All animals

442 to explore · page 5 of 10

• Watch Animal Giant otter The giant otter is the longest otter in the world, up to about 1.8 meters from nose to tail. It lives in the rivers and lakes of South America in noisy family groups that hunt fish together by day. It is endangered, and people are working to protect it.
• Watch Animal Giant Pacific octopus The giant Pacific octopus is the largest octopus species in the world, living in cool waters of the North Pacific from Japan to Alaska and California. It hunts crabs and clams at night, changes color and skin texture at will, and can squeeze through a hole only a few centimeters wide.
• Watch Animal Giant panda The giant panda is a black-and-white bear that lives in misty mountain forests in China. About 99 percent of its food is bamboo, and it spends up to 16 hours a day eating. Pandas were once endangered, but protecting their forests has helped them, and they are now listed as Vulnerable.
• Watch Animal Giant squid The giant squid is one of the biggest animals without a backbone. Most of its length is two very long, stretchy feeding tentacles. It lives deep in oceans around the world, and it is so hard to find that the first photos of a living one in the wild were taken only in 2004.
• Watch Animal Giant tube worm The giant tube worm lives more than a mile deep in the Pacific Ocean, beside hot springs in the seafloor called hydrothermal vents. It has no mouth and no stomach. Instead, billions of bacteria living inside its body make its food from chemicals in the vent water.
• Watch Animal Gila monster The Gila monster (say HEE-luh) is the largest lizard native to the United States. Its bumpy black skin is patterned with pink or orange, it spends most of its life hidden underground, and it is one of the very few lizards with venom.
• Watch 3D Animal Giraffe Giraffes are the tallest animals on Earth. A long neck and a long dark tongue let them eat leaves from treetops that other animals cannot reach, and their patchy coats help them blend into the shade of the trees.
• Watch Animal Glasswing butterfly The glasswing butterfly has wings you can see right through, framed with orange-brown edges. It lives from Mexico to Panama, and its caterpillars eat plants called Cestrum. Scientists study its clear wings because they hardly reflect any light, which could help people design better glass.
• Watch Animal Golden eagle The golden eagle is one of the largest and fastest birds of prey in North America, and it lives across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It soars over mountains and open country on wings more than two meters wide and dives at tremendous speed to catch rabbits, hares and ground squirrels.
• Watch 3D Animal Golden hamster Golden hamsters, also called Syrian hamsters, are popular pets all over the world. But in the wild they live only in a small area of farmland on the border of Syria and Türkiye, and the IUCN lists them as Endangered.
• Watch Animal Golden lion tamarin The golden lion tamarin is a small, bright orange monkey with a lion-like mane. It lives only in the Atlantic coastal forest of Brazil. In the 1970s only about 200 were left in the wild; thanks to decades of work, a census in 2022 and 2023 counted about 4,800.
• Watch 3D Animal Golden poison frog The golden poison frog is a small frog from one small area of rainforest in western Colombia. It comes in bright yellow, orange or mint green, and its skin holds a very strong poison that comes from the insects it eats. Scientists call it the most toxic of all frogs. It is endangered because its forest is being cleared.
• Watch 3D Animal Goldfish The goldfish is a small member of the carp family that people in China tamed centuries ago, by the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Wild goldfish are greenish-brown, but careful breeding has made gold, white, black and spotted pets with fancy fins.
• Watch Animal Goliath beetle The Goliath beetle is one of the largest beetles on Earth, from about 5 to 11 centimeters long. It lives in the rainforests of central and eastern Africa, where the adults drink tree sap. Its huge grubs need protein-rich food to grow, and they may even hunt other small animals.
• Watch Animal Goliath birdeater The Goliath birdeater is a giant tarantula from the rainforests of northern South America. With legs spreading about 28 centimeters and a weight of up to about 170 grams, it is described as the heaviest spider in the world. Despite its name, it eats mostly worms and insects, not birds.
• Watch Animal Goliath frog The Goliath frog of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea is the largest frog in the world: its body can be over 30 centimeters long, and it can weigh more than 3 kilograms. It lives along fast, clean rainforest rivers, and scientists recently discovered that these giants build and guard little ponds for their eggs. Hunting has made it endangered.
