legs after suffering an accident.

When he was only a puppy, Dexter escaped his owners’ yard in Ouray, Colorado, darted into traffic and got hit by a car. One of his front legs had to be amputated and the other was severely damaged. But he survived, and that’s all his owners cared about. They assumed he would need some kind of wheelchair to get around without his front legs, and he did use one for a while, but only until he learned he could walk much faster on his hind legs alone. Since then, he has been walking like a human, turning heads around town and inspiring the entire world.

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When a Ukrainian family returned to their war-ravaged home in Hostomel after four months, the last thing they expected to find was their beloved pet husky, Belyi.

In March of this year, when Russia started targeting Hostomel’s strategically important airport with its artillery, 35-year-old Kateryna Tytova and her family had to make a heartbreaking decision. Kateryna, her husband Olexandr and their two young children fled the city and left their white husky, Belyi behind. It sounds cruel, but those were desperate times. Russians were advancing, there was shelling around the airport, and there was no time to plan their escape. A photo of Kateryna holding her 5-year-old’s daughter as they run from artillery shelling has made international headlines. But despite leaving Belyi behind, the family always hoped he would be waiting for them when they came back.

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The gumboot chiton, a marine mollusk also known as the Wondering Meatloaf, has teeth made of the hardest biological material known to man.

Magnetite is a geologic mineral commonly found in the earth’s crust, but it’s also somehow produced by the gumboot chiton and synthesized into rows of small teeth hard enough to scrape algae off of rocks. The top of these teeth is layered with magnetite, which makes them literally as strong as steel, but the root is also incredibly tough, thanks to another iron-like material that has never been observed in living creatures before – santabarbaraite. This unique combination makes the chiton’s teeth the hardest biological material in the world.

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The western hook-nosed snake, a small snake endemic to the deserts of the United States and Mexico, is famous for the shape of its snout and for farting to confuse its enemies.

Cobras and rattlesnakes have their deadly venom, constrictors like pythons and Boa have their strong musculature, but the western hook-nosed snake doesn’t have either, so it relies on a more unusual defense mechanism – farting. When threatened, it emits rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca – the common opening for excretion at a snake’s rear end. Known and cloacal popping or defensive flatulence, this strange means of defense is designed to confuse predators long enough for the snakes to escape.

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The workers of several ant species have large, flattened, and slightly concave heads that they use as plugs to block entrance to their colonies’ nests.

The so-called ‘door head ants’ are soldier ants with armored heads that match both the size and the shape of the entrance to their colonies’ nests almost to perfection. They function as living doors, using their heads to plug shut the nest and only allow access to other members of the colony while keeping unwanted guests out. Door head ants can be found in several ant genera, including Cephalotes and Carebara. How these species developed the exact size and shape as the entries to their nests is the result of millions of years of evolution.

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The Onagadori (‘honorable fowl’ in Japanese) is a rare chicken breed known for its exceptionally long tail, which can reach over 10 meters, putting even peacocks to shame.

Of the seventeen chicken breeds considered Japanese national treasures, the Onagadori is the only one to have “special” status. Ever since it received this status in 1952, exports of Onagadori birds and eggs were forbidden, so there are very few specimens, if any, found outside of Japan today. The breed is famous for the non-molting, and thus incredibly long tails of roosters, which, if kept in the best conditions with high levels of animal husbandry, can grow for the lifetime of the bird.

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What do you get if you mix a bird, a squirrel and a lizard? Well, I think you’ll have a tough time finding a better answer than the Great Eared Nightjar.

Seeing a great eared nightjar for the first time, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a squirrel or even a lizard. The fact is it kind of looks like a combination of animals, or even a real-live version of Toothless, the dragon from DreamWorks Studios’ hit animation “How to Train Your Dragon“. You could say it’s living proof that birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than reptiles.

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Out of the roughly 1,400 species of land snails that call Cuba home, the six species of the genus Polymita, fondly known as painted snails, are without a doubt the most eye-catching.

When it comes to snail per se, there’s probably no beating the spectacular red-and-black contrast of the Malaysian fire snail, but as far as shells go, Cuba’s painted snails are in a class of their own. Just a look at the stunning swirling colors on their shells, and it’s easy to understand why they are considered by many to be the world’s most beautiful snails. However, this flattering title comes with a downside. Because their dazzling shells are so sought after by collectors, all six species of the genus Polymita are now critically endangered.

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Scientists recently found that one of the world’s “toothiest” animals, the Pacific lingcod, keeps its 555 teeth razor-sharp by losing up to 20 of them every day and growing them right back.

The Pacific lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus) is a carnivorous fish found in the North Pacific. You couldn’t tell just by looking at it, but this 20-inch (on average) fish has one of the scariest mouths in the world. Instead of the incisors, molars, and canines we’re used to seeing, it has hundreds of nearly microscopic teeth lining its jaws. Their hard palate is also covered in hundreds of tiny spikes, as are the pharyngeal jaws, a set of accessory jaws that the lingcod uses to chew its food the way we use our molars. Now scientists have found that Pacific lingcod keep their hundreds of teeth sharp by losing and then growing dozens of them in a day.

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