There are at least a billion people on this planet who possess 'misfitting' bodies and who are consequently directly affected by disability. Many more people encounter different abilities when families, friends, and colleagues are taken into consideration. Disability - and the structures that create it - really matters. It may be marginal, but it is hardly a minority experience. Indeed, when we take time to look at the animal world, we find that 'extraordinary' bodies are all around us. Some dart through the darkness mapping the world through the art of echolocation. Others flourish in underground rivers via senses that allow them to 'see' without eyes. The way in which people in Britain and North America have understood these ways of surviving and thriving in the world have an important history, and that history reveals much about transforming cultural assumptions about what we have thought to be 'normal' bodies and abilities. Since the early nineteenth century, unusual nonhuman bodies have been imagined as variously 'deficient', 'super', 'expendable' and, most recently, highly 'vulnerable' in the face of environmental transformation. These are familiar labels; we find them at the heart of contemporary and historical conversations relating to human disability Centred on a deep case study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagination of dark-dwelling creatures and the impact of human systems and structures on their shrouded worlds since the mid-nineteenth century, this cutting-edge research project is really about the ways in which notions of what it means to be 'normal', 'able' and 'vulnerable' have been refracted through the multifarious bodies of animals that live in ways that are radically different from our own. Nocturnal creatures are among the most misunderstood creatures on earth, and that is principally because they are active in an environment from which we are normally excluded. This has facilitated the imagination of nocturnal animal bodies as variously 'abnormal', 'extraordinary', and 'deficient'. Ultimately, misunderstandings of these more-than-human bodies have also rendered them highly vulnerable to exclusion from environments to which they are adapted. By building this case study and generating a brand new research agenda, the project offers an important intellectual and methodological intervention into the allied fields of animal history, environmental history and disability studies. While each of these fields are concerned in varying degrees with the production of identity and the impact of identity politics on the material world, they are yet to interact with each other in mutually generative ways. More-than-human histories need to embrace disability studies approaches in order to better appreciate the wide array of engagements which constitute human relationships with the natural world and the ways in which abled and disabled identities have been constructed and refracted through and via the bodies of our animal kin. Disability studies needs to turn to the more-than-human world as a means of pivoting around the concept of disability itself; to challenge what we think we know about historical discourses of ability and normativity, re-energising a stagnating conversation about the conditions that exclude and marginalise the 'differently-abled'. This research is crucial in other ways, too. In exposing connections between discourses of normalcy, ability, vulnerability and adaptation across the human and more-than-human realms, it may be possible to generate recognition of shared vulnerabilities that transcend the human-nonhuman divide that has permitted the marginalisation of living beings across the course of modernity. Engagement and impact activities benefiting Key Stage 2 children, their teachers, sight-impaired individuals and vision clinicians highlight the potential of thinking creatively about diversity and vulnerability as issues that unite rather than isolate all living beings.