Liz Langley

Hands are so important to humans - we do everything with them, including communicate, with gestures or even terms (having the upper hand, lending a hand, having a hand in the proceedings). Animals have amazing hands, too - weird, beautiful and incredibly useful. Here are  5 Weird Animal Hands, my latest NatGeo, a fun and funky piece with a few "whaddaya know!"'s thrown in, my favorite kind of story. You'll notice the first animal I zeroed in on was the Aye Aye.....here's why why:

Who knew that marine researchers sometimes do research in fish markets?  I had no idea but thought it was kind of thrilling, and perfectly logical: lots of fishing boats go out in a day and bring back lots of fish, so science researchers can see what's being hauled in off a particular coast and get an idea of what's there. In the case of one scientist doing research in Kuwait it turned out to be a shark no other scientist had seen for a hundred years. You can see the whole spiffy story in Shark Species Thought To Be Extinct Turns Up in Fish Market on National Geographic. Olympic level shoppers, take note: if you find yourself at an exotic market one day you may be able to use your discerning eye to suss out something a little unique about a particular offering and find something more meaningful out there than a a nice pair of slingback pumps (though the population of those in my closet are dangerously low and a privately subsidized expedition to Macy's would not

Maybe it was from writing the last post about music or maybe from hunting down good 80's songs to use for karaoke but I just realized that there was a weird spike in cannibal-inspired music in that decade. There was the band Fine Young Cannibals, memorable for a nice-looking, adenoidal soprano male lead songer and the hit She Drives Me Crazy and Total Coelo and their hit I Eat Cannibal , memorable for the trash bag outfits in their video. Other decades spawned more cannibal stories, real and otherwise, but at no other time did anyone seem to feel a need to put it to music. For animals cannibalism isn't all that aberrant. Lots of them do it, some of which I've listed in The Flesheaters: 5 Cannibalistic Animals on National Geographic . There were a couple of animals who are known to practice cannibalism that I left out - the chimp and the bonobo . The incidence of cannibalism is, from what I've read, not all that common in these apes and I was focusing on animals

      Inspired by a NatGeo story by Jane J. Lee, U.S. Giant Salamander's Slipping Away: Inside the Plight of the Hellbender ,  Mark Pagano, songwriter and guitarist for the St. Louis band Fire Dog, sent NG a catchy tune about the hellbender that he'd written and the band performed. Check it out in Ode to the Giant Salamander and Other Songs Inspired by Nature on NatGeo.      Having grown up in the 70's and being used to songs with socio-political bents like Marvin Gaye's environmental commentary  Mercy Mercy Me   and Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi , I thought Hellbender  was especially fabulous. It may be that I'm out of touch with pop music but I don't hear tons of cause songs anymore; heck even in the 90's there was Crystal Waters Gypsy Music (She's Homeless) , though TheCelebrityCafe.com has this list of environmental songs, the latest of which is Ray LaMongtagne's All the Wild Horses  (2005).      When I talked to Pagano about Hellben

From what I hear I’m the only person who was a little wistful at seeing 2013 go.  It was a bit of a bipolar year - high highs, low lows - but for me all the awful bits were lavishly seeded with totally surprising bursts of comfort, even luxury, like if you had to move a whole house across town by hand,  but every 20 minutes someone offered you a break to drink champagne and watch old Kids in the Hall for an hour or two in a posh hotel suite. It really was like that. The crappiest predicaments were mined with benefits, like the time it took me six weeks to be able to afford to get my car back on the road - but a large part of that time was spent house sitting a lakefront mansion I never wanted to leave anyway. Again - it really was like that.  I won’t tell you everything  - a writer giving away all their stories in one pop is like a stripper walking on stage naked - but there’s no question about what the best part of the year was: .getting to write for National Geog

Tapirs are weird. Astonishing, grand and sometimes just darling, but unquestionably weird. They're what I call a collage animal, one that looks like it was put together from a couple of different kits - like if you took a pig, mixed in a bit of hippo and gave it a sawed-off elephant trunk, an accessory described with the most wonderful and unlikely combination of words ever, "prehensile nose." They're fabulous. You can watch a video of one if you take a look at my NatGeo blog post New Tapir Discovered: One of the Largest Mammals Discovered This Century  about a new species found in Brazil. The above photo is of a pair of Malayan tapirs, not the new ones - you have to click on the story to see cool night vision photos of them, and besides, you'll want to see the video. It's the best weird-cute you'll see all day.