Obviously, the no-tail side won the evolutionary battle, presumably because it has to be next to impossible to bone a female squirrel monster with a tail in the way that's longer than your goddamned body. It's hard not to miss it a little bit, though. Sure, it would make driving a car impossible, but do you ever find yourself standing in line at the DMV and wishing you had a giant limb that you could use to smack somebody across the room? That's you subconsciously missing your phantom tail (that's our theory, anyway).

And in some cultures, being born with a tail can earn you some perks. In India, Chandre Oram is believed by many to be the incarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman because of his 13-inch tail. It's a comparison that he encourages by climbing up trees and eating bananas. That's right, buddy, just go with it.

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"We bring you these offerings that you might show us mercy, oh god of fruit and poop."

These days, whales and dolphins are still occasionally born with stubby little legs, like this one that Japanese researchers caught in 2006 (pictured above), an apparent throwback to ancient times when they may have looked like this:

Via Mary Parrish/Smithsonian Institution
You think you're too good for land? We're glad the Japanese keep harpooning you.

You can see not only where they had back legs, but also that their front fins used to be webbed paws like the Creature from the Black Lagoon:

His balls look like a rolled-up armadillo.

Which is kind of terrifying if you're imagining them, you know, whale-sized. In fact, even normal whales have rudimentary leg bones crammed into their backsides, as you can see floating under the lower left of this killer whale skeleton:

Via Whyevolutionistrue
"Killer legs, man."
"Shut up."

You can also see its freaky "hands" where you thought it just had flippers. That's what their front limbs actually are -- evolved hands (or paws, whatever):

Seaworld.org
"Gimme five, man."
"No."

The pictures only get freakier from there. Here's the giant skeleton hand of a sperm whale:

Via Wolfgang Sauber
"Make one sperm joke. I'm daring you."

And here's a killer whale with both skeleton hands and huge teeth included in the frame so you can imagine it grabbing you by the neck and biting your head off:

Via Wolfgang Sauber

We'd point out how terrifying it would have been to live in an era when killer whales could come flopping out of the ocean to munch on land prey, but we have a feeling the things would have been slow as shit.

Sometimes, though, the chickens are granted a nostalgic throwback to their badass past with a little help from modern science. In 2006, mad scientists working on chicken embryos managed to grow chickens with teeth by coaxing their DNA to recall their ancient evolutionary origins.

Matthew Harris
We didn't say they were good teeth.

After all, there were a lot of steps in between "building-sized lizards with murderous jaws" and "sad lumps of feathers that eat worms." For instance, there was once a time when they looked like this:

Stephanie Abramowicz via Phys.org
Did anyone else make a "duuuuuuhhh" noise when they saw that?

That's Sulcavis geeorum, the 125-million-year-old ancestor of modern birds, which nature wisely saw fit to eliminate from the gene pool and humanity has decided to tease back into existence by way of the world's most non-threatening species. So modifying a chicken embryo to make it grow teeth just involves using a few tricks to bring out the dormant genetic traits that are still hiding in there.

Somewhere, a young writer has already started on his screenplay about hordes of genetically modified dino-chickens descending upon KFC headquarters to exact their violent revenge. And the poster will be a big KFC bucket full of severed human limbs.

And just as the man with the tail has been worshiped as a mystical being, multiple-toed horses were often regarded as magical status symbols among warriors. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were both said to have owned one. The Romans were so impressed by the "toes on a horse thing" that Caesar's was rendered as having at least five, and also a unicorn horn for good measure:

Jacopo di Stefano Schiavone via Theinquisition.eu
This piece is titled "Ew, Freak Horse. Gross."

To be clear, the toes did NOT look like that -- the Romans were so fascinated by horse toes that they just couldn't help going overboard with it.

"... AND ADD MORE TOES TO MY DAMNED HORSE. Also, make that trumpeter's dick smaller."

Imagine you're struck one day with the most crippling chest pains and you race to the hospital, fearing the worst. The doctor tells you that there's good news and bad news. The good news is that you're not having a heart attack. The bad news is that inside your chest beats the cold heart of a reptile.

That's exactly what happened to a 59-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital with mysterious symptoms that had medical professionals puzzled until they gave him an X-ray and found that he had a full-blown case of snake heart -- a reptilian heart with only three chambers, instead of the usual four.

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"As you can see here, you are the devil."

Again, this isn't just a freak deformity that happens to resemble a lizard's heart in the body of a man -- studies of the organ found that it was a genuine genetic throwback, a simple case of evolution getting drunk and forgetting which eon it is. Because we know you think we're making this up, let us just quote the scientists:

"In early stages of embryonic development, the human heart resembles that of a fish .... In later stages of development, the human heart -- now with fully separated atria and a partially separated ventricle -- resembles a reptilian heart. ... To our knowledge, this is only the second reported case of an unusual morphologic variant involving a non-mammalian, reptile-like cardiac anatomy ...."

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"The patient is unable to speak Parseltongue, but he can read it."

Wait, you mean this has happened more than once?

And while this sounds like the origin story for a supervillain (this was the plot of the Spider-Man reboot, right?), the only superpower the patient got from it was a horrible pain in the chest and a dependence on prescription medication. We're assuming that if he complained, the doctor's only response would have been "Dude, count your blessings. You made it to age 59 with a snake heart."

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"Doctor, the transplant has arrived."