A lack of sea ice caused by global warming meant this polar bear was unable to hunt seals and died of starvation. The carcass was found in northern Svalbard, Norway, far from its normal range, where he probably was looking for food.

Meet the pistol shrimp. It is known to be the loudest animal and can emit a sound up to 200 decibels which it uses to stun its prey using its pincers. Check out the video below:

Potoos are a small New World family of solitary and nocturnal birds. Most are so poorly known they seem more fiction than substance, their gruff or wailing cries ghostly delusions of the dim nocturnal world they inhabit.

The arctic fox is an incredibly hardy animal that can survive frigid Arctic temperatures as low as –58°F (-50°C) in the treeless lands where it makes its home. It has furry soles, short ears, and a short muzzle - all-important adaptations to the chilly clime. Arctic foxes live in burrows, and in a blizzard they may tunnel into the snow to create shelter.

Arctic foxes have beautiful white (sometimes blue-gray) coats that act as very effective winter camouflage. The natural hues allow the animal to blend into the tundra's ubiquitous snow and ice. When the seasons change, the fox's coat turns as well, adopting a brown or gray appearance that provides cover among the summer tundra's rocks and plants.

Source: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/ ...

The Dumbo Octopus belongs to the genus Grimpoteuthis, and is given its nickname based on its resemblance to the large-eared Disney elephant. They can live up to 7,000 meters below the surface, though many are found between 1,000 and 4,000 meters. It feeds unlike any other octopus, by skimming the surface of the sea floor looking for crustaceans to swallow whole.

The largest specimen on record was 1.8 m (6ft) long, weighing 5.9 kg (13 pounds).

Lions are now critically endangered in West Africa. Although they once ranged continuously from Senegal to Nigeria, new research has revealed only around 250 adult lions survive in the region, and only one of the four isolated populations contains more than 50 individuals.

An elephant takes the same amount of time to empty its huge bladder as a cat - despite holding 3,600 times more urine. That's a whole lot of pressure.

The controlling factor of urination duration is the length of the urethra, which gets longer at a predictable ratio as an animal gets bigger. All animals have urethras of the same aspect ratio: a length-to-width ratio of 18. This is rare among animals. Usually, body parts change in relative size, such as the eyes and brain.

As the urethra gets longer, the effects of gravity increase and there's more pressure pushing out the urine.

Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/most-mammals-take-21-seconds-to-pee-regardless-of-their-size ...

While this may look like sushi, it's actually Argentina's pink fairy armadillo. This rarely seen animal has silky white hair and a pinkish carapace; it ranges in size from 3.3 to 4.6 inches (84 to 117 millimeters) long, making it one of the smallest species of armadillos. The animal is also nocturnal and has the ability to bury itself in lightning speed given its long claws, which are an astonishing one-sixth the length of the body. ...

Rodents are mammals characterized by a pair of broad, sharp-edged, chisel-like incisor teeth that are firmly inserted in both jaws and are used in gnawing vegetation. The front surface of each incisor tooth is composed of enamel, and the hind surface is of soft dentine wears away during the process of gnawing so that the teeth are constantly kept sharp. Shown above is a beaver sporting bright orange teeth; the reason they are orange is because of an unusually high concentration of iron in the enamel.

Unlike human teeth, the incisors of rodents don't have roots, and they never stop growing! To keep these teeth from growing into their brains, rodents grind their teeth against each other. This friction is similar to using a grindstone to sharp ...

Researchers working to bring back animals like the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth discuss the implications of their work.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

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Human babies and mouse pups both automatically and deeply relax when carried by their mums, new research has revealed. The study showed the babies' heart rates slowed down and their nervous and motor systems relaxed when they were carried, suggesting it doesn't just feel good, its an essential mother-infant interaction.

This photo shows a diver almost being eaten by a whale shark, the world's largest fish species. Marine photographer Mauricio Handler captured the intense moment during a dive in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, when more than 600 of the 12-metre-long animals gathered to feed on tuna spawn.

A wholphin is a rare fertile hybrid born from mating a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) (mother), and a false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens). Although they have been reported to exist in the wild, the first captive wholphin was born in 1945, where a bottlenose dolphin and a male false killer whale shared a pool.

