Weird Animals That You Won't Believe Exist

We’ve all been captivated by stories of mythical creatures, from unicorns and dragons, to Bigfoot and the Chupacabra. But it’s easy to forget just how unbelievable some of Earth’s 8.7 million species are! From rude-looking reptiles and fish with see-through heads, to underwater woodlouse bigger than new-born babies! Forget about all those bogus beasts from story books, and let’s embark on a virtual safari of animals that you won’t believe are real!

Hooded Seals

At first glance, Hooded Seals look like any other member of the fin-footed seal family. But during mating season, the males reveal a mind-blowing secret (or at least, nose blowing). When trying to attract a mate, the male will stomach-churningly inflate the hood of his forehead, before pushing a blood-red sac out of his nose.

Hooded Seal | World's Weirdest by Nat Geo Animals

This elasticated membrane inflates when the seal blocks off one nostril and pushes air into the other, appearing bright red thanks to all the blood flowing through it. As the male waves his inflated sac around like an excited kid with a balloon, the display ironically signals just how big and powerful he is. So, the bigger the balloon, the better his chances of impressing a female.

However, the male can also use it to square off against other, enormous seals, that can weigh up to 880 lbs, during breeding season. When this happens, the male who displays the biggest bulge wins the female, saving them the energy of a physical confrontation!

Rosy Maple Moth

Believe it or not, there is a creature in the wilds of North America that looks more like a cartoon than a real-life animal. The bright-pink and yellow winged thing in the image below is called the Rosy Maple Moth. It’s a species that belongs to the Great Silk Moth family, but it looks more like a winged version of DeeDee from Dexter’s Lab!

While its cartoonish color patterning doesn’t seem like the best choice of camouflage, this moth has a secret hidden up its furry sleeves. Endemic to Northeast America, these pastel-colored cuties like to nest in maple trees, the winged fruits of which have a similar pink and yellow color scheme to them! So, it can perch among the branches without having to worry about becoming a delicious looking snack for a nearby predator. It makes you wonder if it tastes as sweet as it looks.

Giant Isopod

When most of us think of isopods, like woodlouse or pill bugs, we imagine tiny, insect like creatures, usually no bigger than a half dollar coin. And that’s where the existence of the giant isopod defies all manner of imagination!

Living up to 7,000 ft beneath the waves, these underwater isopods exhibit varying degrees of deep-sea gigantism. That means, the deeper they live, the bigger they can grow, with some specimens measuring up to a staggering 2.5 feet long!

The freaky phenomenon has left scientists scratching their heads for decades. One prominent theory claims that cooler temperatures, like those at the bottom of the ocean, encourage animals to grow larger as they radiate less heat. However, another theory argues that large animals have a lower metabolism, meaning they’ve evolved to adapt to the lack of food on the ocean floor.

Whatever the reason, watching these overgrown woodlice scuttle along the ocean floor is still one huge nightmare! But thankfully, they only look menacing. That’s because Giant Isopods are scavengers; rather than hunting down prey with those creepy looking claws, these carnivorous crustaceans wait for food to float down from above in a flurry of so-called marine snow. It’s like they’re constantly waiting on a deep-sea Deliveroo!

Vampire Water Deer

Deer are beautiful, majestic animals that inspire a sense of awe in any lucky onlookers. But there’s one member of the deer family that’s a lot less endearing. Instead of growing regal looking antlers, Water Deer grow huge, terrifying fangs instead!

Although you might imagine these fanged fiends leaping around at night trying to nibble on the necks of unsuspecting victims, the reality is a little more reassuring. Water Deer are completely herbivorous, and males use these fangs like antlers to compete for mates and territory. And their vicious appearance doesn’t seem so threatening when you realize that they only stand about 2 ft tall!

According to Jen Webb, Zoo Atlanta’s carnivore keeper, the ancestors of all deer were small and had both tusks and antlers. But as they evolved, the larger of the species developed larger antlers and lost their fangs, while smaller deer kept their tiny tusks! Either way, this is going to make for one very freaky Bambi prequel.

Feather Star

There are plenty of weird and wonderful things swimming around in the ocean, but the feather star looks like it’s been plucked straight from the pages of a children’s book!

Beautiful Feather Star (Crinoids) caught swimming by Treasure Bay Dive Resort

As a member of the crinoid family, which includes sea stars and sea urchins, they begin their lives attached the sea floor by a stalk. At this stage they’re called sea lilies. But, if their stem is broken, they become fluttering feather stars, using their fringed appendages to swim freely under the waves, almost like a sentient pom-pom!

