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:: The brave pig
 JoAnne Altsman, 57, of Beaver Falls, Pittsburgh, began having a heart attack in her holiday trailer on Presque Isle in Erie, Pennsylvania, on 4 August 1998. Her American Eskimo dog, Bear, did nothing but bark and break a bedroom window; but LuLu, her Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, rose to the occasion.
:: The doe is patroling
 Mopsy The Rabbit, a two-year-old Orange Rex doe, landed a burglar in court after raising the alarm by frantically thumping with her foot during a break-in at her owners' house in Fetcham, Surrey, on 30 June.
:: Strucked by lightning
 Viewers watching the last 12 minutes of a televised Castle Premiership football match between the Moroka Swallows and Jomo Cosmos in the George Gogh Stadium, Johannesburg, saw a group of players collapse suddenly after being struck by lightning.
:: Frog shower
 An unnamed pensioner called the Meteorological Office at Bracknell on 4 March to inform them that an early-morning shower over her house in Shirley, Croydon, south London, had been accompanied by a large number of dead frogs, which were scattered over her garden, her neighbour's house, and nearby streets.
:: The Crocodiles
 Whatever devastated the terrestrial environments 65 million years ago and exterminated the dinosaurs, it failed to force into extinction the ultimate survivors, the Crocodiles.
:: Shark Attack!
 The first sharks appeared on earth about 400 million years ago. Today there are more than 360 known species of sharks.
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Frog Shower
by
Marianna Kommata
An unnamed pensioner called the Meteorological Office at Bracknell on 4 March to inform them that an early-morning shower over her house in Shirley, Croydon, south London, had been accompanied by a large number of dead frogs, which were scattered over her garden, her neighbour's house, and nearby streets; as no-one at the Met Office had the presence of mind to note down her name, she has proved impossible to trace.
Another local said his dog was trying to eat the creatures as he took it for a walk. Met Office spokesman Andy Yeatman was willing to offer, in best fortean fashion, a number of possible explanations for the latest report. "We know there was a heavy rain that night," he told us, "so it could have triggered a migration of frogs - it wouldn't be unprecedented, as it's been observed before." However, the woman does seem to have seen the frogs actually falling along with the rain, and moreover, they were all dead, which seems to count that theory out.
Yeatman also offered the traditional waterspout explanation - that the frogs were picked up somewhere by a mini-tornado and dropped some miles away. However, as has often been objected in the past, it is a rare tornado that can pick up one type of animal from a pool to the exclusion of all others.
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