The Wildlife Encyclopedia
Explore all 545 species indexed across the encyclopedia. Every creature is paired with anatomical superpower breakdowns and musical subcultures.
Capybara
Up to 66 kilograms (145 pounds) of South American zen diplomat, calm enough to let birds pick parasitic insects out of its fur.
Caracal
Explosive feline acrobat capable of vertical anti-gravity leaps up to ten feet and mid-air bird snatches.
Carolina Wolf Spider
A web-free night hunter that grinds up frogs and carries its babies on its back.
Casper Octopus
The nearly translucent deep-sea octopod that nobody has named, because nobody has ever caught one.
Central Bearded Dragon
The sun-loving outback lizard that bluffs with a puffed-out beard and waves an arm to back down.
Chambered Nautilus
A shell that works like a submarine's ballast tank, an eye with no lens, and a sense of smell that can follow a scent up to 10 meters in the dark.
Channel Catfish
A catfish called a swimming tongue, with taste buds all over its body to find food in murky water.
Cheetah
The fastest land mammal alive, sprinting on a spine that bends like a spring and claws that grip like a track shoe's cleats.
Chicken
The toothless bird whose gizzard does the chewing, whose hen usually lays an egg every 26 hours, and which outnumbers every other bird species.
Chilean Rose Tarantula
The desert tarantula with no extensor muscles at two leg joints, and a metabolism that slows when food runs short.
Chimpanzee
DNA letters about 1.23% different from a human's, tool kits that vary from community to community, and Machiavellian troop politics.
Chinstrap Penguin
The seabird that nods off more than 10,000 times a day in naps that average four seconds, banking over 11 hours of sleep in each half of its brain while it guards the nest.
Clouded Leopard
Longer fangs for its skull size than any other wild cat, and ankles that rotate so it can hang from the branches by its back feet.
Clydesdale Horse
A Scottish farm horse first bred in the mid-1700s for heavy hauling, with males standing up to 19 hands on feathered ankles.
Cockatiel
A small crested parrot from Australia's open country that can sing a human melody in near-perfect sync.
Coconut Crab
Land arthropod of up to 4 kilograms, with coconut-cracking claws and a leg span of up to a meter.
Coelacanth
Thought to have gone extinct over 65 million years ago, then found alive in 1938, with fleshy fins that move like a four-legged animal's legs and a pregnancy of around five years, possibly the longest of any vertebrate.
Collared Peccary
A 15 to 28 kg hoofed mammal that is not a pig, with self-sharpening canine teeth and a scent gland above its tail.
Colossal Squid
The heaviest invertebrate documented, with tentacle hooks that swivel up to 720 degrees and eyes about the size of a soccer ball.
Comb Jelly
The predator that pulses with rainbow diffraction along its beating ciliary comb rows, and not one flicker of it is bioluminescence.
Common Blackbird
A lawn-hopping songster whose night-time hormones shift under city light.
Common Cuckoo
A brood parasite whose females lay eggs that tend to match their hosts' eggs.
Common Cuttlefish
A color-blind ocean shapeshifter that reads polarized light and turns its skin from smooth to spiked in moments.
Common Earthworm
A hermaphrodite that lives in deep vertical burrows and generally leaves them only to feed and mate.