Agoutis: neurotic but awesome

According to the LA Zoo website, where I dug up this picture, "Brazilian Agoutis are nervous animals always on the lookout for danger." They also live in small social groups and mate for life. Sounds like a more pro-commitment me! And instead of "danger" they mean "vodka"! Hey-oooo!!! I just pwned myself. Here's some agoutis.





Here's a Daily Mail article about the first baybay agoutis born in the UK.

Check out this link for another awesome agouti picture. It chronicles a bird rescue in Belize!!! That's pretty damn cool. AND they have an agouti. Belize Bird Rescue.

Baby lemurs

I am pretty sure my BFF Sarah checks out Zooborns.com every day as soon as she gets to work. I imagine her sitting there with a coffee, waiting frantically/impatiently to see which adorable exotic animals were born in which zoos, just waiting for it to be something weirdly charming like this tiny baby lemur, which she sent me. So hats off to you, Sarah, and here's some tiny baby lemurs in your honor.

Zooborns: A labor of lemur love


"Read about me in the previously mentioned article!"




We've seen it before with bats, and now we're seeing it with lemurs: nothing is cuter than putting a tiny animal in a sock.


These guys look like the ad campaign for a live action Disney film in which precocious twin baby lemurs cook up a crazy scheme to make their divorcing parents fall in love once again and stay together as a family. Voiced by Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus.

Pangolin: the cutest animal with scales out there?

Thanks to Sharyn for giving me the heads up on pangolins, a true contender for the Weird Adorable genre of animals. Check 'em out! Are they kinda creepy because of the scale thing? Or weirdly heartwarming because of their itty bitty widdle faces? You be the judge!








And just in case you're thinking "WTF is a pangolin?" as someone so eloquently put it on a picture I saw while looking for photos, it's a scaly anteater native to Africa and Asia.

Amazing vending machine-using crows!

My friend Jaina recently posted a link to this blog The Triumph of Bullshit via Twitter, and I was blown away by how awesome it is. It's funny, it's smart, and it gave me this story so I don't have to actually think up weird animals or weird animal news to look up and post on this blog. Everybody wins!

So this fellow, Joshua Klein, came up with the idea of training captive crows to pick up and return coins in exchange for peanuts. The hope is that these crows will pass on their crow knowledge to wild crows, who will stop being goth and haunting lovesick poets and do something positive for society. But I'll let him speak for himself:

The goal of this project is to create a device that will autonomously train crows. So far we've trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to see how quickly we can get wild crows to learn the system, and then how quickly they can learn it from each other.

Once we've got system down for teaching coin collection we'll move to seeing how flexibly they can learn *other* tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue.

You can check out more info at his website here. I found the photo on The Triumph of Bullshit. (I'm hoping they won't think it's bullshit that I used it.)