The Wildlife Encyclopedia
Explore all 545 species indexed across the encyclopedia. Every creature is paired with anatomical superpower breakdowns and musical subcultures.
Bengal Tiger
Longest canines of any big cat, stripes as unique as a fingerprint, and the only tigers at home in mangroves.
Bigfin Squid
The deepest-dwelling squid on record, with elbow-bent arms trailing sticky filaments that may stretch up to 20 times its body length.
Bighorn Sheep
Horns weighing up to thirty pounds, head-first charges at up to forty mph, and hooves shaped to snag any slight protrusion.
Binturong
Shaggy Southeast Asian bearcat that smells like hot buttered movie popcorn, climbing through tropical forest canopies with a thick prehensile tail.
Black Caiman
The Amazon's largest predator and the biggest member of the alligator family, with males that grow past four to five meters.
Black Ghost Knifefish
A nocturnal South American fish that senses its surroundings through a continuous electric field around its own body.
Black Mamba
Its scales are olive-brown, but the inky black mouth it flashes when cornered backs a venom that attacks the nervous system two ways at once.
Black Rhinoceros
A hooked, prehensile lip, a recorded top speed of about 34 miles per hour, and two horns that grow from the skin all its life.
Black Swan
Australia's red-billed swan, whose black plumage is linked to a pigment gene that is cut short in the white mute swan.
Black-Footed Cat
One of the world's smallest cats, with a hunting success rate of around 60 percent and an appetite for a fifth of its own body weight a day.
Black-Tailed Jackrabbit
A desert hare that zigzags at up to 40 miles per hour and eats its own droppings for a second pass at its food.
Black-Tailed Prairie Dog
A keystone rodent that digs towns of multi-chamber burrows, and whose shrill jump-yip seems to set off the neighbors.
Blobfish
Nicknamed Mr Blobby by the scientists and crew of the research vessel Tangaroa after it was trawled from the Norfolk Ridge in 2003, and now held in the Australian Museum's collection.
Blue Jay
A crested jay that can imitate the scream of a Red-shouldered Hawk. In one Virginia study, blue jays cached 133,000 acorns from one stand of oaks.
Blue Sea Dragon
Air-bubble buoyancy, blue-and-silver countershading, and a sting borrowed from the Portuguese man o' war.
Blue Whale
The largest animal that has ever lived, built to gulp krill-laden water by the ton and rated among the loudest animals on the planet.
Blue Wildebeest
A bearded grassland grazer whose foreleg muscle is substantially more efficient than a cow's.
Blue-and-Yellow Macaw
A blue-and-gold parrot that blushes red, crushes nuts and seeds in its beak, and drops in on riverbank clay licks to eat soil.
Blue-Footed Booby
Bright blue webbed feet, a high-stepping courtship walk, and plunge-dives that hit the water at up to 60 mph.
Blue-Ringed Octopus
Golf-ball sized tide pool titan flashing iridescent electric blue rings and deadly tetrodotoxin.
Boa Constrictor
A nonvenomous snake that stops its prey's heart from pumping, and one mother on record who had daughters with no father.
Bobbit Worm
An ambush predator up to ten feet long that buries itself in the sand with its jaws cocked like a spring trap, ready to snap a passing fish in half.
Bobcat
A spotted, short-tailed stalker that steps its back feet into its front-foot prints to cut the noise of the hunt.
Bold Jumping Spider
A daytime stalker from a spider family whose forward-looking resolution beats every insect's, trailing a safety line of silk when it jumps.