If you’re looking to have some goofy fun while quarantined in your own home, how about investing in a high quality portrait of your pet as a pompous royal?

Enter Crown & Paw, a company dedicated to helping pet owners honor their bundles of joy by creating hilarious digital portraits of them as generals, princes, or ladies, whatever title the client desires. The company curates a collection of authentic 19th century portraits and rare Renaissance era oil paintings, and combine them with pet portraits to hilarious effect. Seriously, just look at the examples below.

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Le Le, a British Shorthair cat from Wuhan, China, has become a symbol of resistance during the current pandemic, showing us human that if she could survive by herself in a locked apartment for 40 days, then we can handle a bit of social distancing and isolation too.

This story of feline endurance and survival began in January of 2020, when the Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan was still in its infancy. One by one, Le Le’s human family had to be hospitalized after becoming infected with the coronavirus, and before the Chinese New Year (January 25) rolled up, the heavily pregnant cat had been left by herself. Her owners had decided not to hire someone look after her, or even check in on her from time to time, because they didn’t known whether their home was contaminated with the virus or not. So they just opened a bag of cat food and hoped for thee best.

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Only slightly larger that the insect it’s named after, the Bee Hummingbird weighs no more than two grams and lays eggs roughly the size of coffee beans. It is officially the world’s tiniest bird.

Found only in Cuba, the Bee Hummingbird is extremely small even for a hummingbird, so much so that people often mistake it for an actual bee when they see it hovering over flowers. But this tiny flier not only looks like an insect, it also competes against them for resources. It is the result of a phenomenon scientists call “island dwarfism”, where certain species have problems competing against larger species for resources, so they get smaller and smaller over evolutionary time to avoid running out of food and start competing against other categories of organisms.

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We’ve featured our share of famous internet felines, from grumpy cats, to incredibly beautiful fur balls, but we never really posted about scary-looking felines. That ends today, with Xherdan, the scariest-looking sphinx you’ve ever seen.

The phrase “a face only a mother could love” is usually used maliciously, but in the case of Xherdan, a bald, wrinkly and evil-looking cat, it couldn’t be more true, And his mother, 47-year-old Sandra Filippi, from the Swiss town of Rüti, does indeed love him very much and claims that despite his scary look, he is a sweet pet who loves to sleep and interact with his human owners. She claims that although most people are indeed a bit scared the first time they see Xherdan, they eventually grow to like him after seeing how playful and friendly he really is.

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You’ve probably seen photos of horses sporting luxurious staches and thought to yourself “that must be fake”, but it turns out that horses can indeed grow mustaches.

From curly mustaches worthy of classic cartoon villains, to locks that reach way past their snout, horses can grow mustaches in a variety of styles. And the strange thing is that the style of mustache, or even the chance of growing a mustache doesn’t depend on breed. When photos of dashing, mustache-sporting equines originally went viral online, everyone credited the Gypsy Vanner breed for the trait, but it turns out that specimens of that breed are indeed more likely to grow impressive facial hair, they are definitely not the only ones.

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Photos of hunters struggling to lift up a giant wolf they had shot so they can pose with it have been doing the rounds on social media this week.

The incredibly large animal was reportedly shot near the village of Aleksandrovka, in Blagoveshchensk district, the autonomous Republic of Bashkortostan, where packs of wolves had recently started terrorizing residents. Interestingly, locals say that wolves had not been seen in the area four over four decades, but they recently turned up this winter, and had not shied away from entering human settlements. Several dogs have been found torn to pieces in recent weeks, and around twenty cows and sheep and horses have been eaten by the wolves. To make matters worse, guard dogs have apparently stopped barking to alert people about approaching wolves.

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We’ve featured some interesting animal defense mechanisms in the past, from moths that camouflage as two flies feasting on bird poop, to caterpillars that mimic snakes, but this horned lizard’s secret weapon is on another level of weirdness.

The regal horned lizard is a small reptile native to Mexico and the southwestern United States. Their main habitat is  the Sonoran Desert Mountains, where they spend most of their time eating harvester ants and other small insects. They can eat up to twenty five hundred ants in one meal, but if you think that’s impressive, you’ll love its most unusual self-defense mechanism – squirting blood out of its eyes.

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People passing by the Mega shopping center in the Russian city of Kaliningrad every day have gotten used to the blue sweater-wearing husky calmly waiting for something or someone on the cold pavement. He’s been dubbed the Russian Hachiko and the comparison actually makes some sense.

The clean blue sweater that the Russian Hachiko wears every day is a clear indication that he is not some stray, but just to make sure people don’t chase him away, his owner, a woman named Svetlana, always hangs a hand-written home next to the dog explaining that he is simply waiting for her to get off work so they can go home together. Apparently, the dog howls from morning til dusk if left alone in his owner’s apartment, so she prefers to take him with her in the morning, and leaves him outside the Mega shopping center, where he waits for like a good boy.

