Note: Voting for the tournament is now closed. To find out who won, visit WIRED on Friday for Absurd Creature of the Week's one-year anniversary celebration.
We're coming up on one whole year of Absurd Creature of the Week! So to celebrate, we've used a super-secret, super-complex algorithm to choose the 16 most absurd of the absurd---to pit them against each other in mortal combat (bracket is at the bottom of this post). Now, you will vote to decide which is the very most absurdest of them all.
And ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves an upset. The pink fairy armadillo has edged out the bobbit worm, the most popular Absurd Creature of the Week post ever, to advance to the finals. Here it goes head to head with the zombie ants. So who will it be?
The zombie ants (above). They're like regular ants, only their minds have been infiltrated by a fungus, which directs them out of the colony into a very specific spot in the forest, then kills them. The fungus then erupts as a stalk out of the back of their noodles, raining down spores on the rest of the colony below. I'm not even kidding. It's happening all the time. We even have a recently discovered species in the United States.
VS.
The pink fairy armadillo. Spending almost its entire life burrowing underground in the deserts of Argentina, this enchanting little critter remains largely a mystery to science, since it does not do well in captivity. But it's hard to imagine a more charming creature, with its rosy shell (it's that color because blood is coursing underneath) and brilliant white hair along its belly. Tunnel on, little friend.
