Never Seen Before - Bizarre Animals

The Pelochelys cantorii, or Cantor’s Giant Soft Shelled Turtle, is one of the most unusual looking animals on earth and certainly one of the most odd looking turtles in existence. Yet few people have seen it or know about it. It’s not a sea turtle – the Cantor prefers to inhabit inland, close to streams and wetlands. It grows very large, with adult shells often spanning more than six feet. They are native to Cambodia but are very rare.


Pucker up. The star nosed mole is a tenacious creature, able to withstand severe cold and burrow easily through ice to make its home and find food. It lives in Canada and the East Coast of the United States. It favors a high protein diet of clams, snails, small rodents, mollusks and worms. It’s not a very big creature – about the size of a hand. But its 22 nose tentacles are hard to miss. They help the mole find food.


The nightmare of every new boyfriend, this fluffy creature looks like a science experiment crossing a Sasquatch and a kitten gone wrong. It’s just a rabbit, however. They were exceptionally popular in the 17th and 18th centuries among European nobility as lap pets, and many different hybrids were bred to suit changing tastes of different royalty. The angora rabbit is still popular to this day.


This is not shopped. This is not a hoax. That is a giant crab on a garbage can. They’re native to Guam and other Pacific islands. Coconut crabs aren’t endangered, per se, but due to tropical habitat destruction they are at risk. In WWII, American soldiers stationed in the Pacific theater wrote home with tales about entire atolls being covered in the armor-plated giants. These crabs can crack a coconut in one swipe; but they’re generally too slow to be very dangerous to humans. Children pass lazy afternoons by picking the crabs off tree trunks and watching them crash to the ground; it’s reportedly great fun. And kind of messed up.


Something tells us these giant salamanders were never called for in any witch’s recipe. Seriously, look at that thing! That lives under some people’s porches! The United States is also home to a giant salamander called the Hellbender, and it’s…well, the name fits. However, it is not as endangered as the shockingly strange-looking Chinese cousin. The Chinese giant salamander can grow to be nearly six feet long.