# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 20, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-14-most-famous-animals-in-history*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Laika** — score 1000/1000
   The Moscow stray who became the first living creature to orbit Earth, aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957.
2. **Punxsutawney Phil** — score 907/1000
   The groundhog whose February shadow has been a national broadcast since the 1880s.
3. **Ham the astrochimp** — score 597/1000
   Flew a suborbital Mercury mission in January 1961 and came back alive.
4. **Secretariat** — score 546/1000
   The racehorse who made the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated in one week in 1973.
5. **Balto** — score 545/1000
   Led the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome and has a statue in Central Park.
6. **Clever Hans** — score 423/1000
   The horse who appeared to do arithmetic and instead gave psychology a lasting lesson in experimenter bias.
7. **Bucephalus** — score 423/1000
   Alexander the Great's warhorse, said to be the only one who would let him mount.
8. **Cher Ami** — score 349/1000
   The homing pigeon who carried the message that located the Lost Battalion in 1918.
9. **Dolly the sheep** — score 349/1000
   The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, born at the Roslin Institute in 1996.
10. **Jumbo** — score 263/1000
   The London Zoo elephant P. T. Barnum bought in 1882, whose name became a word for enormous.
11. **Jonathan the tortoise** — score 263/1000
   Jonathan, the Seychelles giant tortoise on Saint Helena, is the oldest living land animal on record.
12. **Trigger** — score 163/1000
   Roy Rogers' palomino, credited in more than 80 films and a hundred television episodes.
13. **Koko** — score 163/1000
   The gorilla taught sign language at Stanford, credited with a vocabulary of over a thousand signs.
14. **Hachiko** — score 163/1000
   The Akita who returned to Shibuya station daily for nine years after his owner's death.

Tags: animals