The platypus

Just when you thought Bambi couldn’t get any cuter, meet the pudu, the world’s smallest deer. Standing little taller than a domestic cat, what it lacks in size, it more than makes up for in allure. Do

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

Unfairly maligned as a sneaky troublemaker, the quicksilver ferret is a characterful, curious and highly intelligent creature–with fascinating regal and cultural trappings to boot, writes Octavia Pollock

From mouth to manure, the journeys animals’ meals go on can be very different to human digestion

BEASTS WITH BOGIES

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