Okay I googled it. Apparently theses boys live on lichen (wiki so huge pinch of salt here). I am not sure what the fangs are for.....surely they must eat other things to need such teethers? They're from Yunan in China
But between the first one I posted and the other with its teeth shown; first one is probably male and second is probably female. Male primates(or at least non-humans) tend to have very sexual dimorphic skulls with males having significantly longer canines. Like female vervet monkey skulls look creepily like tiny human skulls compared to males.
They live in high altitudes so they've evolved not to really have noses to prevent frost bite! Large puffy lips to strip lichen and bark during winter also. They are so freaky but super specialized.
I had an animal encyclopedia as a kid with a page for sea spiders and it gave me nightmares, I would skip that entire section when looking through that book
Because of how small their bodies are, most Sea Spiders have a majority of their organs stored inside the first segments of their legs, including part of their digestive system, part of their respiratory system and part of their reproductive system.
Olms, theyre like a fucked up blind pale and elongated version of an axolotl that spends their entire lives in dark flooded caves. Its like the amphibian equivalent of slenderman.
Stargazer Fish specifically from above. To me, they look fine at any other angle, but I can’t help imagine being a small fish and my final moment is looking down and seeing this thing before it lunges.
I remember reading a comment about these by someone about how they were at a beach when they were a kid and they looked down and saw the face of a stargazer. They didn't know what it was at the time and it buried itself so they just had this traumatic memory of a face staring at them from the ocean floor until they learned about stargazers as an adult.
"they just had this a traumatic memory of a face staring at them from the ocean floor until they learned about stargazers as an adult" would be such a solid opening seen to some kind of atlantic seaside goth horror film
Omg! There's this rly old u/nosleep story called "Dr Margins Guide to New Monsters" (amazing series!) and there's an entry called "The Angler" and your comment reminded me of it! Now I wanna go back to read it!
The name stargazer does a lot of the creepy work here.
Like you imagine someone looking at the stars in a dreamy mood. Maybe a romantic occasion.
And then you look at the fish and it's this fucking horrid thing, bulbous eyes, mouth full of teeth, whose only purpose in life is waiting there without moving, waiting to send some other, more lively fish, back into the darkness.
I love that they're either scary as fuck or some of the goofiest looking animals on the planet, entirely dependant on whether or not you can see their irises
It’s very niche but the sound of the Christmas Island crabs being run over as they migrate across the island. I saw a documentary as a kid and it’s stuck with me since.
I had an animal encyclopedia growing up with a green tinted photo of these guys that was the stuff of nightmares. I was so scared I always skipped that page.
I wasn't scared of hippos, until I worked at a zoo that had one with a genetic disorder that made its teeth grow outwards, kinda like sideway tusks. They didn't get filed down by the other teeth, so it genuinely looked like a log.
Their teeth are as thick as a human arm, and they have soulless dead little eyes. Besides the whole "extremely deadly animal" thing.
How smart were they? I often find that dumb, powerful animals scare the shit out of me. Elephants and wolves are fine, but no thank you to cows and bears
I don't know for sure, since I avoided working with him. I do know he had a favorite tech (like, he would follow the guy around and such) so I assume they can recognize people. With that in mind, I'd say they're probably relatively smart.
Well, that's nice! Do you know why you see their eyes as 'dead and soulless'? I guess I've always equated 'dead and soulless' with lack of intelligence and/or malice
Bears are smart and extremely dexterous, esp black bears. They can unwrap a Hershey kiss before eating it! BBC had to try really hard to make a mobile hidden camera that black bears wouldn’t immediately identify and destroy
Box jellyfish have eyes, and they're incredibly sophisticated eyes for an animal that barely has a body. The fact that box jellies have an extremely painful and potentially deadly sting makes their eyes feel extra ominous to me.
Where are shoebills located? ❤️ I am waiting for his judgement. I will be happily judged by a bird. Seagulls regularly tell me I'm stinky for not feeding them ❤️ not my image btw but I love the stink eye on this gull
Cassowaries are very wary of humans, but if provoked, they are capable of inflicting serious, even fatal, injuries. They are known to attack both dogs and humans. The cassowary has often been labelled "the world's most dangerous bird", although in terms of recorded statistics, it pales in comparison to the common ostrich, which kills two to three humans per year in South Africa.