Although not all species of feather star can swim, scientists believe this evolutionary response helped them escape from predators. And, perhaps more impressively, they also discovered that feather stars can fully regenerate any lost limbs!

They can grow up to 150 of their feathery arms, which can each reach up to a foot long. But should one be severed, it’ll slowly grow back at a rate just shy of a millimeter a day. And providing their central disk, called a centradorsal, is intact, there’s no limit to how many times those arms can grow back! So, theoretically, these mesmerizing sea creatures could keep on swimming forever!

Aye Aye

Lemurs are a famously cute, cuddly looking species native to the island of Madagascar, but there’s one drastic exception to the rule. Meet the Aye Aye, a primate that doesn’t just look like it evolved in a different way, but on a different planet!

It sports rodent-like teeth that never stop growing, piercing eyes that see in the dark, and a skeletally thin middle finger that looks like a spider leg! It’s also the only primate in the world that relies on echolocation to find food, kind of like a dolphin, if a dolphin was small, furry, and downright terrifying.

Using that long, bony finger, the Aye Aye taps on branches before using those massive ears to detect the reverberations of grubs scuttling round the inside. If it hears one, it’ll rip open the branch with a powerful bite, which is so strong that it can chew through concrete!

Then, it uses that hideously dexterous middle finger, which has its own ball and socket joint like a freakishly tiny shoulder, to fish out the grubs. While this spine-tingling display makes many people shudder, the aye-aye clearly doesn’t care. In fact, it’s giving the world the middle finger!

Maned Wolf

From the shoulders up, the Maned Wolf that prowls the South American savannahs looks like any other crafty canine. But once it steps out of the tall grasses, it looks like someone just glued a fox onto some stilts!

Standing around 3 ft at the shoulder, about hip height on most people, the unbelievably long legs of this weird wolf raise up the main bulk of its body. While it looks like an evolutionary joke, scientists theorize that their height makes prey easier to see and catch in the tall grasses of the South American savannahs.

Even so, it doesn’t really look like any kind of wolf you’ve ever seen before, because, despite its name, it’s not a wolf at all! The puzzling mixture of its anatomical oddities, like long legs, bright red fur, and wolfish body, make it a unique and distinct species, called Chrysocyon! So, while it’s still a member of the canid family, it looks more like someone mashed a fox and wolf together and gave it a few rounds through a taffy-puller!

Worm Lizards

The next animal is a worm lizard. It looks something like that mother nature couldn’t decide if this Pepto-Bismol colored creature was going to be a lizard, or an earthworm, so settled for something in between! Known as the Bipes, from the Amphibaenid family, this goofy looking-reptile’s long body has the light pink ribbing of a worm, combined with the beady little eyes and jaw of a lizard. But its strangest feature, by far, are the two funny-looking front limbs attached to its near 10-inch long body.

Found across the Mexican Baja desert, it’s also earned itself the hilarious title of ‘the Mexican Mole Lizard’ because of how it uses those stumpy little legs. Just like a mole, it shovels sand and soil out of its way and buries itself underground in a kind of subterranean bunker. There it stays to escape the heat of the desert sun, only emerging on the surface when it’s much cooler. Although, the verdict is still out on whether it technically slithers or crawls its way around.

Long Beaked Echidna

With spines like a hedgehog, a fleshy beak, and the ability to lay eggs like a reptile, this wacky mammal sounds like it’s been made up by a child! But far from being a Crayola drawing stuck on a fridge, the Long Beaked Echidna is weirdly real.

That long, fleshy beak it gets its name from is comprised of a single bony tube. It feeds by sucking hard at the ground and slurping up soft invertebrates like earthworms, a bit like a kid messily slurping up spaghetti! Except, unlike a child, it has electro-receptors in its beak that can detect the faintest electrical fields produced by its underground prey.

Despite technically being a mammal, this spiney sucker actually lays eggs! When those eggs hatch, the echidna will incubate them in a pouch, just like a kangaroo! But unlike a kangaroo, it’ll feed the babies, adorably known as puggles, through a series of milk patches. Through special glands in their pouches, milk oozes out of its skin for the baby to suck up through its own bizarre little beak!

Bryozoans

In rivers and lakes around the world, mysterious, brain-like blobs can be found lurking in the murky waters. Although they look like mounds of moldy Jell-O, they’re more alive than you might think!