The wholphin's size, color and shape are intermediate between the parent species. For example, an adult wholphin has 66 teeth - intermediate between a bottlenose (88 teeth) and false killer whale (44 teeth). They are smaller than a false killer whale but are larger than a normal bottlenose.

Normally, when two different, yet similar species mate, such as a female horse and a male donkey forming a mule, the progeny is expec ...

The aye-aye lives in the forests of Madagascar. Despite looking like a very scared rodent, the aye-aye is a kind of lemur with a bushy tail and super-thin, elongated middle fingers that they use to dig grubs out of hollow branches. Aye-ayes also have huge lower incisors to chew through wood and bamboo—and in captivity they’ve been known to chew through concrete cinder blocks ...

Wombat droppings are cube-shaped. This prevents them from rolling away when marking their territory. These cube-shaped poop looks like, but doesn't taste like chocolate brownies.

This is Ippo, a three-month-old Italian zonkey. She is the result of a union between a male zebra and a female Amiata donkey, which is an endangered breed of donkey native to southern Tuscany. Genetic differences between the zebra and the donkey - donkeys have 62 chromosomes and zebras have between 32 and 46 - mean that hybrids like this are most often the result of a male zebra pairing with a female donkey. So far there have only been three recorded cases of a male donkey siring a zebra hybrid. ...

This is a mating ritual being performed by a colony of James's Flamingoes (Phoenicoparrus jamesi), native to Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. The males will all vocalise together, sticking their necks and heads straight up in the air, and turning them back and forth in unison to attract the females. ...

It turns out, those infamous teeth are in fact razor-sharp modified placoid scales. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Geckos have 500,000 keratinous hairs on their feet, which split at the ends to create a large surface area. The hairs allow geckos to scale smooth vertical surfaces.

If only all of life's problems could be solved by backing awkwardly into them.

Whenever anyone mentions the word possum, I immediately recall the Simpsons episode where Homer conducts the monorail.


However, unlike the possums found in Homer's closet, the animal you see right above is a western pygmy possum, native to Australia. It might look absolutely tiny, but it's actually one of the largest species of pygmy possum in the world. Another interesting fact is that like all pygmy possums, the western pygmy possum is great at entering mini hibernating periods called torpor.

Source: http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/creatura-blog/2014/09/western-pygmy-possum-burramyidae/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=soc.fb.140925.pygmypossum ...

The green wings of luna moths, with their elegant, long tails, aren't just about style. New research finds they also help save the insects from becoming bat snacks by creating a distracting acoustic signal, which causes these predators to zero in on the wings rather than more vital body parts.

The Hyalinobatrachium dianae glassfrog was just discovered! And people are saying he looks familiar.

When you turn on your TV, it is the definition of ironic to watch the news channels for information about planet mass destruction. Whilst when you step outside your door, it is quite alarming and obvious that our earth is suffering. When every person around you, from toddlers to elderly, own some for of technology, with no means of recycling old items. When students, each with their own copies of pages. When potable water has not yet reached the most needy of nations. When human greed is apparent with every innovative idea claiming to "revolutionize "a domain brought up to make  a quick buck. Drilling, mining, industrialization, politics, scavenging for resources, suffocating our environment... This may all seem negative, but coming from a ...

Migaloo is a rare albino humpback whale found near the coastlines of Queensland, Australia. Adult humpbacks range in length from 12-16 metres (39-52 feet) and weigh approximately 36000 kilograms (79,000 lb).

For more information on Migaloo, visit http://migaloo.com.au/.

That's the longest string of words that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who scientists raised as a human and taught sign language in the 1970s, ever signed. He was the subject of Project Nim, an experiment conducted by cognitive scientists at Columbia University to investigate whether chimps can learn language.

After years of exposing Nim to all things human, the researchers concluded that although he did learn to express demands - the desire for an orange, for instance - and knew 125 words, he couldn't fully grasp language, at least as they defined it. Language requires not just vocabulary but also syntax, they argued. "Give orange me," for example, means something different than "give me orange." From a very young age, humans understand that; w ...