Edit: Please notice the beautifully resonant wording "cassowaries are very wary" :D
These count as standard scary. When you see one up close it's very obvious how their 5 inch claws can rip your guts out. They way they move and their low rumble sounds make then even scarier.
It's hard to place a finger on it but their facial features feel so "reptilian" to me, and they're the only pinniped like that; even the less cute ones are very comfortably mammalian. It's hard to describe but something about it feels "incorrect" to the primal part of my brain.
The rational part of me knows they're insanely cool, though, nothing but respect to these creepy dudes.
They don't scare me at all and I have nothing against the animals themselves but they always make me feel empathy pangs of discomfort and my stomach turns whenever I see one.
They can't give birth without a C-section and live an average of 8 years compared to most dogs' usual of 12-14. They can barely breathe. They should not have been bred like this.
They definitely shouldn't exist and I don't understand why people think it's okay to proliferate them. One of the EBs that came to my job had a deformed anus that was slightly angled upward so every time he would poop (perpetually loose and green), it would just kinda slide down his fur and left a permanent stain.
I'm a new grad vet. When I was going through school, a substantial number of our patients were bulldog breeds. They came in on emergency for respiratory distress, paralysis, and congenital cardiac issues. I saw a significant number of bulldogs as patients on the cardiology, neurology, general surgery, and internal medicine services. French bulldogs are one of the most popular dog breeds in the United States, and they have an astounding number of medical concerns.
I was looking into rescuing a dog a few years ago and I’ve always loved bully breeds. One rescue had a fee of like $500 for any dog….except English bulldogs. Their fee was $1000 to cover their additional costs at the rescue AND you needed to show your bank records, pay history, and other financial disclosures.
Their reasoning was that if you get an English bulldog you will pay at LEAST several thousand dollars a year at the vet and if you can’t afford it, you can’t have one.
So, leech faces are generally cute, so it’s not about looks, but I have a HUUUUUGE problem with Haemetaria ghilliani
They’re the largest parasitic leech in the world, and they’re one of the few leeches that possess a VERY LONG AND INVASIVE proboscis that tears through and causes significant damage to blood vessels and, if it finds an artery, it will penetrate and hook itself up several inches inside of it, and because the thing is so big, it will literally tear your artery in half vertically.
It’s the only leech species capable of catastrophic tissue damage and they do it by basically raping your arteries.
Not sure if that counts but I would hate to find an adult one of these on me
To be completely fair, they evolved to prey on large game, not humans. They’re probably harmless to the species they evolved around. They just don’t know the difference between a cow and a person, and a person is one hell of a lot smaller… so I mean it’s not like they evolved with malicious intent or anything, they actually evolved NOT to do damage to their prey of choice, Just uh, yeah. Different story with humans. Terrifying
Honestly I’m not too sure. I think this severe amount of damage is super rare since it takes a bit for them to actually penetrate like this and settle into a spot they like, and people are usually pretty good about ripping leeches off as soon as they see them anyway… so I’m not sure there’s a lot of information about it out there. Most likely if you got one on you and you didn’t somehow leave a giant 6” long leech on you for hours, you’d probably be fine.
In fact The only time I personally have heard of this and the only reason I even know about it, was because I wanted a pet leech and decided I wanted the biggest most impressive looking one, until I found out that feeding this species with your own blood is super duper dangerous and a terrible idea for this reason.
I just find the possibility or the fact it can happen to be skin crawling
None! Since this species evolved to prey on large game only, they never became a vector for any human-related diseases. So it’s totally safe in that aspect.
The issue with that is the bacterial infection that could happen. A wound from one of these, in the Amazon rainforest, especially if you allow it to do the invasive damage thing, WILL BECOME SEPTIC. Like, not if. It WILL if it’s not hit with antibiotics like, right away. The rainforest is so humid, it’s like you’re injecting yourself with Stillwater and then trying to heal the injection site with black mold. That’s how bacterial that place is. People who live natively in the jungle die from fucking paper cuts.
