The spider-tailed snake

During late August 2025, the Hunterian Museum of Zoology in Glasgow hosted Snake Summer, an event covering snakes in science, folklore and fantasy organised by Dr Will Tattersdill of the University of

Britain is a country mercifully bereft of threatening fauna–or so you might believe. John Lewis-Stempel provides a miscellany of our otherwise benign land’s more fearsome critters

Neither arachnid nor bird, the tarantula hawk is a large wasp (there are over 130 known species) that gets its confusing name from a fearsome habit of preying on tarantulas and other large spiders to

It was soft, rubbery and lubricious, a humongous earthworm to the untrained eye. I was pretty happy with my find until the joy of the moment was momentarily ruined when the ‘worm’ turned. It opened it

On being told that they had been bitten by a venomous snake, most eight-year-olds would panic. Not Nicholas Jubber; he was not terrified but disappointed by a diagnosis that contradicted his own. Nich

Which species are the scariest, most venomous or biggest eight-legged freaks in the world?