Lonely Planet World's Strangest Creepy Crawlies

Enter the weird and wonderful world of creepy-crawlies. Our animal experts have unearthed 40 of the planet’s most bizarre species and ranked them in order of their oddness! With jaw-dropping facts and amazing photos, we reveal each creature’s seriously strange characteristics and the unusual ways they hunt, eat or defend themselves.

They’re sometimes hard to spot, but there are a mind-boggling 10 billion billion bugs on the planet. Inside World’s Strangest Creepy-Crawlies, kids will discover the tiny terror that blows itself up to save its friends, a creature so well disguised even its own species can’t see it, and a giant spider the size of a dinner plate. And with our ‘strange-o-meter’, they can compare each animal based on its creepiness, fight factor and superpowers!

Creepy-crawlies include:

• Elephant beetle
• Hickory horned devil
• Happy-face spider
• Zombie snail
• Leafcutter ant
• Froghopper
• Spiny devil katydid
• Goliath birdeater spider
• Giant weta
• Asian giant hornet
• Scorpion
• Death’s-head hawkmoth
• Bird-dung crab spider
• Exploding ant