If you find yourself walking thorough the forest of Rambouillet, just west of Paris, and happen to see an animal resembling a kangaroo, know that your eyes aren’t playing trick on you, the French forest has been home to up to 150 wallabies for over 40 years.

The colony of red-necked Bennett’s wallabies living in Rambouillet Forest can be traced back to a small group of animals that were brought into a zoological reserve in the nearby village of Emance, during the 1970s. A few of them escaped through holes in the fencing, and were never retrieved. They’ve been living in the wild for decades and researchers believe that the woods may now be home to around 150 wallabies. The forest provided them with shelter and sustenance, they had no natural predators to fear, and the climate was apparently very similar to that of their native Tasmania. The biggest threat to the wallabies of Rambouillet are passing cars.

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A homesick camel recently managed to melt the hearts of millions of Chinese people after it was reported that it traveled 100 kilometres through the desert to return to its former owners, eight months after being sold.

Chinese media recently featured the heartwarming story of a loyal camel who allegedly spent days crossing the barren desert of North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to reach its former home after being sold to another farmer eight months prior. The injured animal was spotted walking through the desert earlier this month by another herdsman who took it in and tended to its needs while trying to find its owner. News of the camel’s discovery reached its owner who rushed to retrieve it, but after hearing about the animal’s arduous journey, its former masters wanted it back.

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According to a fascinating new study, the Andean condor spend almost all of their flying time in soaring mode, flapping their wings only 1.3 percent of the time.

Weighing up to about 16 kilograms and with a wingspan of roughly 3.3 meters, the condor is the largest flying bird in the world by combined measurement of weight and wingspan. With that in mind, it’s almost impossible to believe that it can stay airborne for at least five hours and cover a distance of over 100 miles without flapping its enormous wings once. But that was the most interesting finding of a study published by researchers at the University of Swansea after monitoring a group of condors for five years.

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Moo, a 7-month-old Dachshund from Florida, has a head that doesn’t quite match the rest of his body. He has the black and brown head of a Dachshund, but below the neck he is all Dalmatian.

One look at Moo and it’s easy to see why many people assume that he is wearing some sort of costume or pajamas the first time they see him. His unique look is not the consequence of some mysterious condition, he was just born like that, and he’s actually a healthy and happy little dog. With over 21,000 followers on Instagram alone, Moo is also on his way to becoming an Instagram influencer.

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Frillback pigeons are one of the most coveted breeds among pigeon fanciers, prized both for its relatively calm temperament and for their unique frills or curls.

Believed to have originated somewhere in Asia Minor, the frillback pigeon is the result of many years of selective breeding. Its distinctive features are the frill or curls on the wing shield feathers, as well as at the end of the foot feathers or muffs. Slightly larger than other pigeon breeds, with long tail and wing feathers, are considered some of the most elegant of fancy pigeon breeds and are very popular at pigeon beauty contests.

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Borzoi hounds typically have longer snouts than most other dog breeds, but one specimen is getting a lot of attention these days for having potentially the world’s longest snout, with a length of 31 centimetres.

Two-year-old Eris is a white Borzoi Sighthound from Richmond, Virginia, who has been getting a lot of attention online for her unusually long snout. Ever sine Eris’ owner, Lily Kambourian, posted a photo of her nose from an angle that really showed how incredibly long it was, people have been fascinated by her schnozzle. Lily says that it was quite obvious that Eris and her siblings had an overbite (a genetic defect) since they were only puppies, but she didn’t care, and she certainly never expected this to become her most popular trait.

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Crysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as scaly foot gastropod is a fascinating sea snail that inhabits one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet and has evolved a natural iron armor in order to do so.

“Scaly foot gastropod” has to be one of the most boring names ever picked for one of the coolest creatures on Earth – a sea snail living 2.78 kilometers (1.7 miles) underneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, around hydrothermal vents are spewing out water around 350°C (660°F). Not to mention that this badass snail is the only known creature to have developed a natural metallic armor that is unlike any other known natural or synthetically engineered armor. Did I mention that it doesn’t even need to eat, as a bacteria in its gut produces all the nutrients it needs to survive? Surely such a creature deserved a cooler name…

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If, like me, you spent a fair bit of your childhood on a farm, or if you’re simply fascinated by domestic birds, you’ve probably seen a crested duck at least once in your life. Their fluffy headgear is a adorable to look at, but it comes with some severe side-effects.

First of all, the funny-looking plumage on the heads of crested ducks is just a genetic defect, and one that has some serious health implications. The fluffy hairdo actually grows out of a section of fatty tissue that covers a gap in the duck’s skull. Not only does this defect make it dangerous for a female crested duck to mate – especially with a particularly aggressive drake – but it has also been linked to seizures, neurological problems and early death. Unfortunately, the photos of cute crested ducks circulating on social media these days don’t come with information about these issues, which only makes the ducks sought after as pets. That leads to another serious problem, breading…

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Endemic to a very specific area on the Malaysian Peninsula, the Fire Snail – named after its bright red foot – is one of the rarest, most sought after snail species in the world.

