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. 1
   Laika

   The Moscow stray who became the first living creature to orbit Earth, aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Punxsutawney Phil

   The groundhog whose February shadow has been a national broadcast since the 1880s.
   907pts
3. 3
   Ham the astrochimp

   Flew a suborbital Mercury mission in January 1961 and came back alive.
   597pts
4. 4
   Secretariat

   The racehorse who made the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated in one week in 1973.
   546pts
5. 5
   Balto

   Led the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome and has a statue in Central Park.
   545pts
6. 6
   Clever Hans

   The horse who appeared to do arithmetic and instead gave psychology a lasting lesson in experimenter bias.
   423pts
7. 7
   Bucephalus

   Alexander the Great's warhorse, said to be the only one who would let him mount.
   423pts
8. 8
   Cher Ami

   The homing pigeon who carried the message that located the Lost Battalion in 1918.
   349pts
9. 9
   Dolly the sheep

   The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, born at the Roslin Institute in 1996.
   349pts
10. 10
    Jumbo

    The London Zoo elephant P. T. Barnum bought in 1882, whose name became a word for enormous.
    263pts
11. 11
    Jonathan the tortoise

    Jonathan, the Seychelles giant tortoise on Saint Helena, is the oldest living land animal on record.
    263pts
12. 12
    Trigger

    Roy Rogers' palomino, credited in more than 80 films and a hundred television episodes.
    163pts
13. 13
    Koko

    The gorilla taught sign language at Stanford, credited with a vocabulary of over a thousand signs.
    163pts
14. 14
    Hachiko

    The Akita who returned to Shibuya station daily for nine years after his owner's death.
    163pts

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