Web Video / Lindsay Nikole

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Lindsay Nikole is a YouTube and TikTok-based zoologist whose videos focus on animal behaviour and biodiversity, evolution, and paleontology. Through Rapid-Fire Comedy, skits, and Sophisticated as Hell lectures, she discusses the evolutionary history of different animal lineages, identifies viral mystery animals on social media, debunks the odd conspiracy theory, and gives greater insight into conservation efforts dedicated to protecting threatened species.

Her YouTube channel can be found here and her TikTok here.

In 2021 and 2022, Lindsay released two educational colouring books on deep sea and spooky creatures, respectively. In 2025, she also released Epic Earth: A Wild Ride Through the History of Our Planet, a companion book for her History of Life on Earth (That We Know Of) series.

Let's get the general tropes out of the way!

• Alien Animals: Conversed. "Do scientists think octopuses are ALIENS??" addresses the conspiracy theory that octopuses are of extraterrestrial origin by discussing the evolutionary history of the octopus. The conclusion is obviously that no, they're not (at least, that we know of).
• All of the Other Reindeer: In the short "No Bone Zone", Tiktaalik is faced with fierce resistance when it emerges on land, with the millipedes and plants already residing there yelling for it to go back into the ocean because the land is a "no bone zone". When Tiktaalik threatens them to make it go back, though, they can't.
• Artistic License – Biology: Conversed extensively, with Lindsay often pointing out the issues in zoological conspiracy theories while debunking them.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: One episode of WTF is THAT?? mentions a particular case of intestinal myiasis where a woman in Spain had been parasitized by rat-tailed maggots, with symptoms including her being dizzy, having a stomachache, and having maggots exiting her gastrointestinal tract.
  Lindsay: Dude, the way the paper described her symptoms was fucking crazy 'cause they were in that order. It was like, okay, so she was a little dizzy, she had a little stomachache, and she was also shitting out maggots. […] How are you gonna put all of those on the same diagnostic level?!
• Catchphrase:
  • "That we know of" is appended to any record-breaking achievement attained by an animal species (or any fact stated in the videos, really) to account for how invokedScience Marches On.
  • "Heinous" is a word Lindsay often uses to describe particularly bizarre- or disturbing-looking animal anatomical parts or behaviours.
  • "Let's get the general information out of the way," complete with rotating arm motions, for discussing the background information of each video's topic.
• Cat/Dog Dichotomy: The short "the crossover episode" discusses the first meeting between prehistoric cats and dogs, contrasting the cats' aloof independence with the dogs being "simps for hairless apes".
• Cats Are Superior: Brought up in "How Cats Became Our Gods". In contrast to the domestication of dogs, which involved targeted artificial selection for desirable traits to fulfill different roles, cats were left alone as pest control and weren't subjected to targeted breeding until the modern era — in Lindsay's words, "because they were already perfect". This eventually segues into a section on the veneration of cats in Egyptian Mythology and how different cultures view cats.
• Cheetah Speedsta: Being a science-oriented channel, "How cheetahs become genetically f***ed" discusses the characteristics cheetahs evolved to become the fastest cursorial^note running terrestrial animal today, including a rudder-like tail for balance, enlarged hearts, livers, and adrenal glands, a flexible spine, and semi-retractable claws for grip.
  Lindsay: And all of these adaptations combine to give you a streamlined Major League fast-as-lightning sissy.
• Clever Crows: As much as "Why These Creatures Were Seen as Cursed" discusses Creepy Crows, when it comes to their biology, much focus is placed on their intelligence with respect to their use of tools and their memory.
• Conjoined Twins: The subject of "Real Cryptids: TWO-HEADED SNAKES!". While polycephaly, the condition of having multiple heads, is quite rare in general, it is most commonly documented in snakes and turtles (and humans).
• Creepy Crows: Crows — and corvids in general — are one of the main subjects of "Why These Creatures Were Seen as Cursed", and the video extensively discusses the eerie folklore associated with corvids, death, and fortune.
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died: The K–Pg extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs is given extensive coverage in the History of Life on Earth series, even having its own dedicated short in the TikTok Compilation version.
• Deathbringer the Adorable: The vampire squid, whose scientific name translates to "vampire squid from Hell". Despite their name, they are passive and mainly feed on detritus in the deep sea — in Lindsay's words, they're "literally just a little guy".
• Enemy Mine: How Lindsay explains the initial "domestication" of cats in the History of Cats series — both Mesopotanian farmers and cats considered rats to be something to be eradicated, so the humans allowed cats to stick around in their early settlements.
