Desert
Surviving intense solar heat, freezing nights, and extreme water scarcity through concentrated waste and burrowing.
Greater Roadrunner
Ground-running desert cuckoo that hits up to 20 miles per hour, smashes prey against rocks, and warms up by sunbathing the black skin on its back.
Hamadryas Baboon
Silver-maned sacred baboon of ancient Egypt, living in harems that stack into clans, bands and troops hundreds strong.
Harris's Hawk
The desert wolf of the sky that hunts in cooperative, matriarchal tactical family packs.
Hippopotamus
A one-and-a-half-tonne river giant that walks the riverbed instead of swimming, and oozes its own sunscreen.
Honey Badger
A roughly 9 kg mustelid with loose skin, a muscle receptor that impedes snake toxin binding, and cobras among its prey.
Inland Taipan
Rated the most toxic venom of any snake in lab tests on mice, carried by a shy snake whose handful of known bite victims all survived.
Leopard Gecko
A desert gecko with movable eyelids, no sticky toe pads, and a dropped tail that keeps moving for up to 30 minutes.
Meerkat
Sentinel shifts on its hind legs, glare-cutting eye patches, and some immunity to a scorpion's sting, just enough to make it lunch.
Nubian Ibex
Relatively small desert ibex of the Middle East and northeast Africa, a true cliff dweller whose males carry ridged, backward-arching horns up to 122 centimeters long.
Pallas's Cat (Manul)
Round pupils, ears set low for peeking over boulders, and a BBC documentary's verdict as the grumpiest cat in the world, stalking prey across Central Asia's rocky steppes.
Pink Fairy Armadillo
The world's smallest armadillo, an Argentine sand-burrower wearing a shell of bony plates and hardened scales.
Pronghorn
A 40 to 59 kg grassland runner that can average 65 km/h over 11 km, backed by an extraordinary capacity to consume and process oxygen.
Red Kangaroo
Australia's biggest marsupial, hopping at 64 km/h on powerful hind legs, balanced by a tail it can also rest on.
Short-Beaked Echidna
The spiny, egg-laying mammal that digs into ant and termite nests and carries an electric sense in its snout.
Springbok
A gazelle-like antelope that bounces on stiff legs and flares a hidden crest of white hair.
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.
Veiled Chameleon
A tongue that can shoot to full length in 26 milliseconds, eyes that look two ways at once, and a casque that collects water.
Western Diamondback Rattlesnake
A desert pit viper with a heat-sensing pit on each side of its head. In one study, fasting snakes lost 30% of their body mass over 168 days.
Yellow-Footed Rock-Wallaby
Ring-tailed outback acrobat that leaps up to four metres from rock to rock on short-clawed, thickly padded hind feet.