Adorable dormice!

Dormice! They sound so cozy. So Wind in the Willows. And since I've just described the rock'n'roll rats of the previous entry as having that weird tiny animal speech pattern I imagine everything cute has, I am not even gonna delve into that. So here you go. Here's just a bunch of pictures of dormice, doing what they do best: being adorable. And here's a link in case you want to read about them. I love them so much. I just imagine them wearing little bonnets and calling each other "Mother" and "Papa" even though they're married to each other. And the Mother Dormouse is always baking pies and the Papa Dormouse is really forgetful but teaches the Dormouse children valuable life lessons.


(Pic credit: Wildlifetrust.org.uk)


(Daily Mail)


(The Guardian)


(Cheshire Wildlife Trust)

Look to your laurels, Bob Geldof, here come the real... Boomtown rats!

Yes, I totally lifted that headline and this picture direct from the Daily Mail. They were just too good to not reuse them. Apparently some people from Holland were inspired to teach their pet rats to "play" these itty-bitty instruments after seeing a widdle guitar in a shop window. (Because, as you already know, tiny creatures like rats speak with an adorable lisp and use cutesy words to describe things. They can't help it! They are just that inherently heartwarming.) These Dutch people are truly people after my own heart. Thanks to my friend Tony for finding this. Anything where animals rock out is a-ok in my book.

Read more!

Grammar monkeys on patrol!

Um, how did I miss this? How did THE WORLD MISS THIS??? Apparently, according to National Geographic, monkeys can understand grammar. I mean, sure, most people know about Koko, the sign language gorilla. But WOW. Read more HERE.
The article describes how "previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence." And now our scientist friends have demonstrated that tamarins can recognize suffixes and prefixes, and when they are used incorrectly. During the study, when a suffix was used out of order from what the monkeys had been previously hearing, they turned dramatically towards the researchers. THEY WERE THAT UPSET!!!! What sticklers those little tree-swingin' guys are. This is so exciting! Now in my ideal future universe when we are record shopping alongside giant otters and hanging at poolside Vegas bars with giant salamanders, we can have book clubs with tiny punk rock-lookin' monkeys. DREAMLAND!

Baby bats continue to astound with their strangeness, heartwarmingness

As often happens, my best friend and frequent Cuteoverload.com reader Sarah has opened my eyes (and now yours!) to this adorable yawning baby bat! "Oh it's 11am! I can't believe I stayed up this late into the morning! I am so tiwed!" That is what he is saying. Because as you know by now, I'm sure, all baby animals have an adorable lisp.


(Picture from Northern Territory News in Australia.)

Rein of the giant creatures: Coconut Crab edition

Coconut crabs sound so fun, don't they? All relaxing on the beach, sipping pina coladas, maybe jammin' a little "Margaritaville." They sound like the ULTIMATE SUMMER CRUSTACEAN!!!!! Total good times, beach buddy. Then you find out they are giant. And nobody's laughing anymore.

Check this guy out. I found him on Webecoist.com, a website that apparently shares my fascination with lifeforms that are much larger than they should be. In the past this blog has envisioned hanging out with giant otters at say, the grocery store, or at a picnic, maybe. Not these crabs. They just wanna sit on your garbage can and scare the @#%^ out of you. Fortunately, like most giant things, they live nowhere near me. They are native to Guam and the Pacific Islands.

Echidna, mon amour

Ahh yes. Another reader nominated creature, this time from my friend Jaina. This week's update features a questionably cute (Is it? I just can't decide. I have to go with "yes". His funny, stumpy lil' arms and legs just make me want to visualize him having a tea party, or going sailing in a toy boat with a frog and a pygmy jerboa, or something that British animals do.), but 100% smart little dude known as the echidna. This photo (and this info)come from the NY Times, who chose to caption the image with the quote "Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna," which for some reason strikes me as really funny. "Passion," maybe. Like, dude's all into painting the echidna's toenails for her or turning up sappy love songs that remind him of echidnas when he's in his car.

So why is this interesting? For one thing, echidnas have a larger capacity for reasoning and remembering than humans. "Among humans, the neocortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain; in echidnas, that figure is 50 percent," the article says. Also they lay eggs, which strikes me as kind of wacky for some reason. Check out the article here. It's worth it for the line about echidnas being made up of Babar and a boatload of other creatures. Babar! He made Arby's fun.

Pygmy jerboas: nature's ultimate Furby

A while back, my friend Jessica posted this on her facebook page and let me tell you people it is a WONDER. Thanks to my time-wasting obsession with weird and super cute animals, I am well familiar with jerboas. But this one--WHOA. When I was in preschool, I loved dinosaurs but I really had no sense of depth perception, or how to draw a line correctly, and so all the brontosauruses and such that I drew either had massive football shaped tails that dwarfed their bodies or wee little tiny diamond shaped heads that could in no way jive with the size of the rest of their appendages. This is kinda what the little dude in this video reminds me of. He's like, part tiny Easter chick, part some kind of wildly popular children's holiday toy that I can't think of the name of right now. I WANT ONE SO BAD.