Binturong vs Vinegaroon vs Pelican Eel vs Mata Mata Turtle: A Bearcat That Smells Like Movie Popcorn, an Arachnid That Sprays Vinegar From Its Butt, an Eel That Is 90 Percent Mouth, and a Turtle Pretending to Be Wet Garbage

I put four animals in a room today and none of them are related, none of them agreed to be here, and one of them smells like a Tuesday matinee. On the docket: a fluffy tree gremlin that reeks of buttered popcorn, an arachnid that shoots salad dressing out of its rear, a deep-sea eel that is basically a mouth wearing a fish, and a turtle that has fully committed to the bit of being a soggy pile of leaves. This is my favorite kind of matchup: a mammal, an arachnid, a fish, and a reptile with absolutely nothing in common except that each one made me say 'wait, WHAT' out loud. Let us judge them.

Contestant 1: The Binturong (the popcorn situation)

The binturong is a Southeast Asian tree mammal that looks like someone crossed a cat, a bear, and a shag carpet, and it smells like a movie theater concession stand. This is not a metaphor. Scientists at Duke ran binturong urine through a gas chromatograph and found 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (2-AP), the exact same molecule that makes popcorn smell like popcorn. It showed up in every single one of 33 animals sampled. The weird part: 2-AP normally only forms when you blast food with high heat, but the binturong makes it at plain old body temperature. Nobody fully knows how.

And here is where cool becomes gross. How does it spread this delightful aroma? It squats, pees on its own tail and feet, and then drags that tail through the trees like a scented marker, leaving a popcorn trail on every branch. It also has a prehensile tail it uses like a fifth limb, which is genuinely rare - it is one of only two carnivorans that can grip with its tail (the other is the kinkajou). Also, despite being filed under order Carnivora with the sharp teeth to match, it mostly eats fruit, especially figs.

Contestant 2: The Vinegaroon (the condiment cannon)

Meet the whip scorpion, which is not a scorpion, has no venom, and would like you to know it can absolutely ruin your day anyway. When threatened, it aims the base of its long whip-like tail at you and fires a spray that is about 85 percent concentrated acetic acid. That is vinegar. This creature defends itself by dressing you like a salad. The spray is harmless to skin but stings viciously if it hits your eyes or nose, which is a very funny sentence to write about a bug.

The long tail itself is not a weapon - it is a sensory organ, a giant feeler for a nocturnal hunter with terrible eyesight. It crushes prey with heavy pincer-like pedipalps and feels its way around with its skinny front legs like antennae. Bonus wholesome-then-gross fact: mom carries her eggs, and after they hatch the babies ride around on her back for about a month. Then, in classic arachnid fashion, she typically dies shortly after her one brood grows up. Vinegar and heartbreak.

Contestant 3: The Pelican Eel (the mouth that ate the fish)

The pelican eel, also called the gulper eel, lives in the deep sea between roughly 500 and 3,000 meters down, and it is built like a punchline: a giant expandable pelican-style mouth attached to a tiny whip of a body. The jaw is about a quarter of the animal's entire length, and it can inflate that pouch like a balloon in an instant to engulf prey much larger than itself. When an E/V Nautilus ROV filmed one doing this in 2018, the internet lost its mind, because the thing goes from menacing black balloon to confused noodle in about two seconds.

Despite the terrifying maw, it has only tiny teeth and mostly eats small crustaceans, gulping them down with a big mouthful of water. Its eyes are basically vestigial dots (about 2.6 mm) that just detect faint light. And the best part is the tail: it ends in a light organ that glows pink and gives off occasional red flashes, presumed to work as a lure. It is a fishing rod that is also the fish.

Contestant 4: The Mata Mata Turtle (garbage cosplay champion)

The mata mata is a South American river turtle that has decided its entire personality is 'pile of dead leaves.' Its flat, knobby, cone-covered shell grows algae, its triangular head sprouts fleshy flaps and warts, and the whole ensemble is designed to make it vanish into the muck. It is a bad swimmer - it does not really swim so much as walk along the bottom like a haunted rock.

Two details push it over the top. First, its snout has stretched into a long snorkel, so it can breathe by poking just the tip out of the water without moving its body an inch. Second, it does not chew. Ever. When a fish wanders too close, the mata mata strikes, yawns its huge mouth open, and rapidly expands its throat to create suction that vacuums the prey straight in, water and all, swallowed whole. It is strike-and-gape feeding, and it is deeply unsettling to watch. In a 2020 plot twist, DNA work revealed the mata mata is actually two species that split around 13 million years ago.