Random Animals Blog

Well, it was either a man saying your name and laughing before starting a chainsaw or it was a lyrebird mimicking the sound of a man saying your name and laughing before starting a chainsaw. Lyrebirds are known for their extraordinary ability to replicate sounds that they hear.

As well as mimicking other birds, lyrebirds can mimic human speech, machinery and even explosions. Staggeringly, they can also play two tunes at the same time. They really are pretty incredible.

The bad news is that if a lyrebird was mimicking a man saying your name and laughing before starting a chainsaw, then it must have heard it somewhere…

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 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.

A hodag is a folkloric animal from America (Wisconsin). It was apparantly captured and killed by a infamous prankster who took this picture and circulated it around the press:

It was named Hodag and was said to have:

“the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end”

It even has its own wiki page. Of course it was all part of the legend that is the Hodag. What random animals can you think of? Maybe you could try making one up?