If you are a barred owl and you can understand these words, know this: your days are numbered.

Here is the world's smallest chameleon, the Brookesia micra, recently discovered on an island off Madagascar. These little guys are only an inch long, fully-grown.

Above is a picture of a female Burmese python caught in 2009 by a ranger in the Everglades National Park. All those sacs are embryonic pythons—59 potential hungry baby pythons in all.

According to a North Korean Central News Agency report, "peculiar natural wonders" have been witnessed since Kim Jong-il died on Saturday. And we're not talking about Kim Jong-il's face appearing in a crummy piece of toast.

Today in free speech vs. public safety debates: American bureaucrats beg Science and Nature magazines not to unlock the secrets of a "man-made mutant killer flu virus" invented in a Dutch laboratory, that could kill everyone forever, or at least give some rodents a case of the runs.

Great strides in the field of anthropomorphically amusing animals: Among 208 new species discovered in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia is an "Elvis monkey" that "looks like it wears a pompadour." The Elvis monkey has no nose (Michael Jackson monkey?) and lives in the Himalayan forests of Myanmar, a World Wildlife Fund report explains:

So, if you wake up early tomorrow morning and the moon looks, like, enormous? And is blood red? Don't worry! It's not because the elder gods have returned to exact their brutal form of justice upon humankind.

Some Grand Canyon National Park officials had the great idea to ban bottled water at the park. But, oops, the ban was called off after Park superiors had a friendly chat with major national parks donor Coca-Cola.

Next week, the BBC will debut a series about animal life in the Arctic and Antarctic called Frozen Planet. In this preview clip, male members of an Adelie penguin colony in Antarctica gather stones to build nests while competing for lady penguins in the process. But as you'll see, not all of them do it honestly.

A Sycamore that stood for decades in Greenpoint's McCarren Park and dubbed the "Vagina Tree" for the way that its trunk — and there's really no delicate way to put this — resembled a Tyrannosaurus rex's ladyparts has been felled by Irene, The Brooklyn Paper reports.

Look, I'm don't want to disparage John Denver, but does the man really need a mountain named after him? That's one college professor's plan. J.P. McDaniel gathered some 2,300 signatures to rename the eastern peak of Mt. Sopris after the folksy John Denver, but now it turns out that might violate the Wilderness Act of 1964. More from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel:

You think the world is a boring and cruel place and then one day you wake up on an absolutely normal morning and you look on the internet and there is a story about a Gourami fish who was living on a diet of nothing but chocolate. A fish named Gary! Why isn't Gary eating his grapes at the aquarium like a normal Gourami?

Great white sharks are the largest, scariest predators in the sea. But they should stay in the sea. One shark didn't last week, and decided to see what it was like on a research boat.

A 54-year-old man from New Jersey was electrocuted to death on Sunday after lightning struck the tree next to which he was standing. The last thing Stephen Rooney told his family before he wandered away from a barbecue to smoke a cigar, MSNBC reports, was, "Don't worry guys, lightning never strikes twice." He was referring to an incident from 48 years earlier, when Rooney's father was killed by a bolt of lightning while fishing. So what can we learn from this tragedy? That lightning doesn't care about truisms! It's lightning. It strikes wherever it wants to strike. [MSNBC]

A grizzly protecting her cubs attacked a couple at Yellowstone, killing the husband. It's the first fatal attack there in 25 years, but the third in the region this year. Officials say the bear "behaved normally" and wouldn't be killed.

The NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation has issued a severe hogweed warning to all New Yorkers! There's a lot of information here, so let's just get to it.

Video of a mutant bunny born near Japan's quake-ravaged Fukushima power plant has gone viral. The bunny, which was born without ears, might be evidence of radioactive contamination, which may someday render the entire population of Japan microtic-anotic! Unless, of course, it's just a random birth defect. Every credible scientist in the world is leaning strongly toward the latter. Crazy people, however, are leaning toward the former, so the mutant bunny will probably be on the evening news tonight.

The newest expanse of Manhattan's hippest walkway, the High Line park, will open to the public tomorrow. Everyone is dying to check it out, but it's hot outside and the crowds will be awful. Let's take a virtual tour, shall we?

An MIT professor says he's created an artificial leaf some 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a leaf made by dumb ol' "nature," proving yet again that nature is incredibly stupid and lame.

This video features some of the biggest displays of aurora borealis "northern lights" in recent years. It was shot by Terje Sorgjerd over the course of a week in a national park in Russia while temperatures hovered around -34 degrees.