5. Upside Down Dogs Does what it says on the tin! Take a picture of your dog lying upside down, flip the image so that he or she appears to be right side up, and send it into their submissions queue. The results are more hilarious than you might expect. UpsideDownDogs.com was the I Can Has Cheezburger? Of 2008. 4. New Animals Throughout 2008, scientists were busy hunting through malaria-infested bogs and darkest forests looking for new species - and they found them! This year science introduced new monkeys, spiders, vipers, birds, and more. 3. Bird Flu, or the lack thereof In 2007, bird flu was going to kill us all and bring about the complete collapse of civilization. It still could, of course, but news agencies were mum on the issue in 2008. Although the CDC warns that the animal outbreak is "is not expected to diminish significantly in the short term," the threat to humans has been significantly downgraded. No human cases have been reported in North America, and the person-to-person spread of H5N1 has been "very rare, limited and unsustained." 2. Colossal Squid thawed in New Zealand In early 2007, a fishing vessel caught a colossal squid in the Ross Sea off Antarctica. The squid was frozen and shipped to a lab at New Zealand's national museum, who began thawing it out in April of 2008. Among their discoveries: the colossal squid has the world's biggest eyes, as well as a light emitting system that may serve as a "cloaking device." 1. Polar bears Polar bears have become the poster children for global climate change, thanks both to their charismatic and photogenic nature, and to their rapid decline in habitat. As the Arctic thaws, polar bears have to travel farther and farther to their feeding grounds in the open ocean. Polar bear populations experienced a record decline in 2008, and in May of this year the U.S. Department of Interior listed the polar bear as a "threatened" species.