I know what you’re thinking: you came here to read a feature about a creature like a pink fairy armadillo or something else you’ve probably never heard of. I bet the fact that you’ve seen a rabbit or maybe even owned one as a pet makes you think you know rabbits pretty well. Right? Well you may know less than…

If you’re planning on dressing up as Wolverine for Halloween this year, folks here at the Ethogram suggest you start looking for a caribou leg and not retractable nails for your costume. Yep- that’s right- wolverines are not just a Marvel comic book character- they’re one of the most elusive and aggressive mammalian predators of…

You’ve most likely heard of squid and octopii, but have you ever seen their close relative, the Cuttlefish (Order: Sepiidae)?!  There are about 120 species of cuttlefish around the world, exhibiting an amazing array of behaviors and fascinating physiological adaptations. Like other cephalopods, cuttlefish are marine animals with at least 8

The peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus), sometimes known as the harlequin or painted mantis shrimp, are found in the warmer waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans. While commonly known for their bright coloration, the peacock mantis shrimp has one of the most advanced eyes and vision systems in the animal kingdom, far beyond those…

The story of Kitti’s Hog-nosed Bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai), also sometimes referred to as the Bumblebee Bat, is a tiny story and a sad one. This little bat, a native to parts of Thailand and Burma where it lives in limestone caves, measures in at a mere 2.9 to 3.3 cm (1.1 to 1.3 in) in…

Pufferfish. They are toxic (tetrodotoxin, to be precise). They can inflate when threatened to become huge, unwieldy balloons that are hard to eat. Most species have spines. These are things that just about everyone knows about Pufferfish. However, this is all that most people know about Pufferfish, and yet there is so much more to know. Pufferfish represent…

Animals have evolved to wonderfully conform to the environments in which they live, and animals that live in particularly extreme environments have some particularly amazing adaptations. One such animal is the Weddell Seal (Leptonychotes weddellii). With a large and stable population (estimated at around 800,000 individuals) and the ease with which humans can approach them,…

Any idea what the smallest species of Armadillo is? You guessed it! It is the tiny (only 3 or 4 inches long), and ever so cute, Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus)! This little resident of a small area of central Argentina is found in sandy desert areas where it lives by digging under ground with…

Ever wonder how big the biggest arthropod in the world is? I have, so I figured I would do a bit of poking around and see what I could find. Turns out, the world’s biggest arthropod is really big indeed! It is a crab called the Japanese Spider Crab (Macrocheira kaempferi).

There are some really cute insects out there, and one genus of especially cute insects is the genus Euspinolia, called the Panda Ants. Panda Ants are actually not ants at all, but instead are wasps of the family Mutillidae, commonly called the Velvet Ants. The Panda Ant was first described to science in 1938 and is…