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For the last two decades, Indian wildlife photographer and conservationist Aditya Singh and his wife have been buying land adjacent the famous Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, and simply letting the forest grow back as a refuge for big cats and other wildlife.

In 1998, Aditya Singh left his comfortable job with Indian civil services in Delhi and moved to a remote part of Rajasthan, in the vicinity of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, to be closer to nature. He took up photography and together with his wife, artist Poonam Singh, opened a tourist resort to earn a living. They had been able to buy a piece of land, because farmers were eager to sell due to the danger of tigers from the nearby reserve venturing onto their properties. Over the year, the couple bought up more land, but instead of planting crops, they just let nature slowly reclaim it. Over the last 20 years, their 35 acres of land has transformed into a green forest patch where lions from the tiger reserve as well as wild boars and other animals come all year round.

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Photos of an adorable “fox dog” have been doing the rounds on the internet over the past week, leaving people wondering whether the animal is a dog, a fox, or a mix between the two.

The adorable Mya first drew the internet’s attention back in 2016, when her Instagram account went viral and she made appearances in some of the world’s most popular publications. But fast forward four years, and most most people still don’t know what animal they are looking at. The truth is that Mya’s blue eyes and vixen-like appearance can be a bit confusing, but she is actually a Pomsky, which is apparently what you call a Pomeranian-Husky mix.

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As children, we learn that birds build their nests out of twigs and dry grass, but the truth is that bird nest architecture varies greatly, as demonstrated by the tiny Tailor Bird, which uses as its beak as a needle to stitch a protective nest out of leaves.

Orthotomus sutorius, or the Common Tailor Bird, is a small, warbler-like songbird that lives in tropical Asia, but it’s not its singing that’s intriguing, it’s the bird’s nest building skills. It stitches one or two solid tree leaves together to create a cup that provides both a comfortable shelter and camouflage from predators. And when I say stitches, that is exactly what I mean. The female tailor bird uses its sharp beak as a needle to first pierce the leaves, then takes cobwebs or plant fibers and guides it through the holes as thread, until the pouch is nice and secure. It’s unclear how the tailor birds picked up this talent for sewing but it’s clear that it is passed on genetically.

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Turtles may be cute, but they are also slow and clumsy, which doesn’t really help them when they are trying to cross train tracks. Luckily, for the turtles in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, railway operators and a local aquarium teamed up to find a solution.

Between 2002 and 2014, disruptions of train operation caused by turtles were reported 13 times, with many more probably going unreported. That is why, in 2015, West Japan Railway Co. and Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe joint forces to prevent tragic turtle deaths on the tracks and unnecessary train delay. After running a series of tests and experiments, they came up with a U-shaped ditch that collects the turtles, preventing them from getting stuck between the metal tracks and getting squashed to death.

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A six-year-old Labrador Retriever from Canandaigua, New York recently set a new world record befitting his playful personality – most tennis balls held in a dog’s mouth at once.

Finley the dog loves tennis balls so much that he has developed a very special skill – picking up and holding up to six balls in his mouth, without any assistance from a human. His owners, the Molloy family, first noticed the pooch’s talent when he was two years old. Back then, he could fit up to four tennis balls in his mouth at once, but before they knew it, Finley started showing up with five balls between his teeth, and then finally with six, which stretched his cheeks to the extreme.

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Indonesian officials are offering a monetary reward to whoever manages to remove a motorcycle tyre from the neck of a 13-foot-long crocodile.

The full-grown crocodile has reportedly been wearing the tire around its neck since 2016, but authorities in Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi, are worried that it may end up strangling the reptile, so they are turning to the public for help. In 2018, conservationist and “animal whisperer” Muhammad Panji tried to remove the tire, and later that year the local conservation office tried luring the 4-meter-long crocodile with food. Both attempts proved unsuccessful so Palu officials are now hoping that brave locals can do the impossible for an unspecified cash prize.

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Most people think that cats are nature’s ultimate rat catchers, but they’re actually a lot less efficient in catching and killing rodents than dogs.

Rats are known to breed at an alarming rate, and in the English countryside it’s easy for farms to be overrun by disease-spreading rodents. When rats become too much for farmers to handle, it’s up to small companies like Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack to come in and clean up with the help of some small but exceptionally skilled rodent hunters. Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack specialises in training dog breeds that genetically designed to catch rats; they travel all around the UK helping farmers clean up their rat infested properties in a matter of hours. Their most successful endeavour yet occurred earlier this month, when a pack of eight dogs managed to kill no less than 730 rats in only seven hours.

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