These lifeless gelatinous lumps are actually living colonies, called Magnificent Bryozoans. While the individual animals they’re made up of, called zooids, only grow to about 1/25th of an inch in length, they cluster together to form colonies as large as 4 ft in diameter!

Banding together means they can find food more easily in the water, usually in the form of algae or other organic material. But the way they eat might turn your stomach, because they each have only one opening that serves as both their mouth and their poop shoot. Using tiny, hair like tentacles around the opening, they gently push food down into their gut. To excrete, it’s the same, but in reverse! So, if ever you spot one of these in the water, you might want to think twice about picking it up.

Salps

Although the mysterious balls of goo below look like they’ve been forced into a fish shaped mold, you might be surprised to learn that they’re taxonomically closer to humans than jellyfish! That’s because these semi-transparent sea creatures, called Salps, are members of an animal group known as sea squirts, or Tunicata.

They all have a supporting notochord, a bit like a backbone, running through them to protect their central nerve cord. Despite their floppy, jelly like appearance, this crucial attribute makes them some of the closest living relatives to vertebrates! However, if you catch a glimpse of them underwater, you might realize just how different they really are.

Salps form unbelievable, underwater chain colonies as part of their reproductive cycle. They’re created when a single, solitary Salp asexually buds off clones of itself, with each one growing so fast they increase in length by 10% every hour! Different variants can range in size, from a few millimeters to almost 4 inches, meaning the chains they form can measure up to 15 feet! These bizarre living jelly ropes can twist and spiral in the water, which is a pretty amazing feat for an animal with no bones.

Pyrosomes

Salps aren’t the only boneless animal that look impossibly impressive underwater! If you want proof, just take a look at the alien-esque form of the enormous Pyrosome in the video below. Pyrosomes are free-floating colonies of zooids, kind of like the Bryozoans! They’re all connected by shared tissue, like some sort of gelatinous tunic, which they use to communicate and co-ordinate their movements.

Giant Pyrosome - San Clemente Island by Ross Overstreet

As each individual zooid filters the ocean water for food, they expel the filtered water into the colonial, cylindrical body. With enough water being pushed out, like using thousands of tiny motors all at once, the colony propels forward! These colonies can range in size from just a few centimeters, to 60 ft long with openings wide enough for a human to swim through and bodies big enough to ride!

They increase in size through asexual reproduction, meaning they create identical clones of themselves to expand their gigantic, wormlike structure. And like that wasn’t weird enough, they also glow! The name Pyrosome literally means "fire body" in Greek because they emit a bizarre, bioluminescent light that can be seen more than 100 feet away! Scientists think it may be to ward of predators or communicate with other colonies, although it remains something of a mystery.

Atretochoana Eiselti

This unfortunate looking creature is called the Atretochoana Eiselti, although its suggestive appearance has earned it the hysterical nickname of "The Man-aconda". This phallic-fiend is actually a type of caecilian, which are a group of blind, snake-like amphibians that look more like worms than reptiles.

Aquatic Caecilian Birth by Tennessee Aquarium

However, the Man-aconda has a few unique traits. For a start, it’s the only lungless species of caecilian known to man, meaning it breathes via a gas exchange in its skin. And secondly, its flat skull and enlarged mouth look like they were plucked straight out of my worst nightmares! But what it lacks in beauty, it makes up for in length, as some variants have been found to measure up to 31.7 inches.

The Punk Mary River Turtle

Back in 2018, an unbelievable image of a tiny turtle sporting one hell of a mohawk took the internet by storm.

But it turns out the vivid-green hair isn’t the strangest thing about this rebellious looking reptile. It’s called the Mary River Turtle, an endangered species native to Australia that has the unique ability to breathe through its genitalia. Using specialized glands near its cloaca, an organ used for both excretion and mating, it can stay submerged in the water for anywhere up to 72 hours!

Because they spend so much time under water, algae can start to grow on their shell, head and other body parts, which is where that hilarious green hairdo comes from! So the hair may be fake, but is there anything more punk than breathing through your own butt?

The Yeti Crab

At first glance, you might think the crab in the image below pinched some poor raver’s shaggy leg warmers! But this is, in fact, the Yeti Crab; a name that comes from its white, hairy appearance, which resembles the legendary Yeti snow monster. But there’s nothing monstrous about this crab, considering it reaches around 6 inches in size!

