Nature offers video of 10 cutest animals of 2014

(Phys.org)—The journal Nature has released a video that ventures a bit from its traditional strictly-science approach to technical journalism—it's all about the cutest animal stories of the past year (along with cute narration), though they might be stretching the definition a bit—some perhaps are simply striking. Also it might be noted, that in many cases, it's not the thing that is being done that causes the cuteness, but how the animals look while doing what they're doing. In any case, here are the winners:

10—Marmosets (a very cute kind of monkey) learning how to do things by watching videos of other marmosets doing things—like opening containers.

9—Doggies peeing in line with the Earth's magnetic field. Turns out, dogs have some sort of internal compass they use when going about their bladder business. Who knows why, but then, who knows why dogs do a lot of the things they do.

8—A Dumbo octopus really mimicking Dumbo. It gets its name because it looks like Dumbo, the Disney elephant, but sometimes, the resemblance is uncanny, and perhaps, a little weird.

7—Dancing frogs in India. Researchers discovered fourteen new species of frogs in that country this past year, and the males of some of them, do this little lift-the-leg dance thing to attract females, that clearly needs to be set to music to fully appreciate.

6—Lizard stowaways in the Caribbean. Researchers found out that anole lizards are making their way around the Caribbean islands by stowing away on cargo ships, and some of them are actually pretty cute.

5—Tiny swarming bots. Some might argue that they are more scary than cute, while others might disagree. In either case, they are impressive and maybe even a little bit awe inspiring considering what they are capable of doing.

4—Toupee monkeys being naturally cute. Five new species of the monkey were discovered this year in South America, and some are just flat out cute.

3—Jumping spiders showing off their eyes. Noah Fram-Schwartz caught a truly interesting and unique picture of those strange eyes, and won third place in a Nikon contest.

2—Penguin bots interacting with real penguins. Researchers built a little baby penguin bot that rolls around on wheels, and sent it into a crowd of adult penguins—the resulting footage is priceless.

1—Koalas hugging trees. Everyone knows koalas are cute, and that they sleep most of the time and hug trees while doing so, now we know why—they get a cool-down from the trees while napping, and look about as cute as anything can while doing so.

There you have it, a roundup of the ten cutest animal moments of the year, except perhaps, that one time your own precious companion did that one thing that made you cry like a baby.

© 2014 Phys.org