Roughly three times the size of the common squirrels seen darting around city parks, the Indian giant squirrel is a genuinely striking animal, with a rich coat of maroon, cream, black and tan patches that make it look almost hand-painted against the green canopy of the forests it calls home. Its most curious trait, though, isn’t its size or colouring but its response to danger, rather than fleeing the way most squirrels instinctively do, it freezes completely still or flattens itself against a tree trunk, relying on its patchy coat to blend into the dappled light and shadow of the forest canopy rather than outrunning whatever’s threatening it. It’s an approach that works remarkably well given how effectively its colouring breaks up its outline among branches and leaves, and it spends almost its entire life in the trees, rarely descending to the forest floor at all.

Each of these animals is a reminder that evolution doesn’t always aim for what looks conventional or expected, sometimes it produces a frog shaped like nothing else on earth or a dolphin that’s traded eyesight for sound, simply because that was the most effective answer to the specific conditions each species found itself in. India’s biodiversity is packed with these kinds of quiet, specialised oddities, most of them going about their lives entirely unnoticed by the millions of people living not far from where they call home.