It lives in almost freezing ocean depths, around 7,800 ft below the waves, but its fantastic white fur isn’t designed to keep it warm. Scientists speculate that these little crabs use the hairy bristles on their arms to harvest bacteria. By clambering over hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor, they use the warm, rising waters to cultivate nutritious microbes. This means they have a constant food supply within arm’s reach!

The Great Potoo

With its freakishly gigantic eyes and a creepily open smile, it’s hard to tell if the creature below is a bird or a demonic muppet! It may look like a shelved design for an R-Rated Jim Henson creation, but this feathery fiend is in fact tropical America’s Great Potoo bird.

At just 23 inches tall, this nocturnal creature has developed huge, bulging eyes to spot flying insects in the dark, along with a massive mouth to help catch them. However, when exposed to light, their iris’ shrink dramatically, making them look either incredibly cute or utterly deranged!

Their ominous orbs also have a narrow slit along the bottom of their eyelids, allowing them to sense movement even when their eyes are closed. This means when they sleep during the day, while expertly camouflaging themselves as tree stumps, they can detect any approaching predators!

Fire Snail

If regular snails celebrated Halloween, they’d probably go trick-or-treating looking like the one in the image below! Except, that’s no costume, because these are the true-to-life colors of the Fire Snail.

With its huge black shell growing up to 2.7 inches in diameter, and bright red foot measuring up to 11.8 inches, they’re big enough to make a grown man scream. With their vampiric color scheme, they look like they’d leave a trail of blood rather than slime!

But in reality, these crazy-colored mollusks are no different to your garden variety snail. Well, almost no different. It’s a species native to the cloud forest of the Cameron highlands in Malaysia, which has a very cool and humid temperature that allows this melanoid mollusk to thrive. Because these specific conditions are almost impossible to emulate, the snails are notoriously hard to keep alive outside their natural habitat.

Blue Dragon (Glaucus Atlanticus)

Dragons aren't mythical beings that only exist in children’s stories and nerdy role-playing games. The extraordinarily embellished predator in the image below is known as Blue Dragon, although its scientific, and much less cool, name is Glaucus Atlanticus. And despite its majestic appearance, this brilliantly colored creature is actually a species of small, pelagic, sea slug!

Growing to a maximum of just 1.2 inches in length, these tiny slugs float along ocean currents by swallowing air and holding it in a specialized gas sac in their stomachs. But as pretty as they look, you don’t want to go scooping these out of the water!

Blue Dragons are predators of other pelagic creatures, including the deadly Portuguese Man-O-War and other venomous siphonophores. Once they’ve chowed down on their poisonous prey, they recycle the nematocysts that give the siphonophores their dangerous stings and store them in their finger like cerata. So, if you pick one up, you might receive a deadly sting! While it’s not exactly breathing fire, they do have a little bit of dragon in them after all.

Creatonotos Moth

Every wondered what would happen if Satan had been allowed to create an animal? Well, the answer would probably look something like the Creatonotos Moth. Those terrifying tentacles protruding from its abdomen may look like something out of a bad dream, though this thing is completely real.

But it’s not as bad as it looks! For a start, the moth only has a wingspan of about 1.5 inches, which is about half the size of your thumb. Despite its less-than-appealing appearance, those menacing tentacles aren’t used to feed on your soul. They’re known as coremata, which are scent organs that the moth inflates to produce pheromones when trying to attract a mate.

Barreleye Fish

A fish with a transparent head may sound like something straight out of science-fiction, but in the deep, dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, it’s very much alive and swimming!

The Macropinna Microstoma, more commonly known as the Barreleye Fish, gets its nickname from the tubular set of eyes embedded within its transparent head. It’s eyes aren’t the dark capsules at the front, but the large green orbs glinting inside that fluid-filled shield! As unusual as this physical trait seems, it’s actually a clever hunting tool.

The Barreleye lives around 2,000-2,600 ft below the waves, so it’s constantly swimming through pitch-black waters. To catch a decent meal in these abyssal conditions, its sensitive, tubular eyes are angled upwards through its head. This means it can spot the faintest silhouette of prey floating above and ambush it from below. While this makes it sound like a terrifying, deep-sea predator, the Barreleye is only about 6 inches long, so the only thing you’d risk losing to this fish is a staring contest!

If you were amazed at these weird animals that look like lies but are real, you might want to read more about animals! Thanks for reading.