Strangest Animal Discoveries

Scientists are always looking to make new discoveries. The wade into jungles, deserts and museum collections to examine animals and if they're lucky, discover a new species.

In 2015 researchers made some new species, identified a ruby-red sea dragon off the coast of Australia, a new species of giant tortoise in the Galápagos Islands and an ancient spikey worm with 30 legs in China. As these new creatures are discovered, it is important to protect them from habitat loss and the havoc caused by other species.

Let us look at 10 newly discovered and exceptionally strange animals, both alive and extinct.

1. Sneezing monkeys

The Myanmar snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri) is a species of colobine monkey that was discovered in 2010 in northern Burma (Myanmar).

The species is known in local dialects of Lisu people as mey nwoah and Law Waw people as myuk na tok te, both of which mean "monkey with an upturned face". Rain causes it to sneeze due to the short upturned nasal flesh around its nostrils. People from the area report that it sits with its head directed downwards, hiding its face between its knees when it rains.

2. Smallest snail on Earth

Tiniest Snail Ever Found Could Fit Through Needle's Eye 10 Times. The newly discovered snail species, found in China, may be the world's smallest land snail. The height of its shell is only 0.03 inches (0.86 millimeters), making it a mere crumb of a creature. Tiny Angustopila dominikae was identified by a single empty shell found below limestone cliffs in Guangxi, China.

3. Dementor Wasp

Meet The Strange And Fascinating Dementor Wasp. It turns cockroaches into zombies. The red-and-black wasp is known to live only in only known to live in Thailand. It has marked wings and belongs to an ant-mimicking group of species with attractive coloration and rather bizarre habitus and probably also behavior. The Dementor Wasp has a rather peculiar behavior towards its prey, cockroaches. The dementor wasp paralyzes cockroaches with venom to the head, turning them into a zombie-like creature, with seemingly no free will of its own. 2. The dementor wasp will lay eggs on the cockroach to act as an incubator. It was named after the soul-sucking ‘dementors’ in Harry Potter.

4. Hippo-size mammals (extinct)
It might not help clean the living room, but about 23 million years ago a hippo-size mammal used its long snout like a vacuum cleaner, suctioning up tasty morsels of marine algae and seagrass along the coast.

This newly identified extinct animal (Ounalashkastylus tomidai) belongs to the order Desmostylia, the only known order of marine mammals to go completely extinct.

5. "Skeletorus" and "Sparklemuffin" (peacock spiders)

Skeletorus (Maratus sceletus) got its name from the white markings on the males' dark limbs, which give them the look of a skeleton.  Sparklemuffin was the pet name Maddie Girard, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, gave Maratus jactatus, which has blue and red stripes on its midsection. Peacock spiders are a type of jumping spider, related to common jumpers you may have seen yourself. Jumping spiders don't weave silken webs to catch prey, but instead, hunt and stalk their prey. Their eyesight is incredible—they can see as good as cats.



6. Enormous sea scorpion

During an excavation of an ancient meteorite impact crater in the Upper Iowa River, researchers uncovered the fossilized remains of human-size sea scorpions with both pointy and paddle-shaped limbs.

The sea scorpions (Pentecopterus decorahensis) likely ate bivalves and squishy eel-like creatures during their day, about 460 million years ago.

7. Four-legged snake

Today, modern snakes move by slithering around on their bellies, but 120 million years ago their ancestors had four feet, each with five digits. The new species was discovered in a museum exhibit of fossils from the Crato Formation in northeastern Brazil. Researchers named the 7.8-inch-long (20 centimeters) snake Tetrapodophis amplectus, literally, four-legged snake.

8. Pig-nosed rat with vampire teeth

This elusive rodent is from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and is a newly identified species, and a weird one at that. The rat (Hyorhinomys stuempkei) has a hoglike nose and oversize upturned teeth like a vampire. "I had never seen a rat with a nose like that," Jacob Esselstyn, curator of mammals at Louisiana State University's Museum of Natural Science, told Live Science in October. "When I took it out of the trap, I knew it was a new species. There was never any doubt in my mind."

9. T. rex's vegetarian cousin
Tyrannosaurus rex is known for its bone-crushing bite and knifelike teeth, but the beast's fondness for meat wasn't shared by its cousin, the newfound Chilesaurus diegosuarezi.

The 145-million-year-old dinosaurs are oddballs, with characteristics belonging to theropods (mostly meat-eating, bipedal dinosaurs) and plant-eaters.

"It just shows that we really don't know much about dinosaurs at all," said Thomas Carr, an associate professor of biology at Carthage College in Wisconsin and a vertebrate paleontologist, who was not involved in the study.

10. Terror Bird

Ten-foot-tall flightless bird. These giants, named terror birds, lived in South America from about 50 million to 1.8 million years ago, and sent any animal they chased into a panic. In April, researchers announced they had discovered a new species of terror bird (Llallawavis scagliai) off the eastern coast of Argentina. The 3.5-million-year-old specimen is the most complete terror bird fossil on record, with about 90 percent of its bones intact.


An analysis of its inner ear structures suggests L. scagliai heard low-frequency sounds, meaning it could hear the low rumble of its prey's footsteps hitting the ground from far away, the researchers told Live Science in April.