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There are animals you can travel the whole world and find in only a single place. Not rare in the sense of being few in number, though they often are that too. Rare in the sense of being found nowhere else. A creature that exists on one island, in one forest, in one lake, and across the entire rest of the planet, not at all. Step beyond its small home, and it simply does not occur. It never has. These animals are called endemic to their place, and they are among the most fasc

In the heart of the Sahara, the driest place most people can imagine, a crocodile lies waiting in a pool of water. It seems impossible. The crocodile is a creature of rivers and swamps, of warm, abundant water. The Sahara is a furnace of sand where rain may not fall for years. To put the two together feels like a mistake, a fact that cannot be true. Yet it is true. Deep in the desert, in hidden pools fed by ancient water, small populations of crocodiles still survive. They ar

Far up a tributary of the Amazon, where the forest leans low over still brown water, something pink breaks the surface. It is a dolphin. Not in the sea, where every instinct tells us dolphins belong, but here, hundreds of miles inland, in a freshwater river deep in the heart of a continent. And it is pink, genuinely, improbably pink, a flush of rose across its strange, long bodied form. The pink river dolphin is one of the most surprising animals on Earth. A creature that see