Mountains
Mastering rocky crags, thin atmosphere, and sheer vertical cliffs with specialized hooves and muscular grip.
Long-Tailed Chinchilla
An Andean rodent with up to 60 hairs growing from one follicle.
Mountain Gorilla
Up to 220 kilograms of plant-eating ape, a chest beat heard more than a kilometer away, and the only great ape whose numbers are growing.
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.
Peregrine Falcon
The sky's guided missile, folding into a 320 km/h (200 mph) stoop with the same navigation math built into real missiles.
Red Panda
Ringed bushy tail, false thumb wrist bone, and bamboo-eating acrobats in high Himalayan forests.
Resplendent Quetzal
A cloud forest trogon revered by pre-Columbian cultures, whose males grow iridescent tail plumes up to 90 centimeters long.
Rock Hyrax
A stub-tailed, rabbit-like rock climber with singing males, whose closest living relatives are elephants and manatees.
Short-Beaked Echidna
The spiny, egg-laying mammal that digs into ant and termite nests and carries an electric sense in its snout.
Snow Leopard
The "ghost cat of the Himalayas", with a tail up to a metre long and leaps of up to thirty feet.
Spectacled Bear
South America's only native bear, an Andean climber with pale rings around its eyes that builds platforms in the trees.
Spotted Hyena
Bone-crushing jaws, matriarchal clan rule, and a whoop that carries for miles.
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.
Vogelkop Bowerbird
A generally brown bird that builds what biologists call the most elaborately decorated structure erected by an animal other than humans, in a style that changes from range to range.
Volta Electric Eel
The biological super-battery that hit 860 volts, the strongest electric discharge known from any living animal.
Wolverine
Scavenger of the far north whose jaw-joint bone was the stiffest and most crush-resistant of 40 carnivores tested in a 2018 study.
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.