The Wildlife Encyclopedia
Explore all 545 species indexed across the encyclopedia. Every creature is paired with anatomical superpower breakdowns and musical subcultures.
Spotted Hyena
Bone-crushing jaws, matriarchal clan rule, and a whoop that carries for miles.
Spotted Lanternfly
A planthopper, not a moth, that turns red as it stocks up on its host tree's chemical defences.
Springbok
A gazelle-like antelope that bounces on stiff legs and flares a hidden crest of white hair.
Stag Beetle
Antler-like jaws for wrestling rivals, years spent as a larva tunnelling through rotting wood, and just a few weeks as an adult to find a mate.
Staghorn Coral
An antler-shaped coral that can grow up to 8 inches of branch a year, yet lost 97 percent of its numbers to one disease.
Star-Nosed Mole
A semi-aquatic mole armed with twenty-two fleshy sensory tentacles that can identify and eat a piece of prey in as little as 120 milliseconds.
Stoat
Takes on rabbits more than five times its size, dances in a way that seems to hypnotise them, and can turn snow-white in winter.
Strawberry Poison-Dart Frog
A 2-gram rainforest frog in warning colors, whose poison appears to come from the ants and mites it eats.
Striated Frogfish
The lure-twitching frogfish whose surprise attack pulls in prey within six milliseconds as its mouth expands up to twelve times.
Striped Bark Scorpion
One of the most common scorpions in the United States. In lab tests, its females stung at a faster rate than its males.
Striped Hyena
A raised mane that makes it look nearly twice its size, jaws built to crush bone, and a scavenger's range from northern Africa to India.
Striped Skunk
The black-and-white warning sign that hisses, stamps and, if that fails, fires musk up to about twenty feet.
Suffolk Sheep
A jet-black, wool-free head and legs against a clean white fleece, on an English meat breed whose lambs can gain more than a pound a day.
Sugar Glider
Patagium gliding membrane, glides that can reach about 150 feet between trees, and an appetite for eucalyptus sap and sweet nectar.
Sun Bear
The world's smallest bear, 23 to 65 kg, with the longest tongue and a chest crescent as individual as a fingerprint.
Sunda Colugo
Southeast Asian mammal with a furred gliding membrane from neck to fingers, toes and tail, carrying it up to 100 metres with little height loss.
Sunda Pangolin
A scale-armored mammal that swishes its tail with its scales erect, then curls into a near-impregnable ball when threatened.
Sunda Slow Loris
The deceptively cute nocturnal primate whose elbow-gland secretion carries a protein closely resembling a cat allergen.
Superb Lyrebird
Ground-dwelling mimic whose courtship act includes a fake alarm-flock illusion convincing enough to fool real birds.
Surinam Toad
The flat, leaf-like toad that carries its developing young inside honeycomb pockets on the mother's back.
Swordfish
A fish with a heater for its brain and a flattened bill it apparently uses to slash prey.
Sydney Funnel-Web Spider
Male venom carries a nerve toxin that likely evolved to deter bandicoots and birds, and is lethal to humans by unfortunate coincidence.
Tardigrade (Water Bear)
Eight-legged micro-survivor that meets a dose of gamma rays by rapidly switching on many of its own DNA-repair genes.
Tasmanian Devil
Pound for pound, the strongest estimated bite of any living mammal predator studied, bloodcurdling nocturnal screams, and a scavenger's take-no-prisoners appetite.