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...

Eyelash vipers were thought to be one widely distributed species that came in a lot of colors, but they’re actually more like five to nine different snakes that each come in a rainbow of colors...even within the same litter... so, how...

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...

The greater bulldog bat lives in Central and South America where it uses its enormous feet to catch fish right out of the water.

The salp's seemingly simple body hides a surprisingly complex life history that involves cloning itself, changing sex, and fighting climate change through the power of poop.<br/>

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...

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.<br/>

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

Welcome back to Bizarre Beasts: Season Zero, where we are remastering episodes of Bizarre Beasts that were originally created for Vlogbrothers. This episode, the dumbo octopus, the cephalopod that uses "ears" for efficient swimming and...

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...

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....

Caecilians are legless amphibians. Some of them are immune to cobra venom and in a certain sense, some of them eat their mothers from the inside-out and some eat them from the outside-in.

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...

Welcome back to Bizarre Beasts: Season Zero, where we are remastering episodes of Bizarre Beasts that were originally created for Vlogbrothers. This episode, Feather Stars! The ancient sea creature that has been on this planet for 500...

If I asked you to name an animal that could stop a train, you might guess something big, like an elephant or a bison. Or you might guess a group of smaller animals, like a herd of deer or a flock of geese. But I’m going to need you to...

In the evolutionary arms race between predator and prey, mammals have mostly gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to body armor.

There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule... And that makes these super-healing...

Welcome back to the second episode of our new format for Bizarre Beasts, which we're calling Season Zero. Over the next year, we will be remastering episodes of Bizarre Beasts that were originally created for Vlogbrothers.

Oilbirds come out at night, live in caves in huge colonies, and echolocate, but they aren't bats! Why would this South American bird have evolved to be so similar to our favorite flying mammals of the night?

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...

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...