27 Animals That Start with V: From Vampire Bats to Volpino Italiano
October 25, 2026
Animals that start with V cover more ground than the letter’s short reputation suggests. The list includes a porpoise with only about ten members left, a Cretaceous bird fossil from Antarctica, and a gecko small enough to rest on a fingertip.
This article covers 27 of them in alphabetical order, from the Valley Bulldog to the Volpino Italiano. Each entry pairs natural history with the human story behind the name: who described the animal, who nearly lost it, or which breed ended up on American couches. Where an animal lives in or near the United States, that gets noted too.
If you are working through the whole alphabet, the previous list covers animals that start with U.
1. Valley Bulldog
The Valley Bulldog is a hybrid dog (Canis familiaris) from the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, Canada. Breed histories trace it to the late 1800s, when local breeders crossed the English Bulldog with the Boxer. They wanted a sturdy, athletic dog with a longer muzzle than the English Bulldog.
Adults are medium to large and muscular, usually brindle, fawn, or white-marked. The Valley Bulldog is not an AKC-recognized breed. U.S. buyers typically find one through hybrid registries and breeders rather than conformation shows.
2. Vampire Bat
Vampire bats feed on blood and nothing else, which makes them one of the few mammals with that diet. Three species live across South and Central America: the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), the hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata), and the white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi). Their range reaches north into Mexico but not into the United States.
The name came after the legend. European explorers in the 1700s named the bats after the folkloric vampire, and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula later made the connection famous. In reality the bat makes a small cut with razor-sharp incisors and laps up blood, helped by saliva that keeps it flowing.
| Vampire Bat Species | Preferred Blood Source |
|---|---|
| Common vampire bat | Mammals, especially livestock such as cattle |
| Hairy-legged vampire bat | Mostly birds |
| White-winged vampire bat | Mostly birds |
Key Insight: Common vampire bats share meals. A bat that fed well will regurgitate blood for a hungry roost mate, a habit that biologists have studied as an example of cooperation among unrelated animals.
3. Vampire Crab
The vampire crab (Geosesarma dennerle) is a small freshwater crab from Java, Indonesia. It is about an inch across, with a purple body and bright yellow-orange eyes that give it the vampire nickname. Scientists described it only in recent years, so it is a newcomer on any list of animals.
In the United States, this crab is best known to aquarium hobbyists. It is semi-terrestrial, so it needs land and shallow water rather than a fully submerged tank. Keepers build paludariums with moss, rocks, and a small pool to match its stream-bank habitat.
4. Vampire Squid
The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is neither a squid nor an octopus. It sits alone in its own order, Vampyromorphida, and the scientific name translates roughly to “vampire squid from hell.” German researcher Carl Chun described it in 1903, and he first classed it as an octopus.
It lives in the oxygen-poor layer of the deep ocean, roughly 2,000 feet down or more, in temperate and tropical seas. Adults are about a foot long, with a dark red body, webbed arms, and two thin filaments it uses to collect drifting debris. It feeds mostly on “marine snow,” the slow rain of dead plankton and waste, rather than hunting.
When threatened, it flips its arm webbing over its body in what researchers call the pineapple posture, exposing spiny tips. It can also release glowing mucus instead of ink.
5. Vanga
Vangas are songbirds found only on Madagascar and nearby islands. The group has around 15 small to mid-sized birds belonging to the family Vangidae, according to the Active Wild species list. The helmet vanga (Euryceros prevostii) has a huge blue bill that looks too large for its head.
Biologists compare vangas to Darwin’s finches. From one common ancestor, they evolved bills shaped like hooks, sickles, and pry bars, each suited to a different way of catching insects and small reptiles. The sickle-billed vanga (Falculea palliata) probes bark crevices, while the hook-billed vanga (Vanga curvirostris) picks prey off leaves.
For a wider look at birds, try the list of bird names starting with K.
6. Van Zyl’s Golden Mole
Van Zyl’s golden mole (Cryptochloris zyli) is a blind, burrowing mammal from the west coast of South Africa. Researchers Shortridge and Carter described it in 1938 from a handful of specimens. For decades afterward, almost no one had seen it, and many scientists feared it had vanished.
In the early 2020s, a team reported it alive again after finding its DNA in soil samples from a coastal dune site near Groenrivier. The method, called environmental DNA, lets researchers confirm a secretive animal without ever catching it. Golden moles have iridescent fur and swim through sand, and their eyes are covered by skin.
They are not true moles. Golden moles belong to the African mammal group Afrotheria, which includes tenrecs, so the animals that start with T list has some of their closest relatives.
