South America’s Weirdest

One thing that all the largest landmasses in the world have in common is their biodiversity. With lots of space spread across a lot of the planet, you’re bound to run into a few vastly different biomes. Being the fourth largest landmass on the planet (after Asia, Africa and North America) South America is no different. What makes South America interesting is how vastly different those biomes are from one another.

They hold the record for both the driest (non-arctic) and wettest places on earth: López de Micay in Colombia and the Atacama Desert respectively. The Amazon rainforests house a third of all the world’s species but only makes up 35.5% of South America. Will all that biodiversity and new species being discovered every other day you’re bound to find a few oddities: seemingly alien creatures whose unique adaptations set them apart from all other life-forms on earth.

In this show, we’ll be taking a look at some of those oddities: the weird creatures that boggle belief and defy expectations. We’ll see how their unique physiologies and behaviours make them well-suited to their strange environments.

Wednesdays at 6 PM on National Geographic Wild (ch 221)