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

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

When, at the age of 12, Inga Nikitiniene first saw a photograph of the pineapple orchid, Dendrobium densiflorum, her response was instinctive. “I knew immediately that I wanted to have this plant. I d

Before I realise what’s happening, the lid is off – and James Maclaine is pulling out a fistful of deep-sea anglerfish. I hadn’t been expecting him to plonk his bare hand inside the jar. I peer more c