The 14 Most Famous Animals in History

Space travellers, wartime messengers, a cloned sheep and a dog who kept waiting at a station. Fame arrived for wildly different reasons.

1

Laika

The Moscow stray who became the first living creature to orbit Earth, aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957.

1000pts

2

Punxsutawney Phil

The groundhog whose February shadow has been a national broadcast since the 1880s.

907pts

3

Ham the astrochimp

Flew a suborbital Mercury mission in January 1961 and came back alive.

597pts

4

Secretariat

The racehorse who made the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated in one week in 1973.

546pts

5

Balto

Led the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome and has a statue in Central Park.

545pts

6

Clever Hans

The horse who appeared to do arithmetic and instead gave psychology a lasting lesson in experimenter bias.

423pts

7

Bucephalus

Alexander the Great's warhorse, said to be the only one who would let him mount.

423pts

8

Cher Ami

The homing pigeon who carried the message that located the Lost Battalion in 1918.

349pts

9

Dolly the sheep

The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, born at the Roslin Institute in 1996.

349pts

10

Jumbo

The London Zoo elephant P. T. Barnum bought in 1882, whose name became a word for enormous.

263pts

11

Jonathan the tortoise

Jonathan, the Seychelles giant tortoise on Saint Helena, is the oldest living land animal on record.

263pts

12

Trigger

Roy Rogers' palomino, credited in more than 80 films and a hundred television episodes.

163pts

13

Koko

The gorilla taught sign language at Stanford, credited with a vocabulary of over a thousand signs.

163pts

14

Hachiko

The Akita who returned to Shibuya station daily for nine years after his owner's death.

163pts