Animals

The United States Marine Corps has endured few firefights as savage as the Battle for Outpost Vegas in the waning months of the Korean War. With a roar that sounded like “twenty tornadoes tearing at a countryside,” according to one serviceman, more than 500 mortar and artillery ...read more

1. Sergeant Stubby—The Most Decorated Dog of World War I On a fateful day in 1917, a stray pit bull mix wandered onto the Yale University campus while members of the 102nd Infantry Regiment were training. This lost pup fit right in, participating in drills and even learning to ...read more

It’s called “panda diplomacy” and it’s thought to have started as early as the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century when Empress Wu Zeitan sent a pair of bears (believed to be pandas) to Japan. This Chinese policy of sending pandas as diplomat gifts was revived in 1941, on the eve of ...read more

1. Franklin Roosevelt and Fala In 1940, FDR was given a Scottish terrier puppy he named Murray the Outlaw of Falahill, after one of his Scottish ancestors. Known as Fala, the pooch frequently traveled with the president, attended important meetings with him and slept by his bed ...read more

In late November 1926, a live animal sent by one Vinnie Joyce of Nitta Yuma, Mississippi, arrived at the White House to be slaughtered and served up for that year’s Thanksgiving dinner. President Calvin Coolidge, however, became smitten by the beast and instead granted it a ...read more

Though far less famous than later non-human astronauts, the first animals in space were a group of fruit flies, launched to an altitude of 42 miles at the tip of a Nazi-designed V-2 rocket by American military scientists on February 20, 1947. The flies, members of the ...read more

On February 2, 1887—a few months after an inferno had reduced a third of the commercial buildings in Punxsutawney to ashes—a small group of men ascended a wooded area a mile outside the small western Pennsylvania coal town in search of a local rodent said to possess ...read more

A group of scientists from Siberian Northeastern Federal University traveled to Maly Lyakhovsky Island, in far northern Siberia, in May 2013 to track down rumors of a woolly mammoth skeleton trapped in the region’s permafrost. After finding two giant tusks protruding from the ...read more

Although known for millennia by many of the peoples of Africa and Asia, elephants’ introduction to the classical West came around 331 B.C., when Alexander the Great encountered war elephants as his army swept from Persia into India. At the river Jhelum, in present-day Pakistan, ...read more

The children of Nome were dying in January 1925. Infected with diphtheria, they wheezed and gasped for air, and every day brought a new case of the lethal respiratory disease. Nome’s lone physician, Dr. Curtis Welch, feared an epidemic that could put the entire village of 1,400 ...read more

1. Laika, the mutt who became a space pioneer On November 3, 1957, Laika (meaning “barker” in Russian) traveled aboard the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2, becoming the first animal to orbit Earth and paving the way for human spaceflight. The canine cosmonaut made her historic ...read more

The world was a very different place 3.5 million years ago. A land bridge connected Alaska and Russia. Our ancestors, the australopithecines, were first appearing in Africa. And giant camels roamed the Arctic, looking a whole lot like their desert-based descendants do today. ...read more

Prehistoric humans began taming wolves at least 15,000 years ago, transforming dangerous pack predators into loyal companions and creating specialized dog breeds for different tasks. (In another version of this story, wolves engineered their own domestication after tasting the ...read more

On April 10, 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is founded in New York City by philanthropist and diplomat Henry Bergh, 54. In 1863, Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to a diplomatic post at the Russian court of Czar ...read more