Whether a large and fuzzy social media sensation or deep-sea slug slunking around the ocean's Midnight Zone, there are still so many exciting animals on Earth just waiting for their close-up. In that spirit, here are the 11 of the most exciting animal stories that Popular Science covered this year. A wildlife filmmaker and biology doctoral student took what could be the first picture of a newborn great white shark. Filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes were looking for sharks near Santa Barbara on California's central coast. Most great whites are gray on top with white bellies, but Gauana's drone camera showed a roughly 5-foot-long shark pup that had more white on its body than normal.

I can't count the number of animal stories that appeared in my timelines this year with comments like, "Everything is garbage, so here's this." There was the cat who was reunited with her family after the Camp Fire, in California, and the parrot who was adopted after getting kicked out of an animal shelter for swearing too saltily. Among the bears preparing for hibernation at Katmai National Park, a female named Beadnose became famous for being the most gloriously round. There was the baby raccoon who scaled a skyscraper in St. Paul, "Mission Impossible" style, stopping occasionally for naps in window ledges along the way. Stories from the animal world offer reliable moments of escapism--the ones we see in viral videos are usually cute, or tame, or strange and majestic, and glimpsed from a safe distance.