I recommend looking at all the iNaturalist observations sorted by favorites
I have posted a tiny amount here before about iNaturalist, the major "citizen science" website for individuals to upload nature observations for identification and possible scientific study.
iNaturalist operates three different mobile apps now - I do not use "Seek" because it's often extraordinarily wrong and doesn't have the same emphasis on requiring you to make choices about the identifications yourself. (It is essentially "child iNaturalist".) I do currently have both iNaturalist Classic and the new iNaturalist app installed on my phone simultaneously, though. These apps require you to be involved in choosing the identification of the thing you've seen, and they allow you to upload your pictures so that other people can confirm your IDs. If you have ever thought, "damn, I wish I could identify birds" or "I wish I knew what the wildflowers on my hikes actually were", then I strongly recommend getting one or both of these apps! Classic has some UI decisions I still slightly prefer, but you are fine just getting the main one.
If you're at all interested in the site, I also recommend checking out this link specifically. This is a list of all the "research-grade" observations on the site with the most favorites. This means that these observations have been heavily viewed, sometimes heavily discussed. Most were featured by the site itself on social media, which is why so many users marked them as "favorites."
This tends to favor beautiful photographs of strange, controversial, or unusual things. Because they are all "research grade," it's a bit more satisfying to read through these IDs than the unconfirmed identifications, because for now at least, each of these mysteries has been "solved". (What it means for people to have achieved consensus on an ID is interestingly illuminated by some of the links below, however!)
You can spend hours reading down through this list and wiki-rabbitholing into the various creatures and situations they document. You can see:
- A wild jaguar in Arizona. Read the comments to learn more about the history of wild jaguars in the United States - they were roaming around in Arizona, Texas, and even Louisiana more recently than you might expect!
- A random Swedish tourist finding an extraordinarily rare, never-before-photographed moth in New Zealand while on vacation there. This happened only last year! The Wikipedia page illuminates more about what happened.
- A moth which disguises itself as a pile of bird shit with flies on it. The comments on this observation are particularly wild, because the moth was photographed at a bed and breakfast in Malaysia which describes itself as "a home style bed and breakfast strictly for naturalists". No children allowed! The owner apparently puts out moth-collection sheets and lights every night so that the guests can take pictures of rare species. The comments feature the photographer talking about visiting this place and seeing "500+ species per week".
- A previously-thought-lost bird from Papua New Guinea. This remains its only observation on the site.
- A discussion of a very cool flying squid observation where everyone first disagrees on what squid it is... then discuss it, and coalesce around a different identification... only to be surprised by the publication of a DNA study of the flying squids which reveals that the flying squids actually have four separate subspecies with different geographic distributions. The whole conversation takes place over the course of six years!
- An observation of a muskrat which seems to have been graffitied by students? amateurs? who were part of a citizen science program at some point in 2017-2019. The comments are full of people complaining about people incorrectly identifying it as a groundhog or beaver, and discussing the scientifically unhelpful data fields that have been attached to the observation- "Cat bell or clown collar?:No", "Swallowing gravel:No", etc. The students seem to have decided that this creature's name is Gerald, and a lot of the data is just people working in the name "Gerald". People have been actively commenting on this page for years.
- A bird choosing to swim, thus surprising the commenters - I gather that it was not known that this species would choose to swim. Notably however one of the observation fields a user chose to add here is "Does Bro have Aura?:Yes"
If you want to see some more open-ended discussions, though, you can filter for highly-favorited observations which are explicitly NOT research-grade. That list is here. This features some crazy photos where people are still arguing about what the thing is, including:
- A photo of a frog which seemingly has a mushroom growing out of its side. Some users here disagree on the nature of the photo, what's going on here, whether it might be staged, etc.
- A possible new moth species in Madadgascar where the moth makes a little protective case for itself that makes it look like bird poop. The initial disagreements here about whether this creature is even a creature or a bit of plant are fascinating.
- A camel spider of some kind that may be a new species
- A potentially undescribed species in caterpillar form which just straight up looks like a gummy worm
- A fully transparent larval eel that nobody can identify
- An x-ray of a fish inside the belly of a snake
- A woman clutching a bottle of booze and sitting on a park bench in Warsaw next to four hedgehogs
...and on and on. If you want to see even more specific deep cuts of mysterious animals, you can filter that unidentified critter link by specific parts of the animal kingdom and see just the mammals, just the reptiles, etc. Anyway!! Have fun reading!!!