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Which Creature Is the Most Absurd of All? You Decide in Our Final Matchup
Note: Voting for the tournament is now closed. To find out who won, visit WIRED on Friday for Absurd Creature of the Week’s one-year anniversary celebration. We’re coming up on one whole year of Absurd...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The 100-Foot Sea Critter That Deploys a Net of...
These are the siphonophores, some 180 known species of gelatinous strings that can grow to 100 feet long, making them some of the longest critters on the planet. But instead of growing as a single body...
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The Most Absurd Creatures on Earth, From Satanic Geckos to Fairy Armadillos
Well, here we are. Absurd Creature of the Week made it one year without getting canceled. It seems like just yesterday when I awkwardly asked WIRED’s resident GIF expert to make one of a pearlfish...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Naked Mole Rat Could One Day Save Your Life
“Sic semper tyrannis,” Brutus supposedly yelled as he helped assassinate Julius Caesar: Thus always to tyrants. John Wilkes Booth exclaimed the same to the panicked crowd in Ford’s Theater after he...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Parasitic Worm That Turns Snails Into Disco...
This is Leucochloridium, a parasitic worm that invades a snail's eyestalks, where it pulsates to imitate a caterpillar. The worm then mind-controls its host out into the open for hungry birds to pluck...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Incredible Spider That Lives Its Entire Life...
The diving bell spider the only arachnid on Earth that spends its entire life underwater, a lovely reminder that where life finds a niche, it fills it—oh, and that if you’re afraid of spiders you...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Vicious Duck That Beats the Crap Out of...
This is the avian version of Bloodsport, only without all of the terrible yet somehow endearing acting. The four species of steamer duck (so named for their penchant for flapping and running along the...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Beautiful But Deadly Undersea Raver That...
Up here on terra firma, we’re treated to all kinds of wildly colorful wildlife: polychromatic parrots, iridescent green beetles, unicorns galloping on rainbows that one time I ate too many pot...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Wasp That Lays Eggs Inside Caterpillars and...
Few parasitoids are more bizarre or disturbing than the wasps of the genus Glyptapanteles, whose females inject their eggs into living caterpillars. Once inside, the larvae mature, feeding on the...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Vampire Frog That Devours Its Mother’s Eggs
The frog they’d found wasn’t particularly remarkable. As far as flying frogs go, its feet weren’t as comically large and webbed as, say, Helen’s flying frog (which Rowley also discovered, and named...
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Absurd Creatures of the Week: Disco Snails and Other Real-Life Zombies...
A staggering number of creatures out there (and even some fungi) have figured out how to mind-control their unfortunate hosts. In Absurd Creature of the Week, I’ve covered quite a few of these. But...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: This Crazy-Looking Sea Slug Has an Ingenious...
All over our world’s oceans, the many astoundingly colored species of nudibranch are eating things like the vicious Portuguese man o' war, incorporating their stingers or toxins into their own skin,...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Nightmarish Shark That Lures Victims With...
In the deep sea, to get ahold of prey you'd do well to have row after row of backward-facing, needle-like teeth---hundreds and hundreds of them that are each forked into three nasty prongs. Such is the...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Adorably Creepy Gliding Mammal That’s...
The colugo is the most accomplished mammalian glider of all—on account of being essentially a giant flap of skin—capable of soaring an incredible 200 feet from tree to tree. The post Absurd Creature of...
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Absurd Creatures of the Week: Nature’s Weirdest Eaters Will Make You Feel...
I can’t help you with that post-Thanksgiving lethargy, or the hangover for that matter, or with that thing you shouldn’t have said to your grandmother, but I can assure you that you’re not alone. I’m...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: This Is an Actual Insect. This Is Not a Joke
Let’s just admit it: We all have body issues to some degree. I, for instance, was informed a few years back by a drunk lady in a bar that I am in fact slightly bow-legged, which was the first I’d heard...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Adorable Mexican Mole Lizard Has a...
Down in Baja California there crawls a beast so bizarre, so cruel, so foul, that the mere mention of it sends locals scurrying. It’s an opportunist, said to attack humans at their most vulnerable...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The World’s Goofiest-Looking Spider Is Actually...
The bizarre assassin spiders of Australia, South America, and Madagascar hunt other spiders. By deploying their jaws out 90 degrees from their necks, they can impale prey, inject venom, and let them...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Tiny Primate That Was Probably the...
What I’m about to say could well ignite sectarian conflict within the Star Wars fan community, but I’m pretty sure I know what the inspiration for Yoda was. It was a tiny, wide-eyed, positively...
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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Beautiful Octopus Whose Sex Is All About...
In Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the crew of the Nautilus takes a break from going for swims and pissing off native islanders to admire an armada of strange beasts floating along the...
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