7. Vaquita
The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is the smallest porpoise and the most endangered marine mammal on Earth, according to Britannica. It lives only in the northern Gulf of California, Mexico. The World Wildlife Fund notes that science did not discover it until 1958.
The cause of the collapse is gillnet fishing. Much of the decline can be explained by the expansion of totoaba fishing after 2011, driven by Chinese demand for totoaba swim bladders. Vaquitas drown when they get tangled in nets set for the totoaba, and the United States added a seafood embargo on the region in 2020.
- 1997: about 567 vaquitas estimated in the first survey
- 2015: about 59 left
- 2024: just eight, the lowest count on record
- 2025: between 7 and 10, with at least one or two calves
The 2024 and 2025 figures come from SeafoodSource, which reported on the May to September 2025 survey. A Sea Shepherd Conservation Society post dated October 9, 2026, says the sharp decline of earlier years is no longer evident in the monitored area. It also describes a May 2026 effort to train Mexican vaquita observers.
Important Note: Recent vaquita figures are minimum counts of animals seen in a small search area, not full population estimates. Sea Shepherd’s survey page says a full 2025 abundance estimate was expected in 2026, so treat any single number as provisional.
8. Veery
The veery (Catharus fuscescens) is a cinnamon-brown thrush with a faintly spotted chest. It breeds in cool, damp forests across the northern United States and southern Canada, including the Appalachians and the Upper Midwest. The name imitates the bird’s song, a rolling, downward spiral that sounds like a flute played inside a pipe.
Veeries spend winter in the Amazon region of South America, so a bird singing in a New England woodlot in June has traveled thousands of miles. They nest low to the ground, which leaves them vulnerable to deer browsing the forest understory.
Birders hunting for thrush songs can find similar quiet-forest species in the list of bird names starting with I.
9. Vegavis
Vegavis (Vegavis iaai) is a bird that lived about 68 to 66 million years ago, right at the end of the age of dinosaurs. Its fossils came from Vega Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. The species name honors the Argentine Antarctic Institute, whose initials are IAA.
Scientists consider it an early relative of ducks and geese, which suggests that modern bird groups had already split before the asteroid impact. A 2016 study reported a fossil voice box, called a syrinx, linked to Vegavis. It is the oldest known example of this organ in a bird.
Other prehistoric animals fit the same period, and the list of animals that start with P includes flying reptiles that shared the skies.
10. Velociraptor
Velociraptor (Velociraptor mongoliensis) was a small predatory dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia. Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York named it in 1924, after a fossil expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews in 1923. The name means “swift thief.”
The real animal was about the size of a turkey, much smaller than the film version, and it carried feathers. Quill knobs on a fossil forearm, reported in 2007, showed that. A 1971 discovery in the Gobi Desert, the “Fighting Dinosaurs” fossil, shows a Velociraptor locked in combat with a Protoceratops.
For other feathered dinosaurs and their kin, see the list of animals that start with D.
11. Velvet Asity
The velvet asity (Philepitta castanea) is a plump Madagascar rainforest bird in the small family Philepittidae. During breeding season, males wear glossy black plumage and a colorful wattle above each eye, while females are olive green with streaked underparts. The male’s coat does look like velvet in good light.
Velvet asities feed mostly on fruit and sometimes nectar, so they help spread seeds through the forest. Like many Madagascar animals, they live nowhere else, and they depend on lowland and mid-elevation rainforest that has shrunk because of clearing for farmland.
12. Vendace Fish
The vendace (Coregonus albula) is a silvery freshwater fish in the whitefish group. It lives in cold, deep lakes across northern Europe, from Finland and Sweden to a few waters in Great Britain. It is the same genus as the cisco, a fish that American anglers know from the Great Lakes and northern inland lakes.
In Britain, the vendace is among the rarest freshwater fish, and wild populations survive in only a few lakes. In Sweden, the roe from the Kalix region is a prized delicacy with European Union protected status. The species depends on clean, cold water, so warming lakes and pollution are the main threats.
13. Vermilion Flycatcher
The vermilion flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus) is a small songbird in which the male looks like a lit coal against a dark mask and brown back. Females are gray-brown with a salmon-pink belly. In the United States, the bird shows up in southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and it often perches near water.
The male performs a courtship display, fluttering up into the air while singing, and he may offer the female an insect. The species hunts by sallying out from a low perch to snatch flies, then returning to the same branch. Sightings in places such as southeastern Arizona draw birders from across the country each year.