• Watch Animal Gray parrot The gray parrot is a gray, red-tailed parrot from the rainforests of West and Central Africa. It lives in big, noisy flocks, eats fruit and seeds, and is famous for copying sounds. Trapping for the pet trade and forest loss have made it endangered.
• Watch Animal Gray whale The gray whale is a baleen whale of the North Pacific Ocean. It sucks up mud from the seafloor to catch tiny animals, and it makes one of the longest yearly journeys of any mammal: about 16,000 kilometers there and back between Arctic feeding seas and shallow lagoons in Mexico.
• Watch 3D Animal Gray wolf The gray wolf is the largest member of the dog family and the wild ancestor of pet dogs. Wolves live in family packs that hunt big animals like elk and moose together, and their howls can carry about 10 kilometers. After being wiped out in many places, wolves are coming back in parts of North America and Europe.
• Watch 3D Animal Great blue heron The great blue heron is the largest heron in North America. It wades slowly through marshes, rivers and ponds, or stands as still as a statue, then strikes like lightning with its dagger-shaped bill to catch fish, frogs and even small mammals.
• Watch 3D Animal Great egret The great egret is a tall, all-white heron that lives in wetlands on every continent except Antarctica. It wades slowly through shallow water, waits, then strikes like lightning to catch fish. Once nearly wiped out in the United States by hunters who wanted its lacy feathers, it made a remarkable comeback.
• Watch Animal Great hammerhead The great hammerhead is the biggest of the hammerhead sharks. Its wide, flat head, called a cephalofoil, holds its eyes far apart and is packed with senses that help it find stingrays hiding in the sand of warm, shallow seas.
• Watch Animal Great hornbill The great hornbill is a very large bird of Asia's forests, with a long tail, broad black-and-white wings and an enormous curved yellow bill topped by a helmet called a casque. It eats mostly figs, and the female seals herself inside a tree hole to raise her chick.
• Watch Animal Great horned owl The great horned owl is a large, powerful owl with two long, earlike tufts of feathers on its head. It is one of the most common owls in North America and lives in almost any kind of semi-open place, from deserts and forests to city parks. It hunts mostly at night.
• Watch 3D Animal Great white shark The great white shark is the largest of the mackerel sharks: a strong, torpedo-shaped fish with a gray back and a white belly. It hunts fish, seals and sea lions, and it is partly warm-blooded, which helps it stay active in cool water.
• Watch Animal Greater bird-of-paradise The greater bird-of-paradise is a rainforest bird of southern New Guinea and the Aru Islands. Males have a yellow head, a green throat, long tail wires and huge golden flank plumes, which they show off in group dances high in tall trees to win a female.
• Watch Animal Greater blue-ringed octopus The greater blue-ringed octopus is a small octopus that lives among rocks and reefs in the western Pacific. Most of the time it hides, but when it is bothered, about 60 blue rings flash on its skin. The bright rings are a warning, and they tell us this is an animal to watch, never to touch.
• Watch Animal Greater flamingo The greater flamingo is the tallest and heaviest flamingo, standing up to about 1.45 meters tall. It lives in salty lagoons and lakes across Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. It feeds by holding its bent bill upside down in the water and filtering out tiny animals, and it gets its pink color from what it eats.
• Watch Animal Greater roadrunner The greater roadrunner is a long-legged member of the cuckoo family that lives in deserts and scrubby country in the southwestern United States and Mexico. It flies only a little but runs fast, chasing lizards, insects and even snakes, and it has clever ways of coping with desert heat.
• Watch 3D Animal Green anaconda The green anaconda is one of the largest snakes on Earth. This olive-green, spotted boa lives in the rivers, swamps and flooded grasslands of northern South America, where it lies hidden in shallow water with only its eyes and nose showing.
• Watch 3D Animal Green iguana The green iguana is a large lizard from the forests of Central and South America. It climbs high into trees to bask in the sun, eats leaves, flowers and fruit, and dives into rivers to get away from danger. It can grow to about 2 meters long, tail included.
• Watch Animal Green sea turtle The green sea turtle is the largest sea turtle with a hard shell. It lives in warm seas around the world and, unlike other sea turtles, grown-ups eat mostly seagrass and algae. Females swim hundreds or even thousands of kilometers to lay their eggs on the beaches where they hatched long ago.
