Remember the first time you saw a platypus as a kid and for a moment refused to believe that nature would really create an animal that looks like a duck had sex with a beaver? Well guess what, the world is actually full of bizarre mashup creatures like that, some of them hilarious and some of them terrifying, all of them looking like the result of a very drunken night of interspecies animal sex.

9 Deer + Mouse = Chevrotain

Shiliru via Smithsonian

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This picture is almost like some sort of visual illusion: Cover the lower half of the photo with your hand and it looks like a perfectly normal squirrel-size rodent, but focus on its hoofed legs instead and it's hard not to imagine it being the size of a deer.

The truth is somewhere in between: The chevrotain, or mouse deer, is the world's smallest hoofed mammal. If they wanted to recreate the plot of Bambi with these things, the hunter could save himself a few bullets by just stepping on Bambi's mom.

Stanley Kaisa Breeden / Getty

Hunting season probably doesn't concern you too much when a stiff breeze can shatter your legs.

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One might suspect that a creature that's the size of a rabbit and looks like a mashup of the two most timid animals on earth would be a pushover. Well, it just so happens that chevrotain males come equipped with, for no immediately apparent reason other than wild incongruity, a set of elongated, saber-like canine teeth. The males actually use these outsized fangs to fight with one another over territory and mouse deer ladies.