Inspired by the opossum thread - what animal is, in your opinion, the ugliest, grossest, most revolting of your-deity-of-choice’s mistakes?
Quite arbitrarily, let’s exclude stuff like insects, worms, spiders, squid, etc. and restrict ourselves to vertebrate animals.
My entry: the Naked African Mole Rat. Absolutely hideous!
Blobfish.
You wouldn’t look too good, either, if you were put into an atmosphere where the pressure was several dozen times less than you were used to.
I might nominate certain species of insect-eating bats.
The Surinam toad is not particularly attractive under the best circumstances (enough said).
That dick nosed monkey.
Giant. Frakking. Isopods.
This is excluded under the OP’s restrictions (vertebrates only; arthropods specifically excluded).
If it weren’t for those restrictions, this would certainly be a reasonable candidate though.
I we’re talking about the face, I wouldn’t want to kiss a lamprey.
And to pick on the deep sea fish some more, then angler fish wouldn’t win a beauty c ontest.
Ugliest, grossest…eh, no contest.
I’ll submit the naked mole rat.
I don’t know if slugs count. Do they have vertebrae?
Slugs. Ug. They look like a cross between shit and snot. I loathe slugs.
They’re Mollusca, so I’m betting they can’t play in this game. Never mind.
They’re still gross.
Oh! Oh! Has anyone done the star-nosed mole?
Oh! Snub-nosed monkeys disturb me.
Monkeys with no noses are worse: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3FTO6EjRbe4/SwmFMbh41kI/AAAAAAAAXQk/K9BUsqrAThY/s1600/golden+monkey.jpg
The solenodon.
It’s like a kwiwi with teeth!
Voldemonkey!
Agreed with others that this doesn’t count because of lack of vertebrae, but if we WERE allowed to use it, I’d have to trump it with Cymothoa exigua, the Tongue-Eating Isopod. Only because it’s conceptually more horrific than some free-swimming sea bug, no matter how big.
Do they look like hotties at their own pressure, then? 
Pshaw. I would kiss a lamprey on the lips (raspy tongue-thing??). Their cousin,the hagfish is the worst. Imagine a lamprey, except it is blind, and covered with disgusting slime. Also it’s much bigger, and is known to “devour their victims from the inside” and “pull out hunks of flesh from carrion fish or cetaceans, eventually making an opening to permit entry to the interior of the body cavity of larger carcasses.”
On a similar note to the anglerfish is the viperfish. The angler is notable in that the male is like 100th the size of the female, and bites her on the side, and fuses with her body becoming an atrophied sperm machine.
National Geographic recently had a feature on these guys…the small ones are just fuzzy and cute enough for me to ignore the lack of nose.
Something about the face of the sloth is unsettling to me. Those claws are pretty freaky too.