14. Vervet Monkey
The vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) is a small, gray-green African monkey that lives in troops across eastern and southern Africa. Males have a pale-blue scrotum that stands out in the savanna, and both sexes have a black face fringed with white. They eat fruit, flowers, seeds, and insects, and they raid crops, which puts them at odds with farmers.
Vervets also have a famous vocabulary. Field studies by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth in Kenya found that they give distinct alarm calls for leopards, eagles, and snakes, and each call triggers a different escape response. Vervets also live on Caribbean islands such as Barbados, St. Kitts, and Nevis, descended from animals that arrived by ship centuries ago.
Another African primate worth knowing is the yellow baboon, which you can find among the animals that start with Y.
15. Vesper Bat
Vesper bats make up the family Vespertilionidae, the largest and most widespread group of bats. The name comes from the Latin word for evening, which is when they emerge to hunt. Most are insect eaters, and a single bat can catch hundreds of mosquitoes and moths in a night.
Most of the bats Americans see belong to this family, including the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) and the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus). The little brown bat has been hit hard by white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that spread across the eastern United States starting in the mid-2000s. That makes the bats in your backyard worth protecting, and a bat house is a simple way to help.
16. Vestal Cuckoo Bumblebee
The vestal cuckoo bumblebee (Bombus vestalis) is a European species that lives as a parasite. A female enters a nest of the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), kills or subdues the resident queen, and forces the workers to raise her own young. It has no worker caste of its own, so it cannot survive without a host.
The cuckoo name comes from the cuckoo bird, which also lays its eggs in other nests. North America has its own cuckoo bumblebees, which follow the same strategy against native hosts. Because they depend on healthy host populations, a decline in bumblebees ripples down to the parasite.
17. Vicuña
The vicuña (Vicugna vicugna) is a slender, wild relative of the llama that lives in the high Andes of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. It is the national animal of Peru and appears on that country’s coat of arms. Its fleece is among the finest and most expensive animal fibers in the world.
Inca rulers reserved vicuña cloth for royalty and held organized roundups called chaccu, in which villagers herded the animals, sheared them, and let them go. After Spanish conquest, hunting for the fleece pushed the species down to a few thousand animals by the 1960s. Protected reserves such as Pampa Galeras in Peru and international trade rules then helped the population recover. The vicuña is also the wild ancestor of the alpaca.
Camels, which are distant cousins, are covered under the animals that start with B list.
18. Vine Snake
Vine snakes are long, thin, tree-dwelling snakes that look like vines. Asian species belong to the genus Ahaetulla, including the green vine snake (Ahaetulla nasuta), which has keyhole-shaped pupils that give it sharp forward vision. The American brown vine snake (Oxybelis aeneus) reaches southern Arizona and Texas.
Vine snakes hold still and sway in the breeze to blend in with branches, then strike at lizards and frogs. Many have rear fangs and mild venom that affects small prey, and they are not a danger to people. If you spot one on a hike in the Southwest, the best response is to enjoy it from a distance.
19. Vinegaroon
The vinegaroon (Mastigoproctus giganteus) is a giant whip scorpion that lives in the southern United States, including Texas, Arizona, and Florida. It is not a true scorpion and it has no venom. It has a long whip-like tail and large front pincers for grabbing insects and other prey.
The name comes from its defense. When disturbed, it sprays a mist from the base of its tail that contains acetic acid, the compound that gives vinegar its smell. Females carry their eggs on their bodies, and the young ride on their mother’s back after hatching. It is a close relative of the arachnids on the animals that start with S list.
Pro Tip: If you find a vinegaroon at night in the Southwest desert, leave it alone and use a flashlight from a distance. It is harmless to people, but it will spray if you handle it.
20. Viper Boa
The viper boa (Candoia aspera) is a stocky snake from New Guinea and nearby islands. Despite the name, it is a boa, not a viper, but its triangular head, rough keeled scales, and short tail give it the look of a venomous snake. This resemblance may help keep predators away.
It hunts on the ground at night, waiting for frogs, lizards, and small mammals. Like other boas, it gives birth to live young rather than laying eggs. Reptile keepers in the United States sometimes hold this species, though it is less common than the ball python.
True vipers, including the rattlesnake, appear in the animals that start with R list.
21. Viper Shark
The viper shark (Trigonognathus kabeyai), also called the viper dogfish, is a small deep-sea shark that Japanese ichthyologists described in 1990. It reaches roughly 21 inches long and lives in the Pacific off Japan and Hawaii. It looks more like a fish from a horror film than a typical shark.
