Man Delivers Dead Porcupine's Baby—by Chance

This is one of the strangest animal rescue stories in a while. A motorist in Maine inadvertently delivered a baby porcupine by what amounted to emergency C-section after its mother was killed by car, reports TheDodo. The original story comes from WMTW, which reports that Jared Buzzell saw the mama porcupine get hit by a car and stopped to investigate. It seems his uncle had told him porcupines form something called bezoar stones in their intestines, and they're thought to have healing qualities in traditional medicine.

Buzzell got his knife and decided to check out the story. But instead of bezoar stones inside the dead animal, he found a tiny baby porcupine. He cut the umbilical cord and put the baby inside a hat. "We thought it was dead—then I started massaging it and all kinds of stuff start[ed] coming out of its lungs so it started breathing," he tells the TV station. The upshot is that Buzzell is now nursing the critter with baby formula from a bottle until it gets healthy enough to go to a wildlife rehab facility. (More strange stuff stories.)