The wizarding world’s premier expert on animal life hits the big screen in North America on November 18—with a menagerie of fantastical creatures in tow.
In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the latest film based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a wizard named Newt Scamander has traveled the world, studying and collecting magical creatures of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions—and then has to deal with the chaos of their escape from captivity.
The creatures in Scamander’s magical suitcase—and Rowling’s imagination—may be awe-inspiring, but the real world offers up creatures that are just as amazing.
From ancient snakes more than 40 feet long to explosive beetles, here are a few examples of what nature has to offer.
Acromantula
Real-Life Animal: Tarantulas (Family: Theraphosidae)
Range: Global
Size: 4.75 inches (12 centimeters) long; up to 11-inch (28-centimeter) leg span
IUCN Red List Status: Least Concern to Critically Endangered
In the wizarding world, acromantulas are enormous spiders—bearing a real-life resemblance to tarantulas, a group of spiders comprising more than 850 species. The similarities between fact and fiction are striking.
In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Scamander describes acromantulas as large black-haired spiders native to Borneo. There really is a large black-haired spider native to the Sangihe Islands, east of Borneo: Lampropelma nigerrium, a tarantula first scientifically described in 1892. And like Aragog, the acromantula most featured in the Harry Potter books and films, Australian tarantulas can "talk” by rubbing together their chelicerae, or fang-tipped jaws, to create a hissing sound.
But neither of these carnivorous spiders is the biggest living tarantula. That honor arguably goes to South America's Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), which can get up to 11 inches (28 centimeters) wide—and can prey on small birds, although it mostly eats arthropods. No tarantula living or dead has gotten as big as the fictional acromantula, however, which reportedly has a leg span of 15 feet (4.6 meters).
Basilisk
Real-Life Animal: Titanoboa cerrejonensis
Range: Colombia, 60 million years ago
Size: 42 feet (12.8 meters) long
IUCN Red List Status: Extinct
For centuries, the basilisk has slithered through European myth, a massive serpent with a crown-shaped crest and a reputedly lethal stare. In a sense, basilisks actually exist: The reptile family Corytophanidae consists of iguana-like lizards called basilisks, including the Jesus Christ lizard (Basilicus basilicus), which can run for short spurts across water. What’s more, early legends of the basilisk may have been inspired by cobras.
But if you're looking for a massive serpent, your best bet is probably Titanoboa cerrejonensis, an anaconda-like snake that lived some 60 million years ago in what's now Colombia. The 42-foot-long (12.8-meter-long) serpent is the biggest known snake, living or extinct, and weighed some 2,500 pounds (1,134 kilograms).
Billywig
Real-Life Animal: Blue ant (Diamma bicolor)
Range: Australia
Size: Up to one inch (2.5 centimeters) long
IUCN Red List Status: Not Yet Assessed
In Fantastic Beasts, a billywig is a blue stinging insect from Australia. In real life, it matches up well with the blue ant, an Australian insect that isn't an ant at all.
Instead, it’s a solitary flower wasp that parasitizes mole crickets. Female blue ants paralyze mole crickets with their stings and then lay their eggs on them, ensuring that the newborn larvae have a fresh meal. Adults, however, feed mainly on nectar.
According to Newt Scamander, the billywig’s sting is something to be desired, inducing momentary levitation and feelings of giddiness. The blue ant’s sting is less pleasant: The Australian Museum says that blue ant stings are rare but can happen, and they cause burning pain and swelling.
Blast-Ended Skrewt
Real-Life Animal: Bombardier beetles (Subfamily: Brachininae)
Range: Every continent except Antarctica
Size: Up to one inch (2.5 centimeters) long
IUCN Red List Status: Not Yet Assessed
In the Harry Potter novels, the blast-ended skrewt is the product of a breeding experiment gone wrong—a crablike creature that smells of rotten fish and can explosively blast its enemies.
The non-wizarding world has a creature capable of similar pyrotechnics: the bombardier beetle. When threatened, the beetle can produce a noxious spray that can reach temperatures of 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) and can fly at predators at up to 22 miles an hour (10 meters per second). (Find out more about how the bombardier beetle generates these explosions.)
In fact, bombardier beetles have a skill that even blast-ended skrewts don’t seem to have: rapid-fire. Bombardier beetles’ outbursts pulse rapidly instead of going all at once. The result? Pulses of spray that fire out between 300 and a thousand times per second.
Bowtruckle
Real-Life Animal: Stick insects (Order: Phasmida)
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Range: Global, mainly in the tropics and subtropics
Size: Up to 24.6 inches (62.4 centimeters) long
IUCN Red List Status: Least Concern to Critically Endangered
In Scamander's telling, bowtruckles are stick-shaped insects that guard the trees that yield wood for magical wands. In reality, insects of the order Phasmida invoke a magic themselves—by resembling a dizzying variety of leaves, twigs, sticks, and branches.
Some 3,000 Phasmid species live worldwide. Their shapes, colors, and sizes vary spectacularly: Timema cristinae, a stick insect native to North America, is only half an inch (1.3 centimeters) long, while Phryganistria chinensis Zhao, found in China in 2014, is a staggering 24.6 inches (62.4 centimeters) long.
Diricawl
Real-Life Animal: Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)
Range: Mauritius
Size: 3.3 feet (one meter) tall; 23 to 46 pounds (10 to 21 kilograms)
IUCN Red List Status: Extinct
According to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the non-magical world knows the diricawl as the dodo, a flightless bird once found on the island of Mauritius. In Scamander's telling, people don't see the dodo today because it can vanish at will when it senses danger. The truth of the dodo's disappearance is much sadder: Habitat loss and run-ins with human-introduced predators drove the dodo to extinction by the late 1600s.
Current research on the dodo's closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon, could present its own form of magic by letting scientists understand the details of the dodo's genome, which was sequenced in 2015. Don't get your hopes up for reviving the dodo: Scientists haven't yet cloned a bird successfully, much less brought a bird species back from the dead.
Horklump
Real-Life Animal: Dendrogramma
Range: Waters off southeastern Australia, between 1,310 and 3,280 feet (400 to 1,000 meters) deep
Size: Disk up to 0.7 inch (1.7 centimeters) wide; stalk up to 0.3 inch (0.8 centimeter) tall
IUCN Red List Status: Not Yet Assessed
In the Harry Potter world, the horklump is an animal that resembles a mushroom, and few mushroom-shaped animals have proved as mysterious, and controversial, as Dendrogramma. First described in 2014, the deep-sea creature—comprising two closely related species—first defied classification, preventing biologists from assigning it to an existing branch of the tree of animal life.
However, an analysis in 2016 revealed that Dendrogramma isn't in a league of its own: In fact, it's a deep-sea genus of Cnidaria, the animal phylum that includes jellyfish, corals, and box jellies.
Niffler
Real-Life Animal: Star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata)
Range: Canada and the United States of America
Size: 7.6 inches (19.3 centimeters) long
IUCN Red List Status: Least Concern
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them describes the niffler as a mole-like creature with an affinity for stealing shiny objects. While the star-nosed mole doesn't have great eyesight, it has another heightened burgling sense: touch.
The star-nosed mole's 22-fingered nose is one of the most touch-sensitive organs in the animal kingdom, studded with thousands of microscopic sensory receptors called Eimer’s organs.
This stellar nose lets the mole "see" its environment with remarkable detail and hunt for small invertebrates underground with startling efficiency. A star-nosed mole can identify, catch, and finish eating its prey in less than a quarter of a second—making it the world's fastest-eating mammal.