Its jaws can thrust forward, and its needle-like teeth point outward, so it can snag prey and swallow it whole. It has light-producing organs along its underside that help it blend in with faint light from above. Few people have ever seen one alive, and most of what we know comes from deep-sea trawls.
| Deep-Sea Animal | Group | Approximate Adult Size | Feeding Style |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vampire squid | Cephalopod | About 1 foot | Collects drifting debris |
| Viperfish | Bony fish | Up to about 1 foot | Ambush with fangs and a lure |
| Viper shark | Shark | Up to about 21 inches | Snags prey and swallows it whole |
For larger sharks, such as the whale shark, check the animals that start with W list.
22. Viperfish
The viperfish, most often Sloane’s viperfish (Chauliodus sloani), is a deep-sea predator with fangs so long they curve back past its eyes when its mouth closes. The species honors Sir Hans Sloane, the physician whose collection became the foundation of the British Museum. It grows to about a foot in length.
A long, glowing lure dangles from its dorsal fin, and rows of light organs line its belly. It hovers in the dark and draws smaller fish toward its mouth. Like many deep-sea animals, it travels upward at night to feed in shallower water, then returns to the depths by day, which makes it part of one of the largest daily animal migrations on Earth.
23. Vireo
Vireos (genus Vireo) are small songbirds of the Americas, with roughly 60 species in the family Vireonidae. The name comes from a Latin word meaning “I am green,” which fits the olive-green plumage of many species. Unlike warblers, they move slowly and deliberately through the leaves.
The red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus) is one of the most common breeding birds in eastern U.S. forests, and it sings nearly all day long, even in summer heat. The black-capped vireo (Vireo atricapilla) nests in Texas and Oklahoma scrub, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed it from the endangered species list in 2018 after habitat protection and cowbird control.
24. Virgin Islands Dwarf Gecko
The Virgin Islands dwarf gecko (Sphaerodactylus parthenopion) is among the smallest reptiles in the world. HowStuffWorks calls it one of the tiniest reptiles anywhere, and adults measure less than an inch from snout to vent. It lives on islands in the Virgin Islands archipelago, mostly the British Virgin Islands.
It hides in leaf litter and rock crevices during the day and eats tiny insects and mites. Females lay a single egg at a time. A species this small has little room for error, so invasive predators such as rats and mongooses are a major threat on islands where it lives.
25. Vizsla
The Vizsla (Canis familiaris) is a Hungarian pointing and retrieving dog with a short, rust-gold coat and a lean build. Breed lore links its ancestors to the hunting dogs of the Magyar people, and Hungarian nobles kept the dogs for falconry and field work. The two World Wars left the breed close to extinction in Europe, and dedicated fanciers carried it to other countries.
The American Kennel Club recognized the Vizsla in 1960, and it now belongs to the Sporting Group. Owners often call it a “Velcro dog” because it follows people from room to room. It needs hard daily exercise, so it fits best with active households that run, hike, or hunt. Other hunting breeds are listed among the dog breeds starting with R.
26. Volcano Snail
The volcano snail is commonly known as the scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum). It lives around hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, more than a mile below the surface, where superheated water pours from the seafloor. It is the only known animal with a shell and foot armor made of iron sulfide.
The snail houses bacteria in a large gland, and those bacteria supply most of its food from vent chemicals. It was the first deep-sea vent species to be assessed for the IUCN Red List, which classed it as endangered in 2019 because of its tiny range and the potential for deep-sea mining. That decision made the volcano snail a symbol of the debate over mining the seabed.
27. Volpino Italiano
The Volpino Italiano (Canis familiaris) is a small white or red spitz-type dog, and its name comes from the Italian word for fox. It is also called the Florentine Spitz. Records suggest Italian nobles and artisans kept these dogs from the Renaissance onward, and tradition says Michelangelo owned one.
It is lively, alert, and prone to barking, which made it useful as a farm watchdog and a lap companion. The breed is rare outside Italy, and only a small number of American breeders work with it, so most U.S. buyers wait for a litter. If you want a small, fluffy, foxlike dog, this is one of the more unusual choices.
The V list moves from folklore to deep-sea oddities to the edge of extinction. The vaquita and Van Zyl’s golden mole show how fragile small populations are, and how quickly a rediscovery can change the story. The Vizsla and Volpino Italiano show a gentler side of the letter, with breeds shaped by centuries of human company.
Many of these animals live in or near the United States, including the vermilion flycatcher, vinegaroon, vine snake, and veery. Others, like the vaquita, depend on decisions made in U.S. markets and Mexican waters. Keep the alphabet going with the next letter, animals that start with W.