Nocturnal
Conducting foraging and hunting under darkness to avoid daytime heat and visual predators.
Nine-Banded Armadillo
A bony-plated digger that smells invertebrates up to 20 cm underground and almost always gives birth to identical quadruplets.
North Island Brown Kiwi
A flightless night forager with its nostrils near the tip of its bill and an egg that averages 15 percent of its mother's weight.
Ocelot
Dark spots that sometimes link into chains across golden fur, on a solitary night hunter whose eyes see much better in the dark than ours.
Philippine Tarsier
Hand-sized night primate with the largest eyes for its body of any mammal, a head that turns 180 degrees, and legs built for jumping.
Pink Fairy Armadillo
The world's smallest armadillo, an Argentine sand-burrower wearing a shell of bony plates and hardened scales.
Potto
A slow, silent nocturnal primate that can hold still on a branch for long periods without fatigue, and presents predators with a shield of elongated neck-vertebra spines.
Pygmy Hippopotamus
Dwarf solitary forest hippo of the Upper Guinean swamps, with pink blood-sweat sunscreen.
Red-Eyed Tree Frog
A neon-green rainforest sleeper whose flash of scarlet eyes and bright flanks may give a predator pause long enough to escape.
Sacred Scarab
A very large dung roller that shapes droppings into balls and holds heat in its thorax in flight.
Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko
Dead-leaf camouflage down to the fake decay and missing pieces, horn-like brow scales, and a loud, red-mouthed bluff when confronted.
Silverfish
A wingless, silver-scaled insect that keeps molting as an adult and can go up to a year without food.
South American Bushmaster
The longest of all vipers, able to aim a strike in the dark by body heat alone, from the only pit vipers in the Americas that lay eggs.
Southern Black Widow
Shiny black spider whose venom floods the nerve-muscle junction with acetylcholine and noradrenaline.
Spitting Spider
A tiny house spider that entangles prey from a distance with a zigzag spray of silk, glue and venom, fired at up to 28.8 meters a second.
Striped Hyena
A raised mane that makes it look nearly twice its size, jaws built to crush bone, and a scavenger's range from northern Africa to India.
Striped Skunk
The black-and-white warning sign that hisses, stamps and, if that fails, fires musk up to about twenty feet.
Sugar Glider
Patagium gliding membrane, glides that can reach about 150 feet between trees, and an appetite for eucalyptus sap and sweet nectar.
Sunda Colugo
Southeast Asian mammal with a furred gliding membrane from neck to fingers, toes and tail, carrying it up to 100 metres with little height loss.
Sunda Slow Loris
The deceptively cute nocturnal primate whose elbow-gland secretion carries a protein closely resembling a cat allergen.
Tasmanian Devil
Pound for pound, the strongest estimated bite of any living mammal predator studied, bloodcurdling nocturnal screams, and a scavenger's take-no-prisoners appetite.
Tawny Owl
Broad rounded wings, lopsided ears, and a 'too-whit-too-woo' that takes two birds to make.
Tuatara
The sole survivor of an ancient reptile order: a nocturnal New Zealand islander with a light-sensitive third eye it does not see with, and a sliding jaw that makes a shearing bite.
Virginia Opossum
Fifty-toothed marsupial that fakes its own death through an involuntary catatonic collapse and is virtually immune to pit viper venom.