STACKER.COM — Life on Earth can be hard. But life itself, in all its forms, is what makes this planet so unique. Organisms have adapted to thrive in some of the most inhospitable environments; places where scientists once believed it was impossible for living creatures to even exist, let alone flourish. In every corner of the planet, whether it is a mile below the surface of the ocean completely out of reach of the sun, or right in our backyard, life—as the beloved “Jurassic Park” mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm would say—finds a way. And for the luckiest on Earth, their lives may even be narrated by the great David Attenborough.
The BBC’s Natural History Unit has produced 150 documentaries since 1957 with more on the horizon. Over the past 20 years especially, advances in technology have allowed documentary filmmakers to give audiences unprecedented perspectives of the natural world. Released in 2006 after five years in the making, “Planet Earth” was the first nature documentary shot in high definition. Ten years later, the sequel, “Planet Earth II,” became the first shot in ultra-high definition. These are just two of many documentaries that introduced us, in stunning detail, to the unknown worlds within our own.
Flora and fauna never before seen made their debuts on film. Things we thought were familiar revealed themselves to be surprising when observed from a new vantage point. What these films have done best is to show us the staggering scope, complexity, and interconnectedness of nature. Stacker wanted to highlight just a few examples of these unexpected revelations from some of the most popular nature documentaries over the past two decades.
What does rare mean in this context? We watched every episode of “Blue Planet I,” “Blue Planet II,” “Planet Earth I,” “Planet Earth II,” “Life,” “Africa,” and “Our Planet,” and pulled out examples of unique occurrences in the natural world. Rare includes animals not often seen, animals with extreme survival tactics, those with small geographic distribution, and those with remarkable evolutionary adaptations.
Read on for a sampling of some of these rare and spectacular animals.
tlindsayg // Shutterstock
Monarch butterflies
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Life: Insects”
While monarch butterflies are common, their migration is exceedingly mysterious. Each year, monarchs travel more than 3,000 miles from Canada to a small patch of Oyamel fir trees in the mountains of Mexico before the winter temperatures set in. Exactly how they find their way to this bit of forest is still unknown.
The monarchs gather by the millions in the branches of the Oyamel firs, which create a climate optimal for hibernation. The roundtrip journey is completed throughout several generations with one “super generation” that makes the entire trip south, hibernates, starts the return journey, and breeds the next generation all in eight months. What makes this so extraordinary is that every other generation lives between five and seven weeks to complete their leg of the return trip back to Canada.
PARALAXIS // Shutterstock
Amazon river dolphin
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth II: Jungles”
The Amazon river dolphin, also known as the boto, is a freshwater dolphin that lives in the Amazon River basin and spends the wet season swimming deep among the trees when the river floods the rainforest floor. Although no consensus has been reached within the scientific community on how exactly these dolphins made the biogeographic leap from ocean to river, some experts believe they branched off from their more familiar marine relatives roughly 15 million years ago during retreating sea levels of the Miocene epoch. Since then, adaptations like long narrow snouts for hunting, unfused vertebrae allowing them to bend to 90-degree angles, and refined echolocation have made these river mammals adept hunters among the flooded tributaries of the Amazon rainforest.
The Next Gen Scientist // Flickr
Railroad worms
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth II: Jungles”
Railroad worms are some of the most specialized hunters on the planet. These worms, named for their resemblance to lighted windows on a passenger train, are actually poisonous beetles that look like caterpillars. Females produce a bioluminescent glow caused by a chemical reaction between the molecule luciferin and the enzyme luciferase; it’s the same reaction that gives fireflies their signature glow. These lights serve as a warning to other predators to stay away. Certain species of railroad worms are also equipped with a red bioluminescent light on top of their heads, which they can turn on and off. Many insects, like millipedes, can’t see red light, giving the railroad worm a distinct advantage in the dark.
TimN NZ // Flickr
New Zealand glow worms
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth I: Caves”
Like the railroad worm, these insects aren’t actually worms at all, but a variety of beetle. Few bioluminescent displays in nature are quite as mesmerizing as that of a cave ceiling full of blue lights from the Arachnocampa luminosa, also known as the New Zealand glow worm. Deployed primarily as a hunting tactic, the light of the glow worm emitted from its lower abdomen is used to attract insects and ensnare them in beaded strings of slime the glow worm also produces.
