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Really Weird Animals [PICS]

Hydra vs Leviathan

21:44 / 17.01.07

Inspired by this...

This is a Solenodon:

and this is a Slender Loris:

The other species mentioned in that report are pretty damn weird as well (although the inclusion of at least one of them, the Yangtze river dolphin, is rather dodgy as it has recently been declared extinct). There are plenty of other (often relatively little known, despite the spectacular weirdness of some of them) freaky looking critters out there (Darren Naish's zoology blog is a good source for mind-boggling animal facts)...

Given Barbelith's apparent love of animal pictures, what are people's favourite weird animals?

(note this is my first attempt to post images directly into a thread, so apologies if it didn't work...)

23:37 / 17.01.07

The deep sea seems like the place to be for weird animals.

The goblin shark looks more than a little odd and has painfull looking holepunch style discs cut out of it by another shark.

Jake, Colossus of Clout

23:39 / 17.01.07

Wow! A real live Metroid!

23:48 / 17.01.07

Oh how could I forget the Dumbo Octopus

10:49 / 18.01.07

Apriona japonica

These images were photographed by Satoshi Kuribayashi. The link leads to more of such wonderful pictures, for which he got an award last year.

11:08 / 18.01.07

the sunbeam snake:

a closeup of its scales:

up unitl recently, t'was a cryptid, until they captured a living specimen.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

16:54 / 18.01.07

These photos are going to give me fucking nightmares.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:58 / 18.01.07

Not only is the Slender Loris pretty fuckin' weird-lookin', it has a GREAT name.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

17:14 / 18.01.07

A nightmarish mix of Seuss and evolution gone wrong, that thing is.

19:24 / 18.01.07

hopefully this isn't too thread-rotty:

when i was in elementary school (late 80's), i had several collections of those big collectors cards with animal photos and facts on them. the one creature that stays with me to this day was something that looked like a moss covered sasquatch. trouble is, i've long since forgotten the name, and it's driving me crazy that i can't identify it. if anyone can correctly identify this creature (unfortunately, giant greenish primate is all i can do in terms of description, although my 8-y.o. self was always astonished by how human it looked), i'll be eternally grateful.

*

19:51 / 18.01.07

Almost any variety of sloth, really. Any sloth can get moss growing on them because it's humid and they move so slowly.

20:08 / 18.01.07

Furry lobster!

20:08 / 18.01.07

Sounds like a sloth - -they've often got lichen and algae growing in their fur.

20:38 / 18.01.07

That is the only pic I can find of this rare lobster. I remember it on the news a few years back. No, that is not white paint.

Lobster with a split personality

James Nickerson pulled the catch of a lifetime from frigid Nova Scotia waters in November.Lobster cartoon

Nickerson’s trap contained a half-albino lobster. Almost as if someone drew a dividing line straight down the lobster from front to back, it was EXACTLY one-half green and one-half white. While albino lobsters are rare, half-albino lobsters are even more uncommon.

As if this wasn’t strange enough, upon closer inspection it was determined that the lobster was a hermaphrodite – both male AND female!

Media from Halifax to Vancouver reported the bizarre specimen.

Weighing in at less than a kilogram, the lobster won’t make it into the cooking pot anytime soon, which is great news for people like Doug Pezzack of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography. "From our point of view, it’s a curiosity. It should be on display to the public."

Hydra vs Leviathan

00:16 / 19.01.07

See, for me all these reptiles and insects and sea creatures (what's your first one, Proisnias? Some sort of... transparent octopus-like thing?) are beautiful and awesome and cool, but weird mammals are somehow much, much more grotesque and scarier and freakier. Maybe it's because the sea creatures, insects etc are entirely alien, but the mammals (especially some of the odder primates... as well as lorises, tarsiers and aye-ayes are things you really wouldn't want to encounter if they were much bigger) are that bit more like us and the "normal" animals that are familiar to us...

Then again, maybe if we grew up with lorises and solenodons as household pets, perhaps cats and dogs would be seen as really freaky (Darren Naish has a good article on why rabbits are among the freakiest of all mammals)...

Tried to find a pic of a moss covered sloth, best i could find were these:

They're not primates, or particularly huge (tho there were extinct giant ground sloths which got up to elephant size), but as the second pic shows, they do have sort-of-human-ish looking faces (with the right imagination)...

00:39 / 19.01.07

the creature in that last picture may very well be what captured my young imagination...

08:40 / 19.01.07

Nataraja:

The first pic is of the deep sea glass squid.

I see what you mean about mammals being a little scarier due to familiarity. I just love the fact that all we have to do to find some rather odd alien-esque creatures is send David Atenborough down in a submarine with a BBC camera. I'm waiting on the next camera shots of the deep sea where, if my predictions are correct, floating brains will be found.

I now I present the new improved folding travel-size armadillo

08:51 / 19.01.07

The goblin shark looks more than a little odd and has painfull looking holepunch style discs cut out of it by another shark.

The sharks which did that - Cookie-cutter Sharks - don't look that weird, but their hunting method is quite bizarre. They use their teeth to latch on to other fish, and then - because they haven't got strong enough jaws to take a straightforward bite out of them - they spin off the other fish, taking a chunk of flesh with them in a more or less circular shape (hence the name).

When you think of it, a lot of sharks are weird.

13:26 / 19.01.07

Pangolin and child.

Like an armadillo + ferret, with razor blades.

13:46 / 19.01.07

nataraja: Ewoks?