The Best Interesting Random Facts
Hoot Gibson was born on August 6, 1892 in Tekamah, Nebraska, and was an American rodeo champion and a pioneer cowboy film actor, director and producer. Cowboy movie star Hoot Gibson takes us way back. Born Edmund Richard Gibson, the silent movie star was also known as the Smiling Whirlwind because of his boyish smile […]
Both bravery and courage are acts of valour and imply a certain strength and fearlessness. There is, however, a subtle difference in meaning between the two words. Courage comes from the French word coeur, meaning heart. It is a quality of character that allows someone to carry through with a difficult premeditated plan of action. […]
In their native habitat, it’s estimated that there are only about 500 wild Asian camels and no Arabian ones at all. The Bactrian camel is now reduced to about 1.4 million animals, mostly domesticated, and there are only about 1000 wild Bactrian camels left in the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia. However, outside the […]
Lobsters have blood that is colorless unless exposed to oxygen, when it develops a bluish tint. Lobsters are mostly gray, green, or brown when alive, but never red. Boiling them breaks down the pigments that color their shells. The most durable heat-resistant pigments are the carotin-based reds, and they are last to break down during […]
The porcupine has one of the best defense systems in nature-its quills. However, the porcupine does not shoot out these quills at an enemy, as many people think. Even though these quills are dangerous to an enemy, they are actually very loosely attached to the porcupine’s body and come off even at the slightest touch. […]
The word “Mush” does not mean “Mush that snow down, boys!” when giving orders to sled dogs. Although it is one of the more interesting theories we’ve heard regarding the origins of the term. Usually people assume that mush is an Americanized version of an Inuit word, but it’s not. It actually comes from French-speaking […]
Dogs bury bones because it’s their version of a doggy bag, or a way to store food for later consumption. The act of burying bones and meat is an instinctual nature that has continued even though the dog has been domesticated. In the wild, canines like the fox, jackal, and wild dog are often left […]
The chop is English, in the sense of “chipped” or “cut,” but the suey is Chinese sui, “bits.” Like the term itself, the concoction or comestible is of mixed origin. As explained to us, forty years ago, it was first devised by a Chinese operating a restaurant in Brooklyn, who composed it of bits of […]
The White Rhinoceros, also known as the Square-lipped rhinoceros, is one of the five species of rhinoceros that still exist and is one of the few megafaunal species left on earth. Found on the African continent, it is the most social of all rhino species, and has a wide mouth that is used for grazing. […]
Checkers is one of the oldest games in the world, with a variation played in the days of the early Egyptian pharaohs in about 1600 B.C. The game was mentioned in the works of Homer and Plato, too. About 800 years ago, checkers was adapted to the 64-square chessboard, and by the 16th century, it […]
There is no name for a group of tigers, because groups of tigers don’t really exist in the wild or in captivity. The relationships between tiger individuals can be quite complex, and there aren’t any set rules that tigers follow with regards to territorial rights. Although tigers avoid each other for the most part, both […]
Cows are the most common type of domesticated cattle, and are raised as livestock for meat, as dairy products, leather, and even dung. The word cow came from the Anglo-Saxon word “cū”, plural cȳ, which means “bovine animal”, and several derivatives include the Latin “bos”, the Greek word “bous” (βους), and in Sanskrit, “go”. The […]
Good question, it gets stupid cold in the Arctic. The average temperature goes down to about 90 degrees below zero, with a windchill factor that will freeze the nuts of a squirrel. Animals survive the cold with thick warm fur, a lot of body fat, small heads, ears, and tails to reduce heat loss, and […]
Unlike true big cats, the cheetah can purr as it inhales, but cannot roar. By contrast, the big cats can roar but cannot purr, except while exhaling. There’s no such thing as a cheetah’s roar, since cheetahs don’t roar. They do, however, purr like a kitten, hiss, whine, and growl. And when they want to […]
The true dolphin is a mammal, any one of about thirty-three species of cetacean mammals in the family Delphinidae, characterized by a pronounced beak-shaped mouth. The dolphin on restaurant menus, Coryphaena hippurus, is a fish with gills, iridescent colors and firm flesh. It is called mahi-mahi in Hawaii and dorado in South America. The dolphin […]
