The bar-tailed godwit makes the longest nonstop flight of any bird: From Alaska to New Zealand.
Introducing the Bizarre Beasts Awesome Smells Club! Happy April Fool's Day, Everyone!
The Oilbird's Job Is Just... Bat
Aphids Are Pregnant The Day They Are Born
The Most Instagrammable Bird
This Bug Looks Terrifying But Is Baby
This Creature Has Been Around For 500 Million Years
An Ocean Mixing Mystery
Welcome back to Bizarre Beasts: Season Zero, where we are remastering episodes of Bizarre Beasts that were originally created for Vlogbrothers. This episode is all an extinct flightless bird from the New Zealand island of Takapourewa. The rumor is that one cat wiped out Lyall's Wren, but Tibbles probably had some help.
The greater bulldog bat lives in Central and South America where it uses its enormous feet to catch fish right out of the water.
Welcome back to Bizarre Beasts: Season Zero, where we are remastering episodes of Bizarre Beasts that were originally created for Vlogbrothers. This episode is the Portuguese Man O’ War, the animal (well, colonial organism) that sails the sea rather than just swim.
*Sea spiders are not actually arachnids, although they certainly look the part. They’re weird guys, and the specifics of their strangeness may actually help us to better understand how all invertebrate groups evolved.
Welcome Back to Bizarre Beast: Season Zero. Thank you for coming with us on this year-long journey to remaster the episodes of Bizarre Beast that were originally created for VlogBrothers. For our final Season Zero episode, the giant fish that loves to sun, the Mola Mola.
Call them stick bugs, walkingsticks, leaf insects, or phasmids, insects in the order Phasmatodea are masters of disguise. But why would an insect want to look like a plant? We decided to go to the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium to find out for ourselves.
Many birds are capable of complex problem solving, and even language, to a degree that seems too advanced if we just look at brain size. After all, a crow brain and a chimp brain aren’t the same size, yet some birds and great apes have been documented performing cognitive tasks at similar levels. So how do birds match wits with animals whose brains are tens of times bigger than theirs? And what does it even mean to be “intelligent?”
The octopus is a pretty odd animal under even the most ordinary circumstances – or ordinary by octopus standards, at least. So when folks start calling out one type of octopus as the strangest, there’s probably something special about it. And the argonaut, also known as the paper nautilus, lives up to the hype.
Plenty of frogs can be poisonous, but Greening’s frog and Bruno’s casque-headed frog use bony spines on their snouts to break the skin of would-be predators and introduce toxins into their attacker’s bloodstream. This makes them the first species of truly venomous frogs that we know of. And they do it via headbutt.
Why are there dolphins in rivers, and why do they look... like that? There are a handful of very similar-looking, but somehow unrelated river dolphins around the world. Where did they all come from, and what is it about living in rivers that causes dolphins to look so specific?
There are a lot of different social structures in the animal world, but how did animals go from solitary to social, let alone from basic interactions to elaborate societies? The small carpenter bee may be just the beast to tackle this bizarre and fundamental evolutionary question.
Port Jackson sharks live off the coast of Australia and have a mouth full of the weirdest shark teeth: pointed in the front and rounded like molars in the back.
Naked mole-rats are not keeping their weirdness on the inside. And all their superficial strangeness—the distinctive look, the complex underground society, even the strategic poop-eating—is just the tip of the weird iceberg.
Hornbills have great big beaks – and often bigger casques on top of those beaks – which certainly make it easy to remember their dinosaur origins. But don’t let their appearance intimidate you: at the end of the day, the real defining feature of hornbills may be their role as interspecies besties with mongooses.
Hank, Sarah, and Kallie Moore (from PBS Eons) are taking turns “blind ranking” a set of animals! Let's find out which beast is the blobbiest.
Hank, Sarah, and Kallie Moore (from PBS Eons) are taking turns “blind ranking” a set of animals! Let's find out which beast you would let teach kindergarten.
Not everything in Australia wants to kill you. Australia is home to 25 species of dangerously venomous snakes, but, as frightening as their venom may be, plenty of those snakes have a much softer side than their reputation lets on. In fact, a few of them are downright cuddly.
Is Hank Green a green expert? Hank, Sarah, and Kallie Moore (from PBS Eons) are taking turns “blind ranking” a set of animals! Let's find out which beast is the greenest.
Hank Green, Sarah Suta, and Kallie Moore rank... weird little guys! Will there be frogs? Bats? Tenrecs? What is the weirdest little guy?
*Pseudoscorpions are not actually scorpions, but a completely different type of arachnid with little claws, but no stinging tail. These tiny guys eat dust mites and other household pests while being some of nature’s most bizarre hitchhikers.
Martha died on September 1st, 1914. She was 29. Martha wasn’t your average Hollywood starlet – she was something even more rare: an endling, the last member of her species. Just a few hundred years earlier, passenger pigeons flocks were so large that they could literally darken the sky for hours. So how did we get from those numbers to extinction? And are they really gone for good?
Ancient texts described silphium as a remedy for everything from tetanus to tooth ache, and a delicacy – it could do it all and was prized around the Mediterranean world. But by the end of the first century CE, it was gone. This plant has the dubious honor of being the first extinction in recorded history… or does it?
By the late 20th century, the Florida panther was down to just 20 to 30 individuals. Now, there are about 200 of them… Or are there? What if preserving an animal means changing it?
The Mexican tetra, lives in freshwater streams and pools from Mexico up into the southern United States. But these fish also live in cave systems in at least 29 separate places in Mexico, where they have no pigment, and anywhere from minimal eye function to virtually no eyes at all.
Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers or Tasmanian wolves, went extinct in 1936. The conflict between them and settlers on the island is mostly to blame for loss of this marsupial, but the trade in thylacines for zoos, museums, and private collections also put a bounty on their heads. So, when it comes to saving a species, what happens when our zoological fascination is actually part of the problem?
Przewalski’s horse, also known as the takhi, roamed wild across Eurasia continuously for tens of thousands of years. And with their disappearance, Earth lost the last of its truly wild horses. But the story of the takhi actually has a happy ending.
The Christmas Island red crab’s yearly migration has captured nature enthusiasts’ attention for decades. But could we be partly responsible for this world-famous crab-valanche?
Dracunculiasis is a painful parasitic disease caused by the Guinea worm. Where it once affected millions of people, after years of effort in 2024 there were only 15 cases. We hope that soon there will be zero. Since the Guinea worm is a member of the animal kingdom, are we talking about eradication or are we planning an actual extinction?
One of the greatest conservation success stories begins with an extinction. The Lord Howe Island stick insect is an animal that came back from the dead.