  Lindsay: You know what they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So boom! Suddenly, a commensal relationship was born. Cats get to dine on the rodent buffet and the humans have fewer rats fucking up their crops. It's a win-win for everyone, except for the rats.
• The Great Serpent: Titanoboa lived during the Paleocene (66–56 million years ago) and was the largest snake to ever exist (that we know of), growing up to 50 feet (approx. 15 metres) long.
• Great White Feline: Discussed in the big cats episode of the History of Cats series. Most if not all white tigers seen in captivity nowadays are descended from Mohan, a white tiger found and captured from the wild in 1951. The preservation of such a rare genetic mutation through captive breeding thusly means tremendous amounts of inbreeding, which is not so great in retrospect.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The Massospora fungus infects male Magicicada nymphs and rips their abdomens off when they emerge from the ground to mate, but keeps them barely alive for them to sexually transmit the fungus to any other cicada they may mate with.
• I'm Melting!: Since hammerhead worms are only native to Southeast Asia and invasive elsewhere, other than, say, Kill It with Fire, Lindsay recommends dissolving them in a jar of salt and vinegar to avoid harming the environment.
• Insult to Rocks: In "Should Mosquitoes Go Extinct?", Lindsay tries to conceptualize the number of mosquitoes on the planet^note over 100 trillion at any given moment by comparing it with Elon Musk's net worth, but then muses that such comparisons would probably be insulting to mosquitoes.
  Lindsay: I bet that's gonna be Elon Musk's next goal once he becomes a trillionaire, which I think actually just happened, like, yesterday? A couple days ago? Once this video comes out, it happened a couple weeks ago? But I bet his next goal is gonna be to have $1 for every mosquito on the planet. Maybe Elon Musk is actually trying to become the amalgamation of all the mosquitoes! Maybe that's insulting to mosquitoes.
• Meek Mesozoic Mammal:
  • Zig-zagged. The "History of Life on Earth" TikTok Compilation invokes the popular science image of Mesozoic mammals being "oppressed" by their reptilian overlords, but also explicitly brings up how some mammals hunted small or baby dinosaurs too.
  • Subverted for Laughs in the short "Rise of the Rats", where a Mesozoic mammal (presumably an early primate) brags to a T. rex and a Triceratops that it's going to survive the asteroid's impact by relying on food chains that don't collapse The Day the Dinosaurs Died, dance on their graves, and dig their bones back up and put them on display millions of years later. It does take a moment for the two dinosaurs to acknowledge the mammal as more than squeaking, though.
    Mammal: It's ya doomsday, bitch!
• Monster Mouth: Since the best-preserved fossils of cartilaginous fishes are often their teeth, prehistoric sharks and ratfish are often characterized with bizarre-looking mouthparts that stump investigating scientists. For instance, the teeth of the Helicoprion are embedded in a spiral root in their lower jaw, and Edestus has two tooth whorls protruding from its mouth like a pair of scissors.
• Mood Whiplash: One episode of WTF is THAT?? involves Lindsay looking up twerking moths. Among the first two search results, the first is of a fluttering moth, as one would expect. The other? An art print of The Mothman with a very generous behind.
• Mosquito Miscreants: The subject of "Should Mosquitoes Go Extinct?". Lindsay's general stance on mosquitoes is "fuck mosquitoes" and the video extensively discusses the harm mosquitoes pose to human populations. However, as a science-oriented channel, it's overall zig-zagged: most mosquitoes aren't actually harmful to humans and play important roles in the ecosystem, and the scientific community is primarily targeting invasive, disease-causing mosquitoes as opposed to indiscriminate eradication.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Several of Lindsay's videos are framed as flirting guides, because according to her, using animal facts as "pick-up lines" would — at least in the case of prehistoric shark relatives — work on the person they're directed at "100% of the time, and 100% of those times, two other people will approach you with interest".
  Lindsay: You know what women want? Women want fun facts about prehistoric life. They don't want to hear about how you bench 300 pounds with veins coming out of your fucking eyeballs. They want little tidbits of information about prehistoric sharks and shark-like creatures. Actually, this will work on anyone, which is why I'm here today.
• Never Bareheaded: Lindsay almost always wears a hat in her videos, whether it be a safari hat, a baseball cap, or a beanie. It gets to the point that her uncovered head is usually censored out if it's ever filmed. Subverted with her "forehead reveal" short, though.
