Excuse me, there's a bug on your shoulder

Via our friends at Archie McPhee's Geyser of Awesome, here's a rhinoceros beetle out for a ride on a human being in Costa Rica.

If you're wondering if there's any chance a person could be that oblivious - no, he really does seem to be doing this on purpose, since he's smiling in this additional photo.

This guy may take second place to the zookeeper we saw a while ago with stick insects all over his face, but that's a real lover of ugly animals.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Not an accident

Via National Geographic, this is a new species of leaf-nosed bat discovered in Vietnam.

We've seen other leaf-nosed bats and many other bats with strange facial protuberances, but this has got to be the saddest-looking. It seems to have been involved in some kind of terrible accident, or perhaps a dramatic incident where a crazed rejected lover threw acid in its face.

In reality, all of thse strange bat face shapes assist in echolocation, helping focus and bounce sound waves off their prey. On the one had that's pretty cool, but on the other, it makes be glad that we humans have developed our advanced technology as separate machines and not part of our actual bodies.

Because it can't get by on looks, this bat apparently relies on having a nice personality. "While captured, some similar body-sized bats, i.e. [the] great leaf-nosed bat, reacts very angrily," said the scientist who discovered it. "But Griffin's leaf-nosed bat seems quite gentle."

-Wombat (No Relation)

Your Monday... ugdorable?

Just when I think I've seen everything nature has to offer in the way of ugly animal babies, I stumble across this photo of a baby Sumatran rhino.

This photo was posted on the Facebook page of the Asian Rhino Project, and it's a baby picture of a rhino called Andalas that was born at the Cincinatti Zoo in 2001. The Sumatran rhino is extremely endangered, with only about 200 left in the wild, and Andalas was the first one born in captivity in 112 years.

Andalas also has his own Facebook page, but he doesn't post much, possibly because the internet connection isn't as good where he lives now: in 2007 he moved to Indonesia, the home of his ancestors and natural habitat of his species. He's now part of a breeding program that you can read more about here - and donate to, if you want to support the production of more ugly babies like this one.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Happy Leap Day!

Another look at our old ugly friend the purple frog in honor of Leap Day.

Your Monday ugdorable

Because you can't have too many baby aardvarks. Born at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago in January and just introduced to the press last week.

Ugly devotion

Isn't that an endearing picture of motherly love? Even if it is so ugly that it makes you a little queasy?

You didn't know that worms take such good care of their offspring? Well, that's not a worm. It's a caecilian, which is a type of amphibian. Believe it or not, this animal is actually a limbless, burrowing cousin to frogs, toads and salamanders. And they not only look quite different their relatives, they have rather different reproductive strategies. About 75% of the species give birth to live young, and the rest, like this one, lay eggs that are guarded by the female till they hatch.

This particular caecilian is one of seven new species that scientists discovered recently in India, which are members of an entirely new family. You may love ugly animals, but I'm betting you can't beat these researchers: they spent a total of 1,000 man-hours digging to find these creatures. Now that's devotion.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Teeny chameleons

That's not just a very close close-up of that newly discovered chameleon. No matter your screen size, that photo is probably way larger than life-size, as you can judge from the next photo:

To be fair, that is apparently a juvenile, but even the adults are only a little bit more than an inch in total length. This is one of four new species of tiny chameleons discovered in Madagascar, described in a paper published this week.

As so often with these stories it's happy and sad at the same time - from "Cool animal!" to "Uh oh" in the space of a blog post - and for these guys, the discoverers even immortalized this in their names. The unique wildlife of Madagascar is under threat from habitat destruction, and with only a small range, these newly discovered reptiles are at special risk. The threat inspired the Latin names of two of the new species. One is called Brookesia tristis, derived from the word for "sad," and another is rather obvious: Brookesia desperata.

-Wombat (No Relation)

The ugly member of the family

Seals are up to some shenanigans lately over at my other blog, which reminded me that it's been way too long since we saw an elephant seal here.

When people think "seal," they think of adorable pups that need to be protected from cruel hunters, or playful trained performers at a zoo or aquarium. (They also are often actually picturing a sea lion, but that's another story.)

And even elephant seals can fool you when they are young and cute and making puppy-dog eyes:

But cute little boys will eventually grow into their ugly adult snout and their ugly adult behavior, which involves harassing the ladies and lots of between-male violence, like in this photo:

As the photographer describes it: "Here one male ambushed an older male opening those wounds on his neck - and then immediately fled the area." The shot nicely captures the sand kicked up by the action, as well as an angle on that lovely proboscis that we don't usually get to see.

So if you're the next one to find an adorable seal pup curled up on your sofa, think twice before you ask if you can keep it, because you might end up with this:

Even as a lover of ugly animals, that's way closer than I need to get.

-Wombat (No Relation)

Photos by Flickr users Mike Baird and especially check out more by Joe McKenna.