Carnivore
Diet centered on other animals, from insects and krill to large prey, caught with teeth, beaks, talons or tongues.
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.
Blue-Footed Booby
Bright blue webbed feet, a high-stepping courtship walk, and plunge-dives that hit the water at up to 60 mph.
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.
Bottlenose Dolphin
Each dolphin is believed to keep its own signature whistle for life, and dolphins have passed the mirror test for self-recognition.
Box Jellyfish
The translucent ocean predator with 24 eyes, no brain, and venom that can kill a person in minutes.
Brown Recluse
A six-eyed night hunter with a violin marking and venom that can kill the tissue around a bite.
Burmese Python
A giant constrictor with stretchy jaws, and the Everglades invader linked to a 99.3 percent drop in raccoon sightings.
California Sea Lion
Males bark like dogs, and a mother can find her pup among hundreds by its call.
Canada Lynx
A snowshoe-pawed wild cat of the northern forests whose numbers rise and fall with the snowshoe hares it eats.
Candiru
The translucent, thin catfish that slips under a fish's gill cover and lets the host's own blood pressure fill its mouth.
Cane Toad
Unstoppable neotropical chemical tank, turned loose in Queensland in 1935 to eat cane beetles, armed with shoulder glands whose toxins often kill the Australian native predators that try to eat it.
Caracal
Explosive feline acrobat capable of vertical anti-gravity leaps up to ten feet and mid-air bird snatches.
Casper Octopus
The nearly translucent deep-sea octopod that nobody has named, because nobody has ever caught one.
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.
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.
Chilean Rose Tarantula
The desert tarantula with no extensor muscles at two leg joints, and a metabolism that slows when food runs short.
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.
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.
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 Cuttlefish
A color-blind ocean shapeshifter that reads polarized light and turns its skin from smooth to spiked in moments.
Common European Adder
A zigzag-backed viper that lives from Britain to the Pacific and is the only snake north of the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia.