From a springtail you could lose on a fingertip to a whale that outweighed the blue whale, the animals we cannot stop thinking about.
There is a springtail smaller than a grain of rice that moves so fast the camera cannot follow it. There is a jellyfish the size of your fingernail that, when it gets old, simply starts over. There is a whale from forty million years ago that may have been the heaviest animal that ever lived, and a shark swimming right now that was born before the United States.
We have been writing about animals since 2009, more than seven hundred stories at last count, and they are the posts people send to each other. This is our map of the best of them, arranged the way you would arrange a museum if nobody stopped you: from the smallest thing we have ever featured up to the largest, then out to the strangest, the gentlest, the ones you should never get close to, and the ones that are gone. Every entry links to the full story. We will keep adding to it.
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a chapter of The Natural World in our atlas
01 · Start Small
Most of the animals on Earth are ones you will never see without help. The pink springtail is about a millimeter long and escapes danger by catapulting itself with a spring folded under its belly, so quickly that on video it appears to teleport. The immortal jellyfish is the size of a fingernail and, when injured or starving, reabsorbs its own body and reverts to a polyp, which then buds into new jellyfish. It is the only animal known to do this on purpose.
A newborn swordfish fits on a fingertip and will grow to a thousand pounds. Six species of frog discovered in Mexico in 2022 are small enough to sit on a coin. And below all of them is the world the Nikon Small World contest photographs every year, where a mosquito’s foot looks like architecture. We have never run a proper post on the tardigrade, the eight-legged water bear that survives being boiled, frozen and fired into space. Consider that an open assignment.
02 · Six Legs, Eight Legs, No Legs
Insects make up the bulk of animal species and get almost none of the attention, which is why Levon Biss spent weeks photographing single museum specimens at 10,000 frames apiece, and why we keep coming back to them. There is a scarab in Costa Rica whose shell is a working mirror. There is a butterfly that has spent a few million years perfecting its impression of a dead leaf, down to the fungus spots. Fireflies in the Smokies blink in unison by the billion. Himalayan honey bees repel hornets with a stadium wave.
And there is the silk moth, which humans have bred for so long that it can no longer fly or survive outside, and which now looks like a small white dog with antennae. A million of its wild cousins in Madagascar produced enough golden silk for a single cape. It took eight years.
03 · Then Go Very Big
The blue whale is the largest animal alive, and the skeleton that hangs over the great hall in London tells you that better than any number can. But in 2023 paleontologists in Peru described Perucetus colossus, a whale from forty million years ago with bones so dense it may have outweighed the blue whale entirely. The debate is still going. Either way, the heaviest animal that ever lived was a whale.
Everything else here is enormous in its own register. Sperm whales sleep hanging upright in the water like a forest. A great white named Deep Blue is roughly twenty feet long and has been swum with, calmly, by divers who know her. The colossal squid was filmed alive for the first time only in 2025, and the specimen was a juvenile the length of a pencil. On land, elephants in Mozambique are being born without tusks because poaching made tusks a liability, and the last two northern white rhinos on Earth live under armed guard in Kenya. The Greenland shark is not the biggest shark, but it may be the oldest vertebrate alive, with some individuals estimated at around four hundred years.
04 · The Weirdest
Evolution has no taste and it shows. The platypus lays eggs, sweats milk, hunts with electricity and carries venom in its ankles, and when the first specimen reached London in 1799 the scientists checked it for stitches. Its cousin the echidna is the only other mammal that lays eggs, and the two of them together are the last of a lineage that split from the rest of us about 160 million years ago.
The axolotl never grows up and can regrow a leg, a piece of its heart and part of its brain. The aardwolf is a hyena that eats 300,000 termites a night and nothing else. The raccoon dog is the only member of the dog family that hibernates, and it is not a raccoon. The kakapo is a parrot that cannot fly, smells like honey, and courts by booming from a hole in the ground. We put twelve of these into Too Weird for Fiction; the rest are below, and the deep sea is where it gets properly strange.
