Video: the top 10 cutest animals - and that’s a scientific fact

Science can be cute or so argues one of the leading world research journals Nature. And it has the video to prove it.

What can be cuter than a robot penguin or a tree-hugging koala bear or TV-watching marmosets or a dog peeing while it aligns itself to the earth's magnetic field?

All of these feature in a short clip prepared by Nature's video unit, its first outing in the online cuteness stakes.

It sourced animal stories and accompanying video clips from a range of research journals looking for that animal X-factor in the hopes the video might go viral.

"It is not just that they are cute, they were involved in real science, " a spokeswoman for the journal said. The research landed in peer-reviewed journals but the clip is really meant to be a crowd pleaser, she acknowledged.

"Nature and the Nature journals publish a lot of serious scientific research each year, but science doesn't have to be just serious, sometimes it can be fun too," said Kerri Smith a senior audio editor at Nature who worked on the video.

The team sought to make science more accessible to a wider audience “and we hope that this video, which highlights some of the biggest animal stories in science this year, helps to achieve that goal”, Smith said.

The dancing frogs and the monkeys with the dramatic hairdos are a must see.