If shooting ink isn’t enough defense to scare off a predator, an octopus can go on the offensive with its tentacles and a beak-like mouth. An octopus’s main defense is to hide by camouflaging itself and avoid being detected as an octopus. Octopuses are also venomous, but only the small blue-ringed octopuses are lethal to […]
Mister Ed was an American television sit-com that first aired on January 5, 1961 and ended on February 6, 1966 on CBS. The stars of the show were Mister Ed, an intelligent horse who could talk, and his owner, an eccentric and klutzy architect named Wilbur Post. Mister Ed’s real name was Bamboo Harvester, and […]
If food is hard to find, a camel will eat anything, bone, meat, leather, and even garbage. Camels usually eat grass, various plants, hay and dry grains, and can eat up to 9 pounds per day. Camels seem to always be chewing something don’t they. Camels do ruminate, or chew their cud, but they are, […]
Before humans learned the secret of glassmaking, nature was the world’s only glassmaker. Lightning striking sand melted it into long, thin tubes of glass, and volcanoes erupting melted rocks and sand into glass. The earliest glass made by humans was probably a glaze on ceramic pottery made somewhere around 3000 B.C. Today, three inexpensive ingredients, […]
Ask even a hard core cardsharp about the origin of playing cards and pointing to the king and queen in their Renaissance raiment, he may well answer smugly that, of course, the cards originated in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Well, the reply would be half correct; yes, the design of modern playing […]
Putting pennies on dead people’s eyes could have been used by many cultures to keep the eyes of the dead shut until rigor mortis sets in. Some cultures, including the ancient Egyptians and more modern African Americans, have also used coins on the eyes and hands of the deceased to share with relatives in the […]
Legend has it that whenever the French-speaking Mary, Queen of Scots, wasn’t feeling well, she would insist on a medicinal concoction made with boiled oranges. The orders the kitchen received were that Marie was malade, which is French for “sick,” leading to “Marie malade,” or marmalade. This, of course, is untrue. Marmalade is from the […]
Most crabs are small enough to hold in your hand, ranging from one inch to eight inches across. But there is one kind of crab, the giant spider crab found in the waters off Japan, that is so big, its legs can span a distance of 12 1/2 feet. Some of these monsters stand three […]
The state of Wisconsin definitely has badgers, but it’s not why it’s called the badger state. Wisconsin doesn’t have many more badgers than any other state, but you have to admit that Wisconsin has one up on Michigan. However, the state wasn’t really called that because of its badgers, surprise, surprise, except indirectly. “Badgers” became […]
A baby boomer is someone who was born after soldiers of the Second World War had come home and up to eighteen years later, so the period differs in some countries. In the U.S. and Canada, 20 million babies were born during the boom between 1946 and 1964. North America’s first baby boomer, Kathleen Casey […]
Hail or sleet is frozen rain, but snow is never formed as a frozen raindrop. Snow forms from ice crystals high above the earth. These particles turn into snow without first becoming rain. At the height that snow usually forms, the temperature is from 20 to 60 degrees below zero, far too cold for water […]
From time immemorial, perhaps as proof of our relationship with the ape, man has amused himself by performing feats of daring upon ropes, ropes hanging from trees or high structures, or ropes tautly or loosely stretched high between two trees or other supports. In ancient Greece, skill in such feats became highly developed, though, like […]
Antarctica holds most of the fresh water on earth. About 90% percent of the world’s total fresh water is frozen in Antarctica. Antarctica is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on earth, and also has the highest average elevation. The first confirmed sighting of Antarctica is believed to have occurred in 1820 by the Russian […]
The Rhinoceros, also known as rhino for short, is a name used to group five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family rhinocerotidae. The word rhinoceros comes from the Greek words ῥῑνο-, (rhino-), meaning nose, and κέρας (keras), meaning horn. The plural for rhinoceros in English is rhinoceroses, and a group of rhinoceros is […]
The term Ivy League has nothing to do with the ivy-covered walls of the prestigious schools to which it refers. Several Eastern U.S. schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, became known collectively as the “Interscholastic Four League,” but the four was always written in Roman numerals, “IV”, and was pronounced “eye-vee.” By the […]