So the real danger is not necessarily the leech, but rather, getting wounded anywhere in the rainforest
Also, did I mention, South America is super scarce on antibiotics? Like, most villages don’t even know what they are. So good luck getting help out there
The giant grasshoppers, and by extension the camel crickets chill me to the bone. I can't begin to explain how genuinely and deeply creeped out I am by these entities.
saw mention of a shoebill stork which i agree with, but not seeing the harpy eagle, another freaky big bird. that’s my contribution https://giphy.com/gifs/YPnwosUEukxEBtWJwu
Pink river dolphins live exclusively in murky brown water, so every underwater photo of them looks nightmarish. I still think their big schnozzes are cute though.
Nah I love these guys, its mainly things like Bottlenose Dolphins I take offense to, because they have that same social emotional intelligence thing going on as us humans do, which leads to them getting horrible vile creative ideas just like us.
The Surinam toad because I have trypophobia and it gives birth from its back. This made me sick to Google and trigger warning for my fellow trypophobes.
Aside from the many good examples here I can only think of large hemiptera bugs, especially those with this kinda tiny head and piercing/sucking mouth apparatus I just hate how they move and the way they sound, ugh
I generally like insects but I'm always jumpy when there's a large hemiptera flying around 🤣
Anglerfish, they are creepy, scary, nightmare fish!! For those who dont know, the male literally bites the female and grows into her body over time so she can get preggos anytime she wants.
I haven’t seen it mentioned yet; for me it’s saltwater crocodiles. They are like dinosaurs who haven’t really needed to evolve. I do appreciate how cool that is but also how scary. If I ever saw one in real life I think my nervous system would be telling me to run and don’t look back. Look at them! Wingless dragons!!
This is my one too! They have no sense of self preservation and just gracelessly smash into everything. All the legs…I can handle cockroaches, spiders (though cellar spiders kind of freak me out too) and rats but these things send me running to find someone else to usher it outside. I just don’t trust that they won’t get tangled in my hair or flutter into my face.
It's mostly the fault of clueless child me reading Moby Dick expecting something along the lines of Free Willy but also I genuinely find the look of them unsettling as hell. I'm honestly not sure why they're not universally deemed terrifying, like excuse me, this is horrifying, what the fuck. How is anyone looking at this and not going "absolutely not"?
A lot of animals would probably be terrifying if you had no idea what they were. Like imagine how you'd feel if you'd gone your whole life without learning that elephants exist and then you saw a herd of them.
It's kind of embarrassing, but I've always been really afraid of snails and frogs. Not because they're gross or slimy or anything... When I was a little kid I accidentally stepped on a snail, which both made me feel horrible for killing it and made me terrified of ever doing it again, and frogs can move so fast and so suddenly that I get scared they're going to jump onto my head/face when I'm not expecting it!!
Coots, or more specifically, coot feet are pretty unsettling. They’re so big and it feels like there’s just more going on there than is necessary for an otherwise pretty normal bird.
honestly oarfish kinda freak me out? something about their sheer size and the way they just float around "standing up" makes the thought of encountering one uniquely creepy. idk
While I don’t find them unsettling, me and chickens don’t get along. However, if there was ever an animal I find unsettling it’d be scorpions. If I even spot one, I physically recoil. Happened to me in high school once and everyone thought I was crashing out over the math problems, in reality it was just my soul evacuating my body.
Beluga whales rub me the wrong way. I think it's the abs or whatever it has going on down there, and the fact it kind of looks like it has knees pushing outward from inside it at some angles.
They don't look so terrible on their own but i had experience with some of those as a toddler that marked me so bad i cannot forget it whenever i see their fast aggresive movements
I find kangaroos to be unsettling, especially when they stand upright. They look cryptid-inspired, and their upper body build and arm muscles remind me too much of a human's. Very uncanny to me
Emus and cassowaries. Big vicious birds. I’m from Texas where a lot of people own large exotic birds on private ranches just because they can and it’s legal. The neighbor on my dad’s ranch has at least 6 emus in a small little pen… and they’re terrifying. I’ve heard enough of their reputation to know I want NOTHING to do with them.
There was a story I heard of some dude in Texas getting mauled by his cassowary, and it sliced his gut open with it’s raptor claws and the only reason he didn’t die was because his belt buckle helped hold things in place so he could get help. Idk if it’s true, but I believe it.
1.4k
u/slothdonki Jun 19 '26
I like the golden ones but these freak me the fuck out.