A baby deer is a fawn, a baby bear is a cub, a baby kangaroo is a joey, a baby fox is a kit, and a baby goat is a kid — and that’s just the beginning. English has a
The smartest animal in the world, by most scientific measures, is the chimpanzee — our closest living relative, a toolmaker with culture, politics, and a photographic short-term memory that beats most humans. But intelligence isn’t a single ladder, and depending
The loudest animal in the world is the sperm whale, whose echolocation clicks have been measured at up to about 230 decibels underwater — the most intense sound produced by any living creature. On land, the title usually goes to
The longest-living animal ever reliably dated was an ocean quahog clam named Ming, which was 507 years old when scientists counted its shell rings in 2013. Among vertebrates, the champion is the Greenland shark: a 2016 study estimated one large
The strongest animal in the world, relative to its size, is a dung beetle: the horned dung beetle Onthophagus taurus can pull about 1,141 times its own body weight — the equivalent of a person dragging six fully loaded double-decker
The biggest animal in the world — and the largest animal known to have ever lived — is the blue whale. The longest individuals reliably measured stretched up to about 98 feet, and the heaviest weighed as much as roughly
The fastest animal in the world is the peregrine falcon, which reaches speeds of more than 200 miles per hour — up to about 240 mph — in its hunting dive. On land, the record-holder is the cheetah, with reliably
Z is the final letter of the animal alphabet, and one animal owns it: the zebra. But Z has more to offer than stripes — there is a humped ox sacred in parts of South Asia, an African “skunk” that
Y is a quieter letter of the animal alphabet, but it has real star power: a shaggy ox that thrives higher than most airplanes cruise on takeoff, a whistling “rock woodchuck” of the American West, one of the rarest penguins
X is the hardest letter in the entire animal alphabet — and this page will be honest with you about it. Only a handful of animals have common names that truly begin with X, and most of those borrow from
W is a wild letter. It owns the largest animal that has ever lived (the blue whale), one of the smallest carnivores on Earth (the least weasel), the howling icon of the wilderness (the wolf), and a marsupial that produces
V is a small but dramatic letter. It brings us the only mammals that live entirely on blood, the rarest marine mammal on Earth, a wild relative of the alpaca with the finest wool in the world, and a backyard
U is a genuinely tricky letter — there are far fewer U animals than S or T animals, and some lists pad themselves out with made-up names. Not here. Every animal below is real, from a bald-headed monkey with a
T stands for tiger — the biggest cat on Earth — but that is only the beginning. This letter also delivers a screaming marsupial from Tasmania, a deer with vampire-like fangs, a high-altitude deer of the Andes, tortoises that outlive
S may be the busiest letter in the animal kingdom. It covers the slowest mammal (the sloth), some of the fastest swimmers (sharks and seals), the smelliest defense system (the skunk), and an entire squad of squirrels. It even includes
R is a letter full of familiar faces: rabbits in the backyard, raccoons at the trash can, robins on the lawn — and then some heavyweights, like the rhinoceros, and some true rarities, like the red wolf, one of the
Let’s be honest: Q is one of the hardest letters in the animal alphabet. There simply are not many animals whose common names begin with Q. But the ones that do exist are wonderful — a marsupial that looks like
P might be the most impressive letter in the whole animal alphabet. It gives us the panda and the penguin, the polar bear and the platypus, the porcupine and the pangolin — plus the pudu, a deer so small it
The letter O is packed with animal celebrities: owls that can turn their heads three-quarters of the way around, octopuses with three hearts, orcas that rule the ocean, and the opossum — North America’s only marsupial. There is even a
The letter N introduces some of the strangest and most wonderful animals on Earth. There is a whale with a unicorn horn, a little Australian marsupial that eats thousands of termites a day, an armadillo that always has identical quadruplets,
M is a monster letter for animal lovers: the largest deer on Earth, a fox on stilts, a bat that emerges by the millions, and the most colorful face in the mammal world. Here are more than 20 real animals
L belongs to the big cats and their look-alikes — lions, leopards, lynx, and a seal named after one of them — plus lemurs, llamas, and a bird that can imitate a chainsaw. Here are 17 real animals that start
K is the letter of champions: the world’s largest lizard, a parrot that forgot how to fly, a ghost-white bear, and a deer small enough to hide in a Florida backyard. Here are 19 real animals that start with K,
J may be the alphabet’s trickiest animal letter, but it hides some greats: the strongest-jawed big cat, a hot-spring-soaking monkey, and the rarest rhino on Earth. Here are 15 real animals that start with J, with fun facts and links