The insect uses digestive saliva to liquefy and subsequently suck out the inside of its prey. Only females have the ability to glow. The glow worm’s light is also one of the few examples in nature of the female in a species using ornamentation to attract a mate. Scientists are unsure what advantage this provides to female glow worms.
Francesco Costa // Wikimedia Commons
Deep-sea hatchetfish
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Blue Planet II: The Deep”
Life in the deep is mostly a game of deception. Many deep-sea species are equipped with highly specialized bodies made for evading predators. But predators have special adaptations, too. Take the deep-sea hatchetfish, for example. Predators of the hatchetfish distinguish their prey by looking up, locating their silhouettes against the backdrop of what little light filters down from above.
Hatchetfish have rows of photophores, or light-producing cells, in their translucent bellies, which they can use to exactly match the colour of the light filtering down. This makes them almost invisible from below. It would seem to be a perfect evolutionary adaptation. But Mother Nature always seems to have the checkmate ready. It has been discovered that predators of the hatchetfish have eyes that can distinguish between light produced by photophores and light produced by the sun.
Geoff Gallice // Wikimedia Commons
Velvet worms
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Our Planet: Jungles”
Velvet worms are some of the oldest and most bizarre living creatures on the planet. They’ve existed, almost entirely unchanged, for over 500 million years; that’s long enough to see dinosaurs come and go. Most species of velvet worms are found in moist tropical or coastal areas and feed on other small invertebrates. And their preferred method of hunting? Rapid-firing swinging jets of immobilizing slime, followed by an injection of digestive saliva that liquefies their prey.
Sinisa Djordje Majetic // Wikimedia Commons
Philippine eagle
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Our Planet: Jungles”
The critically endangered Philippine eagle, found only on four islands in the Philippines, is one of the rarest birds on Earth. Loss of their natural forest habitat due to commercial logging has reduced their numbers to fewer than 400 globally. Conservation efforts include researching and monitoring the current populations, as well as enforcing laws around habitat management.
After their initial discovery in the late 19th century, they were commonly referred to as “monkey-eating eagles” because it was believed their diet consisted exclusively of monkeys. It has since been discovered that Philippine eagles feed on a variety of prey. It is estimated that these eagles can live between 30 and 60 years and can reach heights of over 3 feet with wingspans of 7 feet, making them some of the largest birds of prey in the world.
BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)
Gulper eels
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Blue Planet II: The Deep”
Gulper eels, like many of their deep-sea neighbors, look like the stuff of science fiction. Life at extreme depths—over a mile down—has led to extreme biological adaptations for the survival of marine species. For the gulper eel, this means an enormous mouth to capitalize on any infrequent prey that swims by, regardless of size, attached to a meter-long tail with a bulb at the bottom, which acts as a lure. The gulper eels’ large mouths—large enough to swallow prey as big as the eels themselves—have earned them the nicknames “pelican eels” and “umbrella-mouth gulpers.”
When it comes to courtship, you would be hard-pressed to find a species more dedicated or more exuberant than the bird of paradise. There are over 40 species of birds of paradise, each with their own unique courtship rituals and striking plumage. It is the male birds of paradise that sport elaborate ornamentation, like streamers or bright breast feathers, to attract a mate. But what’s a costume without a performance? Males also dance, showing off their colours and shifting their bodies into various shapes, making them almost unrecognizable as birds.
BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)
Snow leopards
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth II: Mountains”
Sometimes referred to as “ghost cats” because of their elusive nature, snow leopards are extremely rare. Little is known about their lives in the mountains of Central Asia, and because there is so little prey to sustain large populations, there are only around four snow leopards per 40 square miles. It wasn’t until 1971 that the first image of a snow leopard in the wild was captured by biologist George Schaller. Even today, capturing them on film requires meticulous tracking, motion sensors, infrared technology, and an abundance of patience.
BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)
Trogolobites
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth I: Caves”
Troglobites are all animals that have adapted to life in caves. They spend their entire lives in these dark subterranean environments and, over thousands of years, have lost their eyes and skin pigmentation as a result. Some troglobites are hyperspecialized, like cave angelfish, whose entire population lives only in the waterfalls inside two caves in Thailand. Texas cave salamanders and Belizean white crabs are two more examples of troglobites who live only in one cave system.
