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Crowned lemurs, like all lemurs, are primates only found on the island of Madagascar, off the southeastern coast of Africa. Out of all lemur species, crowned lemurs are the most sexually dimorphic, meaning males and females look very different. They are an endangered species, threatened by habitat loss and are hunted for food and the pet trade.

Alpacas are a domesticated, social species that live in herds. Although they originated in Peru, they have now spread worldwide in human care. Although they share similar characteristics and are often mistaken for one another, alpacas and llamas are different species! There are four South American camelids: the alpaca and the llama, both domesticated, and the vicuña and the guanaco, both wild species that diverged from a common ancestor around 2 million years ago.

The African slender-snouted crocodile is a medium-sized crocodilian and uses its slender snout for catching fish and other relatively small prey in the water. This species has suffered declines in the wild due to development and human encroachment into the forested wetlands it occupies. It is also a target for the bushmeat trade.

Aldabra tortoises are the second-largest species of tortoise in the world and, like their larger relatives on the Galapagos Islands, this species is also restricted to a few islands north of Madagascar.

Komodo dragons are Earth’s largest living lizards and are part of the large family known as monitor lizards.

Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes are the largest venomous snakes the U.S. They are maligned and slaughtered, both opportunistically by rural citizens and systematically in locally promoted rattlesnake roundups. Despite their large size and the medical importance of the rare accidental bite to a human, these are quiet and reclusive snakes that do very little harm unless harassed or restrained.

Eastern indigo snakes are the largest native non-venomous snake in the United States. Rather than relying on constriction to disable their wide variety of prey items, they simply overpower their prey with their muscular jaws and swallow it whole. Their conservation status is of concern because their preferred habitat, the longleaf pine forest, has been heavily fragmented by agricultural and logging practices.

The Guatemalan beaded lizard lives only in an isolated pocket of desert in eastern Guatemala. Discovered by scientists in the mid-1980s, this distinctive lizard has been well known to local populations in Guatemala for millennia. This species is one of the five closely related species of venomous beaded lizards, including the Gila monster of the southwestern U.S. The venom is used entirely for self-defense and is not used in the capturing of prey.

Reticulated pythons, along with the green anaconda, are the largest snakes in the world. The distinction is that these pythons attain a greater length, with valid records of wild individuals over 20 feet in length. Green anacondas, on the other hand, are not as long but achieve a much more massive girth and mass.

Ring-tailed lemurs are named for the distinctive, alternating black-and-white bands along their tails. They reside in southern and southwestern Madagascar and are found in social groups called troops. This species uses both vocal and scent marking as tools of communication.