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Things we would keep for ourselves
05 · The Most Docile
Some animals have decided the world is not worth hurrying for. The sloth moves so slowly that algae grows on it, and it turns out the pygmy sloths of Panama can hold their breath underwater for forty minutes, longer than a dolphin. A red-footed tortoise named Manuela went missing in a house in Rio in 1982 and was found alive in a storage box in the attic thirty years later, having apparently lived on termites.
The deer of Nara bow for crackers. The goats of Morocco climb argan trees and stand in the branches like fruit. Highland cattle look like they are permanently getting over something and are among the gentlest cattle on Earth. The pangolin, the only mammal with scales, rolls into a ball when threatened and has no other defense at all, which is why it is the most trafficked animal in the world. We have not yet written about the capybara, the world’s largest rodent and its most relaxed animal, which lets birds, monkeys and other capybaras sit on it without comment. That one is coming.
06 · The Cleverest, Mostly Birds
In northern Australia, black kites and brown falcons have been seen picking up burning sticks from the edge of a bushfire and dropping them in unburned grass to flush out prey. Aboriginal Australians have described the firehawks for thousands of years; science caught up in 2017. It is the clearest case we know of an animal using fire, and it is a bird.
Parrots live eighty years and hold grudges. Wisdom, a Laysan albatross on Midway Atoll, is past seventy and was still raising chicks in her seventh decade. Starlings fly in murmurations of tens of thousands with no leader and no collisions, and Xavi Bou’s photographs draw their flight paths as a single ribbon. The owls in our spot-the-owl post prove that the smartest thing an animal can do is not be seen.
07 · The Most Dangerous
A word on what dangerous means. Sharks kill perhaps ten people a year worldwide, and the hammerheads are closer to extinction than we are to being eaten by one. Mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands. We have no post on the mosquito, and we are not sure we could bring ourselves to make it beautiful. What follows are the animals whose danger you can see.
The box jellyfish carries enough venom to stop a human heart, and the species in our post had been seen exactly once before. The bullet ant sits at the top of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, described by the man who let himself be stung as walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail in your heel. A jaguar in the Pantanal takes a caiman out of the river by the skull. A bobcat leaves the ground to catch a heron mid-flight. The dart frog in our most colorful animals post is bright because it has nothing to hide. And Lake Natron in Tanzania is not an animal at all, but Nick Brandt’s photographs of the birds it turned to stone belong here anyway.
08 · The Ones We Lost, and Might Get Back
The last thylacine died in a Hobart zoo in 1936, and there is film of it pacing. The Barbary lion is gone from the Atlas Mountains. The mammoth has been gone for four thousand years, and a company in Texas is now trying to bring it back one gene at a time, starting with a very woolly mouse. Whether that is a good idea is a longer conversation. That we can have it at all is new.
09 · Through the Lens
Almost everything above reached us through a photographer who waited longer than seemed reasonable. Will Burrard-Lucas sat with camera traps in Kenya for months to get the first clear photographs of a black leopard in a century. Florian Ledoux flies drones over Arctic sea ice to find polar bears from above. Jess Bell throws colored powder at leaping dogs. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the Comedy Wildlife Awards cover the two ends of the same impulse, and the fox portraits, the amphibian and reptile portraits and the red-eyed tree frog are what happens when someone treats an animal like a sitter.
Keep Exploring
There are more than seven hundred animal stories on the site, and we add to them most weeks. This guide is a chapter of The World’s Most Astonishing Natural Wonders, and it has a few close companions: the strangest defense mechanisms in the animal kingdom, nine animals hiding in plain sight, twelve animals too weird for fiction and, newest of all, our descent into the deep sea to meet its newly named animals. For the places these animals live, try 40 Hidden Wonders of the Natural World. For the drawn and painted animal kingdom, from Hoefnagel’s beetle to Loooop’s one-line zoo, see The Most Extraordinary Paintings and Illustrations.
And when you want to keep going, every guide lives on The Guides, from The World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings and The Design That Shaped How We Live to The Most Breathtaking Photography in the World, The Most Beautiful Places on Earth and Retrofuturism.
All images © their photographers and institutions, credited in the linked stories.
