Armored
Tough exterior carapaces, bony scutes, and thick dermal shielding that resist crushing jaw strikes.
African Crested Porcupine
The world's longest porcupine turns its back on a threat, rattles a tail of hollow quills, and charges backward to stab anything that ignores the warning.
Alligator Gar
Described as a 100-million-year-old living fossil, armored in interlocking ganoid scales, with two rows of fang-like teeth in its upper jaw and a swim bladder that can work as a lung.
Alligator Snapping Turtle
The 200-pound riverbed dinosaur with a spiked shell, a 1,000-pound jaw trap, and a pink worm wriggling on its tongue.
American Alligator
An armored reptile with jaws that can crack a turtle shell, and a mouth that can go through 3,000 teeth in a lifetime.
Armadillo Girdled Lizard
Heavily armored Karoo lizard that bites its own tail and curls into a spiky ball when threatened.
Bare-Nosed Wombat
A tough-skinned rump, cube-shaped scats, and the strength to crush an attacker against the burrow roof.
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.
Common Pill Bug
A land-living crustacean that rolls into a ball, and in which bacterial DNA has become a new sex chromosome.
Giant Ground Pangolin
Overlapping keratin scales, a sticky tongue up to 70 centimeters long, and a defensive ball that's next to impossible to pry open.
Giant Isopod
Deep-sea cousin of the pill bug, with about 3,500 lenses in each eye, that has been reported to survive eight weeks between meals in an aquarium.
Gila Monster
Bead-armored venomous lizard, grooved chewing teeth, and Sonoran Desert survivor.
Indian Star Tortoise
Thorn-scrub grazer wearing a starburst camouflage shell, and one of the world's most heavily traded tortoises.
Japanese Spider Crab
The Pacific's leggiest scavenger: a giant crab known to grow up to twelve feet across, picking over the seafloor off Japan.
Komodo Dragon
The largest living lizard, armored in bone and equipped with iron-coated serrated teeth and anticoagulant venom.
Nine-Banded Armadillo
A bony-plated digger that smells invertebrates up to 20 cm underground and almost always gives birth to identical quadruplets.
Pink Fairy Armadillo
The world's smallest armadillo, an Argentine sand-burrower wearing a shell of bony plates and hardened scales.
Scaly-foot Snail
The hydrothermal vent gastropod whose foot scales and shell are often mineralised with iron sulfide, with a heart that takes up about 4% of its body volume.
Texas Horned Lizard
The armored desert lizard that turns its own eyes into blood-squirting weapons against predators.
Thorny Devil
Capillary skin channels that pull water from a puddle to its mouth, a spiny false head decoy, and big spines with no bone inside them.
Thorny Seahorse
A seahorse with extremely sharp spines, a crown on its head and fathers that carry the babies.
White Rhinoceros
1,800 to 2,700 kilograms of armored grey hide and a keratin horn, carrying a name nobody has ever actually proven right.