Sergiodelgado // Wikimedia Commons
Pygmy sloths
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth II: Islands”
Pygmy three-toed sloths are a critically endangered species of sloth found only on a remote island called Isla Escudo de Veraguas off the coast of Panama. Their entire natural habitat is roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park. This has resulted in a process called insular dwarfism, or island dwarfism—when a species shrinks over generations in response to the limited resources of an island environment. At the time of filming, only a few hundred sloths remained in the wild; conservation efforts have received little attention.
Zavodovski Island in the Southern Ocean is home to one of the largest penguin colonies on Earth: over 1 million pairs of mating chinstrap penguins. But it’s not exactly paradise by our standards—Zavodoski Island is an active volcano in the middle of some of the roughest, stormiest seas on the planet. This presents unique advantages and challenges for its residents.
The heat emanating from the volcano means the ground is warm, with little snow or ice buildup, optimal for rearing young. But hunting for food in the waters surrounding the island means treacherous descents down cliffs, as well as powerful breaking waves that beat against the rockface which serves as an entry point for the penguins. Not to mention the constant, potentially devastating risk of a volcanic eruption.
Thejasvi M // Flickr
Stalk-eyed fly
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Life: Challenges of Life”
Body modification isn’t unique to our species. Male stalk-eyed flies use a sort of body modification to attract mates. They take in air bubbles and push them up into their heads and into their eyestalks. Each bubble of air elongates the eyestalks horizontally. The wider apart their eyes are positioned, the more dominant the male is perceived to be. The most dominant male wins the right to mate with all the female stalk-eyed flies in his territory.
Naoto Shinkai // Shutterstock
Giant Pacific octopus
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Life: Challenges of Life”
Giant Pacific octopuses exhibit one of the greatest displays of parental devotion in nature. After a female has laid her eggs in a carefully chosen den, she will spend the rest of her life tending to them. Keeping them free of algae build-up and safe from predators, she will not leave them, even temporarily, in order to feed. After six months of protecting and tending to her clutch, she usually dies of starvation.
Canva
Rock pythons
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Africa: Congo”
Like the giant Pacific octopus, the female rock python exhibits enormously selfless acts of devotion in the service of its young. A mother python will heat her body in a shaft of sunlight until her temperature reaches a dangerously high 105 degrees Fahrenheit. She’ll then retreat back to her burrow and wrap her body around her clutch of eggs, transferring that heat and ensuring their temperature remains above 86 degrees Fahrenheit. This threshold is critical to their development. She will do this every day for three months until they hatch. If the stress on her body doesn’t kill her, it could take the mother up to three years to fully recover.
Katja Schulz // Flickr
Chemical-firing insects
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Life: Insects”
Insects like European wood ants and devil rider stick insects have developed relatively painful defense mechanisms to deter predators. These are just a few examples of insects that produce chemical sprays. But none is as extreme as the bombardier beetle, which houses two reservoirs in its abdomen: one filled with hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones, and another filled with peroxidase and catalase. When separated, the mixtures are innocuous. But when mixed together, the result is a violent reaction. When threatened, the bombardier beetle will open the valve separating the two, resulting in an explosive chemical process. The beetle can aim and fire (out of its backside) over 500 times per second and the liquid can get as hot as 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
Andy Morffew // Flickr
Sword-billed hummingbirds
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Planet Earth II: Jungles”
Sword-billed hummingbirds have evolved to fill a niche in their environments—one that exempts them from competition over limited resources with other species. The sword-billed hummingbird is the only bird with a beak longer than its body. This elongated beak enables the unusual hummingbird to reach nectar deep inside flower shafts that other birds cannot access.
National Science Foundation // Wikimedia Commons
Pompeii worms
– Documentary featuring this animal: “Blue Planet II: The Deep”
Pompeii worms are among the rarest and most resilient creatures on the planet. They belong to a group of organisms classified as extremophiles—lifeforms that thrive in the most extreme conditions. That’s because they are found in hydrothermal vents steeped in hydrogen sulfide along the mid-ocean ridge. Pompeii worms can survive in temperatures up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than any other animal on Earth has been known to withstand. These worms, along with other newly discovered life forms found in the complete darkness of the mid-ocean ridge, overturned the belief that all life on Earth was dependent upon the sun.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
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