Much like people who want to make it in ‘business’, a tarsier’s eye is as big as its brain. In the tarsier’s case, this is because its eyes are massive.

They have ridiculously long fingers. The third one is the same length as their upper arms. Two of their toes have bear claws – but not the others, for some reason.

According to Wikipedia, they catch insects by ‘jumping at them’ which seems a primitive and somewhat amateurish hunting technique.

However, if an animals got the decency to have eyes like that, I’ll forgive most things. I would happily buy a tarsier a pint on that basis alone.

A gliding marsupial. That’s pretty cool.

Sugar gliders live in trees and are nocturnal. They’re called sugar gliders because they like sweet foods, although their preference is for fruit, rather than cakes or chocolate.

Weirdly, despite living in groups of about 15 and therefore seeming like they might be quite sociable animals, they actually boot their young out when they reach the age of about seven to ten months old. This seems particularly harsh being as they don’t even open their eyes for their first three months of life and spend the first couple of those in the old pouch.

I don’t know. It’s just a freaky little lemur, I guess. The picture above looks pretty hideous, but they’re not quite so bad when they’re full-grown.

Focusing on the weird look rather detracts from its major selling point anyway. The Aye-aye has a truly massive middle finger. It doesn’t use this finger for expressing its displeasure with friends or colleagues though. It uses it for grub hunting.

Rodenty face, squirrelly tail, one finger from a much larger animal. It’s a rum beast and no mistake. It’s also not very polite. Male Aye-ayes will pull other males off the female when they’re in the middle of doing it. That’s just bad manners.

That, my friends, is a pangolin.

Pangolins are also known, more descriptively, as scaly anteaters and quite sensibly, they only live in the tropics, although less sensibly they’re nocturnal.

Features of the pangolin

• About one to three feet long
• Loads and loads of really sticky spit which it uses to gather termites
• The tree pangolin hangs from trees by its tail and burrows in the bark of the trunk for termites
• Looks like a walking pine cone
• Secretes acid in its anus

Bizarrely, pangolins are also really good at problem-solving and are pretty good at escaping if you trap them.

That, my friends, is a capybara. It’s a big, fuck-off rodent and its name means ‘master of the grasses’ which is a brilliantly overblown name for something so lumpen.

Capybaras seem to be animals that aren’t really made for mooching around fields eating grass. For one thing they’ve got webbed feet, which seems totally unnecessary.

Secondly, their back legs are longer than their front legs. While this does tip their stubby little heads down towards that delicious green floor-fodder, it doesn’t seem right that an animal that spends its whole time on four legs should have to be inclined forwards the whole time.

Poor bastards.

That, my friends, is a numbat. As with most mammals that you think you should recognise but don’t, it’s from Australia. And yes, it is a marsupial, because Australia can’t build an animal without sticking a damn pocket on it.

What do numbats eat?

They eat termites and NOTHING ELSE. They need to eat about 20,000 of them each day, which is bad news for termites, but good news for anyone who thinks termites are LAZY TWATS WHO DESERVE TO DIE.

It must be pretty boring for numbats, having to eat termites all the time, but they’re far too tiny to eat a kangaroo or something like that. They’re actually only about a foot long.