Nature's monsters

Of course there's no such thing as ugly animals, but there's an entertaining attempt to treat the oxymoron in the New York Times: "A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!"

It stars the star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata), a tunneler and part-time swimmer from the low, wet parts of eastern North America. It is the world's fastest forager. Pretty much its whole face comprises the eponymous "star-nose," a wheel of eleven pairs of supersensative "tendrils," radiating around a mouth that's hungry for insects, worms, and other small invertebrates.



"The star-nosed mole's brain processes the information [from its pink, fleshy tendrils] at a very high speed, which approaches the upper limit at which nervous systems are capable of functioning," says Neurophilosophy blog at ScienceBlogs. "Approximately half of the brain is devoted to processing sensory information from the nose."

It's true, C. cristata may have brains, but it is not a classical beauty. See the Times for more pictures - both a slide show and reader submissions.

Other supposedly ugly animals:

The blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus), facing extinction;

Warthogs, "neither graceful nor beautiful..." (Phacochoerus africanus);

The manatee (Trichechus spp.), a bloated, mopey torpedo shunned by researchers;

And our own Sphynx cat, an inbred "gargoyle of human creation!"

World's Ugliest Animals

LiveScience.com has a feature up to rate the ugliness of some pretty horrid animals, and it includes some little tidbits and cheapshots in the captions.

But I really think they missed some. A simple Google image search turns up hundreds of thousands of hits, and though some pics are dubious and some are just of disheveled dogs or unkempt kitties, I heartily recommend wasting some time perusing them.


Somehow LiveScience.com passed over the little freak pictured above. The Aye-aye, or Daubentonia madagascariensis, is the largest nocturnal primate, hiding its shame among the treetops under cover of darkness, poking its elongated middle finger into holes that it gnaws in trees looking for grubs. It can barely stand to be seen even by others of its kind - it's a solitary forager.

Lastly, I think LiveScience.com was way out of line calling the Brushtail Possum ugly:


Look at it! What were they thinking?