Platymma tweediei was first discovered in 1938, in Telom Valley, Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands district. Since then, it has also been spotted Temenggor and Kelantan, but nowhere else. According to conservationist Junn Kitt Foot, from Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), the stunning-looking snail species can only be found in a 100km radius in the Cameron Highlands, as it only thrives in very specific conditions. Apparently fire snails can only live in very cool, humid environments, more specifically cloud forests – forests located high enough for clouds to form in (at least 1,000 meters above sea level).

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Blaze, an outgoing Labrador Retriever from Finland became an overnight internet sensation after photos showing his color change from black to white went viral on social media.

Blaze was born with a pure black fur and stayed that way for most of his life, but last year, his human master, Santeri, noticed a small white patch on his ear. He didn’t think too much of it, but the patch kept getting bigger, and before long it spread to the 10-year-old pooch’s face and torso, gradually turning his black coat, white. A photo showing Blaze’s transformation over the last year was recently posted on the Facebook group Dogspotting Society, where it received over 32,000 likes and nearly 3,000 comments from people all over the world.

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In a bid to make its exotic fish tank more appealing to visitors, an aquarium in the Chinese city of Guizhou wrote popular Chinese surnames on the live fish, attracting the wrong kind of attention in the process.

Staff at the Guizhou Polar Ocean World thought they had struck gold when they came up with the idea of writing common surnames like “Zhao,” “Hu” or “Wu” on dozens of live fish in an exotic fish tank, but the response wasn’t as positive as they had hoped. Photos and videos of the yellow fish with bright red Chinese characters painted on their bodies quickly went viral on social media and inspiring thousands of critical comments from the general public.

Overwhelmed by the negative feedback, the Guizhou Polar Ocean World recently put out a statement saying that their exotic fish tank was generally overlooked by most visitors, and that the painted surnames were supposed to make the fish more appealing to the public.

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Prickles, a bare-faced merino sheep that ran away from a Tasmanian farm during the 2013 bush-fires, recently returned home, probably after deciding that it was finally time for a sheer.

According to farmer Alice Gray, Prickles was only a lamb when she ran away, seven years ago. The bush fires that ravaged the area back then destroyed a large chunk of her family’s massive property, and the young sheep got stuck in a 200-acre bush block at the back, unable to return after they rebuilt about 50km of fencing. They had spotted her a few times, and even recorded footage of her with surveillance cameras installed to monitor deer activity, so they knew she was alive, but they didn’t expect her to ever return on the farm. They were wrong.

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A California woman is being praised for going above and beyond to ensure that a cracked duck egg she found in a park hatched, by incubating it in her bra for over a month.

Betsy Ross, an independent contractor from Visalia, California, was walking with her family in a public park when her kids noticed that someone had maliciously smashed up all the duck nests that were there. Miraculously, one of the duck eggs had survived the massacre with only a small crack. It wasn’t leaking, so the kids begged her to save it and try to help it hatch. She had never hatched and egg before, and she didn’t think she could save it, but the children were already upset because of the nests, so she said yes. That was the start of a remarkable journey that saw the young mother of three carrying a duck egg with her everywhere she went for 35 days.

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Honey, dubbed by activists and animal lovers ‘the world’s loneliest dolphin’, died last month, after almost two years spent by herself in a small pool at an abandoned aquarium in Japan.

We originally featured Honey’s tragic story back in October 2018, when footage shot by Japanese animal rights activists showing a single bottlenose dolphin floating in what appeared like an abandoned pool went viral online. It turned out that the video had been shot with a drone at the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, months after it had closed down. The dolphin, named Honey, and some penguins had remained behind and were being fed by an employee every few days. Still, the dolphin suffered from skin burns under the hot summer sun, as well as stress and loneliness. The story made international headlines at the time, but that did nothing to change Honey’s fate. After almost two years spent in that pool alone, she died last month…

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Scientists have long suspected that some species of birds can eat drink, mate and even sleep while flying, but even they were stunned when data showed that one such species could go up to 10 months without landing.

As its name suggests, the commons swift (Apus apus) is a common bird that lives all across Europe and much of Asia, but their flight time is anything but common. This medium-sized bird currently holds the record for the most time spent in the air per year, with data showing that some specimens can spend up to 10 months out of 12 without landing even once. They drink and eat in the air, feasting on any insects that they can capture in flight, they can mate in the air as well, and, like the much larger frigate birds, they can also sleep in the air by gliding on warm air currents known as “thermals”.

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