• The Nicknamer: When faced with particularly long or convoluted scientific names, Lindsay sometimes just gives the species a nickname for convenience, such as "Ardi" for Ardipithecus ramidus, "Bobby" for Ardipithecus kadabba.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: One early genus of saber-toothed cats is named Yoshi after scientist Nikolai Spassov's pet cat, a reasoning explicitly cited in the journal paper.
  Lindsay: And it literally says that in the paper. Look, "Etymology: Yoshi is the name of the favorite cat of one of us." That's fucking cute.
• Oh, Crap!: "The Pacific Roast" ends with Orca telling all the marine animals involved in Volleying Insults to shut up. Everyone does.
• Ominous Owl: Owls are the last animals discussed in "Why These Creatures Were Seen as Cursed", and many cultures are described to associate them with death and the underworld. Lindsay also discusses several of their biological features that could have led to these superstitious beliefs, including their nocturnal lifestyles, glowing eyes, and silent flight.
• Panthera Awesome: Since general audiences believe big cats to be awesome, more extensive focus has been placed onto them in some of Lindsay's videos.
  • The big cats, or those comprising the subfamily Pantherinae (genera Panthera and Neofelis), are considered awesome enough by common consensus to have their own dedicated episode in the History of Cats series.
  • Likewise, while the saber-toothed cat lineage have their own video, the genus Smilodon is iconic enough for them to have their own episode — and a crossover episode with Ext-Inked, where Lindsay has the fossil tattooed into her skin, at that.
  • For a non-panther big cat example, thanks to personal experience working with them, cheetahs are Lindsay's favorite animal and have their own dedicated videos: "How cheetahs become genetically f***ed" and "Saving Cheetahs: Returning to Cheetah Conservation Fund".
• Perilous Prehistoric Seas: Given how life on Earth first evolved in the oceans, Lindsay's History of Life on Earth (That We Know Of) series and other related videos on prehistoric life often involve discussing apex predators of the ancient seas.
  • One of the main apex predators dominating the ancient seas were enormous sea scorpions.
  • Among other discoveries, "New Fossils that are Rewriting History" discusses the "Cretaceous kraken" (Nanaimoteuthis haggarti), a giant octopus 22–62 feet long and large enough to compete with or even prey on mosasaurs and other marine reptiles.
• Scary Science Words: Fearmongering through unfamiliarity with science is a major topic discussed in "Should Mosquitoes Go Extinct?". Many news headlines on the Debug programme describe the project to be releasing millions of mosquitoes into the environment in a couple of years, but fail to clarify that the mosquitoes in question are male^note and thus do not bite and sterile, and the purpose of doing so is to reduce mosquito-transmitted diseases in urban areas.
• Sibling Rivalry: While polycephalic snakes usually only have one dominant head while the other is vestigial, in the less common cases where both are fully functional, things tend to get ugly as the two heads may be too busy fighting each other for control as opposed to working together for survival. This has resulted in cases where a snake attacked its own Conjoined Twin and died as a result.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Lindsay's signature narrative style involves interspersing scientific explanations with far more colloquial terms and rephrasings.
  Lindsay: Aposematism is distinct or conspicuous colors that tell a potential predator, "If you hurt me, I'll hurt you 10-fold, bitch."
• Spawn Broodling: The topic of "The Heinous World of Zombie Infections": manipulative parasites, which can manipulate a host's behaviour to kill them (or otherwise place them in life-threatening situations) in order to facilitate its own life cycle.
  Lindsay: The ant has been possessed to feel the urge to leave the colony. She wanders around, convulsing, falling down, getting back up again. You would think that she is wasted! But no! You're not even looking at the movements of an ant anymore! You're looking at the movements of a demonic fungus with one goal: to spread.
• Tempting Fate: In the short "and now they're turning them into meatballs", Wooly Mammoth decides that with the warming climate at the end of the Ice Age, the humans might as well hunt it down and kill it, "at least then [it] would be at peace". Gilligan Cut to several news articles about Colossal receiving funding to de-extinct the wooly mammoth 10,000 years later… in a world threatened by global warming. Not to mention how an Australian start-up genuinely decided it would be a good idea to make gimmick meatballs out of mammoth DNA.
• Understatement: In "Why YOU should live in the MARIANA TRENCH !!", deep-sea realtor Lindsay seems to have an odd idea of what constitutes a "slightly invasive" surgical procedure.
  Lindsay: Ship durability will luckily be of no concern to you, though, as we require all of our residents to undergo just one slightly invasive procedure: to live in this lovely deep-sea oasis, all you have to do is remove your skeleton.
• Volleying Insults: "The Pacific Roast" is a skit where several marine animals happen to gather together and start hurling insults at each other. Oddly, Yellowtail is the only participant who doesn't get directly insulted in the showdown.