Liz Langley

Fell in love with the 'Pinocchio lizard' we had in NatGeo's Weird & Wild  section and decided to go off ISO animals with weird noses - but not elephants and aardvarks and all the usual suspects. I wanted some you wouldn't pick right off the bat. Like a bat. Or this goblin shark - click the links here in 5 Animals with Weird Noses and look at the videos in the story  the way it's jaw reaches out to get prey might give you nightmares. My favorite, though, is this whitemargin unicorn fish that looks almost more like something Terry Gilliam would make then it does an actual fish, but it's real, mostly found in the Indo-Pacific. If you're lucky enough to visit the National Aquarium in Baltimore, though, you can see a couple of other species at their Blacktip Reef exhibit (and if you can't make it go to their website and check out their reef cam!)

After doing an email interview with primatologist Mark Bowler about the red uakari monkey ( Nature's Bald-Headed and Hairless Animals ) I saw his video about monkeys medicating themselves with fruit and onions...not eating them but using them as bug repellent. I looked around and found that a lot of animals are their own doctors, instinctively or intelligently using plants to cure and prevent problems from tummy aches to parasites. Check 'em out:  Animal Pharm: How Animals Self-Medicate on NatGeo.

For the 40 years we had to take beach walks together my mother would, on every single walk, stop to unearth something from the sand with her big toe and be disappointed when it was another shell, dead crab or pull tab (remember pull tabs?). "One day I'm going to find a Spanish doubloon," she would say, and then she'd be rich and we would run away, or just buy a beach house and look for doubloons every day. Dreams of finding treasure in ordinary places fill the heads of everyone in the mundane world, especially by those of us who watch shows like Auction Kings  or Antiques Roadshow  and who are avid thrift store hunters. Sometimes you hear of treasures found in garage sales that belong in art museums. Seldom, though do you hear of a find that belongs in a science museum, but that's just what happened when the tooth and possibly part of a tusk of a Mastodon turned up in a charity donation box in Michigan. Here's my story on the subject on National Geograph

Have  I mentioned how much I love, love, love writing for National Geographic?  I’ve been a freelance blogger with them for a few months and not only do I  learn a lo but once in awhile I get a post that has me laughing, non stop, for minutes at a time. Such was the case with Dancing Animals With Some Serious Moves . It started with the peacock spider (right), who almost made it into a post about animals with two faces, their own and a false one, usually used to alarm predators. But the peacock spider is such a spiffy hoofer that it seemed a post on animals who dance floor was called. It wasn't easy finding them: what constitutes a dance, after all? Some people have posted video of fiddler crabs dancing but to me it looks less like a dance than a wave (still cool, though). Then  I saw it is the stupefying dance of the Superb Bird of Paradise: How can something like this evolve? How is it’s funny false face so perfect? To those that would argue that a de

We have a zillion lakes in Florida (that's the official number: a zillion) but nothing like Lake Natron in Tanzania, a salt/soda lake where photographer Nick Brandt took these chilling photos of animals that had washed up on it's shoreline and which he put in 'living' poses. Eerie-beautiful, and I learned a lot about Lake Natron (which I'd never even heard of) and also about our own Great Salt Lake in Utah from speaking with Jaimi Butler at the Great Salt Lake Institute. Would love to go there and experience a lake so entirely different from our own (one you're not scared to go in for fear of tricky amoeba, not to mention snakes and alligators). Anyway, speaking of scary, please click on National Geographic's Unusual Pictures: 'Calcified' Birds, Bats found in African Lake  to see the rest of Brandt's auspicious photo gallery - and my first jab at photo captioning for NatGeo. Very proud for this to have been my first shot!