Omnivore
Flexible feeding strategy combining plant matter, fruits, insects, and meat depending on seasonal availability.
American Black Bear
A bear whose sense of smell is about seven times stronger than a bloodhound's.
American Cockroach
A cockroach that switches to running on four legs, and on two, at up to 50 body lengths per second.
American Crow
Learns a dangerous human face, and the scolding spreads from crow to crow.
American Lobster
A seafloor crustacean with a crusher claw and a ripper claw. Scientists believe some may live to be 100 years old.
American Robin
A lawn hunter that weighs about as much as three AA batteries
Asian Weaver Ant
Arboreal architects that pull leaves together, even forming living chains, then glue them with silk squeezed from their own larvae.
Atlantic Blue Crab
A paddle-legged swimmer with bright blue claws that sheds its hard shell as it grows.
Australian Lungfish
An air-breathing fish with a single lung, a body that still resembles fossils over 100 million years old, and a genome known to be the largest of any animal.
Binturong
Shaggy Southeast Asian bearcat that smells like hot buttered movie popcorn, climbing through tropical forest canopies with a thick prehensile tail.
Blue Jay
A crested jay that can imitate the scream of a Red-shouldered Hawk. In one Virginia study, blue jays cached 133,000 acorns from one stand of oaks.
Brown Rat
A whisker-guided survivor that breeds all year and quickly learns to shun the taste of food that once made it ill.
Central Bearded Dragon
The sun-loving outback lizard that bluffs with a puffed-out beard and waves an arm to back down.
Channel Catfish
A catfish called a swimming tongue, with taste buds all over its body to find food in murky water.
Chicken
The toothless bird whose gizzard does the chewing, whose hen usually lays an egg every 26 hours, and which outnumbers every other bird species.
Chimpanzee
DNA letters about 1.23% different from a human's, tool kits that vary from community to community, and Machiavellian troop politics.
Collared Peccary
A 15 to 28 kg hoofed mammal that is not a pig, with self-sharpening canine teeth and a scent gland above its tail.
Common Blackbird
A lawn-hopping songster whose night-time hormones shift under city light.
Common Earwig
The garden insect whose mother grooms her eggs like a hen and may go as long as 7 months without feeding.
Common Goldfish
The pond fish that makes alcohol to survive without oxygen and sees four colors, ultraviolet included.
Common Hermit Crab
A scavenger that lives in an empty sea snail shell and raps on rivals' shells to try to take over better ones.
Common Ostrich
The tallest and heaviest bird alive, sprinting in bursts of up to 43 miles an hour on two toes, with a kick powerful enough to kill a lion.
Common Raccoon
The emo masked bandit whose touch-tuned forepaws do its foraging and whose cat-sized brain packs its neurons at near-primate density.
Common Raven
The oversized scavenger that caches food out of rivals' sight, guards the stash when it might be seen, and is less willing to pull its weight after a partner cheats.
Common Warthog
Tusked survivor that usually backs into a borrowed aardvark burrow, so its tusks face whatever comes calling.