Top 10 Weirdest Animal Stories of 2014: Editors' Picks

Purple Frog Goes Underground

This was a banner year for the bizarre, with a snake virgin birth, an extremely rare black sea devil, and a real-life unicorn making headlines in Weird & Wild.

Luckily for our fans, we've rounded up our editors' picks of the ten best weird stories of 2014. (See the weirdest stories of 2013.)

Tenth on our list of oddest animal stories is the unusual mating strategy of the Indian purple frog, also known as the pig-nosed frog, an endangered species (pictured) native to the mountains of India's Western Ghats.

Males of the colorful amphibian, discovered in 2003, call to attract females from underground—a strange method of courtship, according to a study published in February.

Keep clicking for more news on Mother Nature's oddest phenomena.

—Christine Dell'Amore, photo gallery by Mallory Benedict 

Snake Virgin Birth

Photograph by Kyle Shepherd, Louisville Zoo

Virgin birth has been documented in the world's longest snake for the first time,we reported in October.

An 11-year-old reticulated python named Thelma produced six female offspring (pictured) in June 2012 at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky, where she lives with another female python, Louise. No male had ever slithered anywhere near the 200-pound (91-kilogram), 20-foot-long (6 meters) mother snake.

New DNA evidence, published in July in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, revealed that Thelma is the sole parent, said Bill McMahan, the zoo's curator of ectotherms, or cold-blooded animals. (Read: "'Virgin Birth' Seen in Wild Snakes, Even When Males Are Available."

From :news.nationalgeographic