Sixteen animals worth an evening, each with a True Facts video to watch and field notes taken from the papers underneath it. Twelve of them are companions to something already published here, and each one links back.
This is the watching list that produced half our animal writing, written down at last. The companion zine, No. 47, argues that what we took from Ze Frank's series is not that it makes science fun but that the animal is never the punchline. This page is that argument as a catalogue: watch the video, then read what the literature actually says, and notice that the two do not fight.
Nothing loads until you press play. Each entry holds a still card rather than a live embed, so no request goes to YouTube until you ask for one — the same promise search makes about your queries. Open an entry with a click; the field notes, the table and the video are all inside.
The reframe table corrects the popular verdict on the animal. It never corrects anything in the videos — and that distinction is the whole reason this page can exist next to No. 47, which argues the series does not hand down verdicts in the first place. Disgusting, primitive, a mistake, an omen: those come from culture and from language, and they are what the third column answers.
One entry has no table row aimed at a belief, on purpose. The aye-aye is killed in parts of Madagascar because of what it is held to mean, and running sounds like / actually over somebody's cosmology would be the same error Field Guide No. 10 refused with its five turtles people made. The table there answers claims about the animal's body; the belief gets stated plainly and left alone.
Each of these has a piece on this site behind it, and the field notes below draw on the same primary sources that piece was checked against.
Three animals we had never written about, and one that is here as evidence — the hedgehog video is the exhibit in No. 47's fact-check of the series' own origin story.