Strange Animals Scientists Studied

Horses that did math, parrots that asked what color they were, water bears in open space.

39 stories

• The $35 Ferret Hired to Clean a Particle Accelerator
• The Armadillo Pitched as a Leprosy Lab — and the Researchers Who Laughed Until It Worked
• The Dog That Kept Trying to Bite Off Its Owner's Mole — and Turned Out to Be Right
• The Earthworms Darwin Caught Slowly Burying Stonehenge
• The Inch-Long Shrimp That Drowned Out the Navy's Underwater Microphones — With a Bubble
• The Mummified Baboons That Helped Find a Lost Kingdom — Using Their Teeth as a Return Address
• The Pigeons Trained to Spot Breast Cancer — and the Flock That Got It Right 99% of the Time
• The Roman Pet Monkey Buried With Three Kittens and a Piglet of Her Own
• The Ship-Sinking Clam That Taught an Engineer How to Dig Under the Thames
• The Zookeepers Who Wiped a Hippo's Face With Gauze to Find Out Why It 'Sweats Blood'
• The Crocodile Mummy a Fed-Up Workman Smashed — and Found Stuffed With Ancient Paperwork
• The 'Rubbish Bird' a Grad Student Discovered Was Poisonous by Licking His Own Scratch
• The 2,478 Baby Jellyfish NASA Sent to Space — and the Ones That Came Home Dizzy
• The Dung Beetles Scientists Fitted With Tiny Hats to Prove They Steer by the Milky Way
• The Wombat That Proved You Can Fit a Square Peg Through a Round Hole
• The Falling Cat That Seemed to Break the Laws of Physics
• The 180,000 Mummified Cats That Were Sold by the Ton as Fertilizer
• The 7,500 Pounds of Hagfish That Slimed Five Cars and Closed a Highway
• The 8,510 Cows Scientists Counted on Google Earth to See If They Point North
• The Platypus Pelt a Museum Keeper Cut Open With Scissors, Hunting for the Stitches
• The Rats That Learned to Drive Tiny Cars — and Revved the Engine Before the Ride
• The Battlefield Maggots That Became a Prescription Medical Device
• The Chicken That Lived 18 Months After Losing His Head
• The Two Tortoises That Flew Around the Moon Before Any Human Did
• The Twelve Leeches That Were Supposed to Ring a Bell When a Storm Was Coming
• The Stork That Came Home With an African Spear Through Its Neck
• The Cat Who Co-Authored a Physics Paper Because His Owner Used the Word 'We'
• Clever Hans: The Horse That Could 'Do Math'
• Laika: The Moscow Stray Who Orbited Earth, and the Truth Hidden for 45 Years
• The Beetle That Explodes Inside a Predator's Stomach — and Walks Away
• The Blind Bats That Flew Perfectly in the Dark
• The Baby-Blue Blood of the Horseshoe Crab That Keeps Every Vaccine Safe
• The Horses That Battled an Army of Electric Eels
• The Jellyfish That Can Reverse Its Own Aging
• The Kingfisher That Redesigned the Bullet Train
• The Naked Mole-Rat: The Cold-Blooded Mammal That Lives Like an Ant and Won't Age on Schedule
• The Parrot That Asked What Color Am I
• The Teenager Who Sent Two Spiders to Spin Webs in Space
• The Water Bears That Survived Naked in Open Space

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