• Watch Animal Greenland shark The Greenland shark is a huge, slow-moving shark of the cold North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. It grows very slowly in the cold, and in 2016 scientists used the lenses of its eyes to estimate that it can live for at least 272 years, longer than any other animal with a backbone that we know of.
• Watch Animal Grévy's zebra Grévy's zebra is the largest zebra, with narrow stripes, a white belly and big, round ears. It lives only in the dry grasslands and scrub of northern Kenya and Ethiopia, and it is endangered: only a few thousand are left in the wild.
• Watch Animal Grey crowned crane The grey crowned crane is a gray African crane with a spiky crown of golden feathers, white and red cheeks and a red throat pouch. It is one of only two cranes that can perch in trees. It is the national bird of Uganda, and it is Endangered because its wetlands are disappearing.
• Watch Animal Grooved brain coral The grooved brain coral is a reef-building coral of the Caribbean, the Bahamas, southern Florida and Bermuda. Its tiny polyps live in long, winding valleys, which give the dome-shaped colony the look of a brain. A coral disease that spread from Florida since 2014 has hit it hard, and it is now critically endangered.
• Watch Animal Ground pangolin The ground pangolin is a shy African mammal covered in overlapping scales. It sniffs out ants and termites at night and licks them up with a long, sticky tongue. Pangolins are in trouble because people take them illegally, and many people are working to protect them.
• Watch Animal Guinea pig The guinea pig is not a pig and does not come from Guinea. It is a rodent, first tamed thousands of years ago by people in the Andes mountains of South America. Today it is a popular pet around the world, and in parts of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia it is still raised for food.
• Watch 3D Animal Guppy The guppy is a small freshwater fish from northeastern South America and nearby Caribbean islands such as Trinidad. Males are smaller and brightly colored; females are larger and plainer. Guppies give birth to live young, and they are one of the most popular aquarium fish in the world.
• Watch 3D Animal Harbor porpoise The harbor porpoise is a small relative of whales and dolphins. It lives in cool coastal waters of the Northern Hemisphere, in bays, harbors and fjords. It is shy, usually swims alone or in tiny groups, and rolls quietly to the surface to breathe.
• Watch 3D Animal Harbor seal The harbor seal lives along the northern coasts of North America, Europe and Asia, and it is one of the most common marine mammals on the east and west coasts of the United States. It has spotted fur, a dog-like face and no ear flaps, and it wriggles like a caterpillar on land. Its pups can swim within minutes of being born.
• Watch 3D Animal Harpy eagle Harpy eagles are among the largest and most powerful eagles in the world. They live in the lowland rainforests of Central and South America, where they hunt sloths and monkeys in the treetops. Forest loss and shooting have made them rare.
• Watch 3D Animal Hawksbill sea turtle The hawksbill sea turtle lives in warm seas around the world, mostly near coral reefs. Its pointed, hawk-like beak reaches into cracks in the reef to find sponges, its favorite food. Its beautiful patterned shell once made it a target for hunters, and today it is critically endangered.
• Watch Animal Hercules beetle The Hercules beetle is one of the largest beetles in the world: the biggest males can reach 18 centimeters, horns included. It lives in rainforests from southern Mexico to Bolivia and on a few Caribbean islands. Its huge grubs spend more than a year eating rotting wood before they turn into beetles.
• Watch Animal Hoatzin The hoatzin is a strange and wonderful bird of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. It eats mostly leaves and digests them slowly with the help of bacteria, a bit like a cow. Its chicks have claws on their wings that help them climb back up through the branches.
• Watch Animal Honey badger The honey badger, or ratel, is a stocky member of the weasel family that lives across Africa, the Middle East and India. Its gray or white back and black underside make it easy to spot. It digs with huge front claws, travels far to find food, and breaks into bees' nests for honey and bee grubs.
• Watch 3D Animal Horse Horses are grazing animals built for running, with long legs that end in a single hard hoof. People tamed wild horses about 6,000 years ago on the grasslands of Europe and Asia, and horses changed history: they pulled plows, carried riders and connected faraway places.
• Watch 3D Animal House mouse House mice are small rodents that first lived in Europe, Asia and North Africa. By living alongside people, they have spread to every continent except Antarctica. They are quick runners and can have babies when only a few weeks old.