1. The Hercules beetle can carry up to 850 times its weight, which is like a human lifting eight fully grown elephants (or about 65 tons).
2. Millipedes of the genus Motyxia glow in the dark and ooze cyanide — the perfect defense against enemies.
3. Wood frogs can survive being frozen in solid ice.
4. The Pompeii worm lives in deep-sea hydrothermal vents at temperatures of 176˚F (80˚C). It assembles a coating of minions – symbiotic microbes that apparently feed on mucus secreted by the worm – that might help insulate it from the heat.
5. Fireflies' nervous systems control their glowing, and each species has its own pattern — kind of like a subtle Bat-Signal.
6. Elephant seals can hold their breath for up to two hours, making them excellent water spies.
7. Komodo dragons will eat almost any kind of meat, including smaller dragons, large water buffalo, and humans.
8. Goats like eating poison ivy and other invasive plants, if you need any obstructive paths cleared.
9. Black swallowers are deep-sea fish with collapsible teeth and an expandable stomach, letting then gulp down prey ten times their weight.
10. African lungfishes can survive for years without food or water by tunneling into mud and secreting a mucus cocoon.
11. Mantis shrimp can punch their prey at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet (or about 50 times faster than you blink).
12. Narwhals' tusks are actually teeth, and each tooth can contain up to 10 million nerve endings.
13. Some spiders can grow bigger in urban areas.
14. Tardigrades, also known as water bears, can survive a thousand times the lethal human dose of X-ray radiation.
15. They've also been found everywhere on Earth: from the bottom of the ocean, to up a mountain in the Himalayas.
16. In an ultimate death-defying finale to their act, some tardigrades have even survived out in the vacuum of space for 10 days.
17. The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans can survive over 1,000 times as much radiation as a human. (It was discovered in 1956 in a can of meat that had supposedly been sterilized by radiation – still alive.)
18. Lobsters, meanwhile, pee out of their faces. (Surprise attack, anyone?)
19. Hairy frogs break their bones and push them out through their toes to make claws, just like Wolverine.
20. Horned lizards can shoot blood from their eyes (and at their enemies).
21. If a predator catches their tail, geckos and iguanas can disconnect it from their bodies and regrow it later.
22. Salamanders and starfish can respawn entire limbs!
23. And axolotls can even regenerate a crushed spinal cord.
24. A mimic octopus can appear to transform into other species at will – one minute it's a lion fish, then seconds later it's a sea snake. It's so stealthy scientists only discovered it in 1998.
Thanks to the American Museum of Natural History for help with some of these facts.
Their new exhibit, Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species, opens April 4, 2015.