Wild Animals You Won’t Believe Are Real – Strange, Rare & Totally Unique Creatures That Exist

Just when you think you’ve seen every animal on the planet, boom – some bizarre but kinda adorable creature shows up that you didn’t even know existed. Honestly, it feels like unlocking a hidden level in a video game.

Truth is, Earth’s way more creative than we give it credit for. Mother Nature’s got a whole bag of tricks, and she loves surprising us with rare and exotic animals that look straight out of a fantasy world. If you’ve never heard of bagworms, tiger quolls, or greasefish before… don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

There’s even an online community called “Animals I Didn’t Know Existed” with around 29k weekly visitors. And yep, it’s exactly what it sounds like – a place where people share the most unusual, weird, and rare animals that actually exist.

Some of these creatures look like mythical hybrids, others like they escaped from a sci-fi movie. A few could totally star in a fantasy novel. And then there are the cute ones – the kind of animals that look like they belong in a Disney cartoon or as your dream exotic pet.

Bored Panda rounded up the weirdest, wildest, and most wonderful animals from the page. Scroll through, pick your favorites, and maybe even start daydreaming about having one of these strange but fascinating creatures as a pet (just maybe not the creepy ones).

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Let’s be real – you’re never gonna see every single animal on this planet. And honestly, that’s because there are just way too many. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is basically the top authority when it comes to global wildlife and conservation, keeps track of all this stuff.

They update the official list of known species every year, thanks to the work of taxonomists (aka the biologists who spend their lives classifying and naming life on Earth).

According to the IUCN’s 2022 data, there are about 2.16 million species documented so far. That includes around 1.05 million insects, 11,000+ bird species, over 11,000 reptiles, and more than 6,000 mammals. And here’s the wild part — that’s just the species we know about. There are still countless rare and undiscovered animals hiding in the oceans, rainforests, and remote corners of the world.

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Back in 1998, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) pointed out something pretty mind-blowing. Even after more than 200 years of scientists naming and classifying plants and animals, we still don’t really know how many species actually exist on Earth. Some estimates go from 3 million to over 100 million species — yep, that’s how huge the number could be.

According to the NWF, about 13,000 new species get added to the official list every single year. Sure, most of the bigger categories like mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and flowering plants are already documented. But there are still countless rare, unknown, and undiscovered species waiting to be identified.

It just shows how wild our planet really is — and why biodiversity and wildlife conservation are so important.

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According to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), most of the species we haven’t discovered yet aren’t big or flashy animals. The real mystery lies in the small stuff — tiny, often microscopic organisms hiding in places we rarely explore. Think deep-sea creatures, underground life forms, tropical tree canopies, and even organisms living inside the guts of other animals.

We’re talking about insects, worms, mites, fungi, bacteria, and other microscopic species that Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson once called “the black hole of taxonomy.” Why? Because these life forms are so insanely abundant that they could actually multiply our current species count by ten or more.

It’s wild to think that while we’re fascinated by exotic animals and rare wildlife, the real explosion of biodiversity is happening on a microscopic level, in places we barely ever see.

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A study published in PLOS Biology (2018) dropped a jaw-dropping stat: about 86% of land species and 91% of sea species on Earth haven’t even been discovered yet. Yep, we’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to knowing our planet’s full biodiversity.

But if we’re talking sheer numbers of animals (not species), things get interesting. For starters, chickens massively outnumber humans. According to the World Animal Foundation (WAF), there are roughly 26.5 billion chickens compared to about 8.1 billion humans. That’s around four chickens for every single person alive!

And when it comes to the most common animal on Earth, it’s not chickens, cows, or even fish — it’s the ant. The WAF estimates there are about 10 quadrillion ants (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000). These tiny creatures dominate almost every habitat on land, quietly making them one of the most successful species on the planet.

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When it comes to creatures that aren’t big, fuzzy, or Instagram-famous, the truth is… we’re still in the dark. Edward Theriot, director of the Texas Memorial Museum and president of the Association of Systematics Collections (ASC), says the percentage of unknown species is still sitting somewhere in the double digits. That’s a massive chunk of life we haven’t even identified yet.

And microbiologist Diana Lipscomb from George Washington University puts it even more bluntly: “We don’t even know enough to tell you what we don’t know.”

In other words, the world is still packed with undiscovered species and microscopic life forms we haven’t even begun to catalog — a reminder that Earth’s biodiversity is way deeper than what we see on the surface.

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