The Best Interesting Random Facts
The cheetah was previously believed to be the primitive species among the big cats and evolved approximately 18 million years ago. Recent studies have suggests that the last common ancestor of all species of felines lived only about 11 million years ago. The same research shows that the cheetah, does not have ancient lineage, and […]
In 1972, the Blue Ribbon Shoe Company turned to the art department of nearby Portland State University for a student who could design a distinctive logo. Carolyn Davidson was chosen, and she set about the first real job of her career. Company founder Phil Knight asked for something both functional and stylish. He wanted what […]
Only bears that eat more vegetation than meat, like the brown and black bears sleep through most of the winter when they hibernate. Their main food supplies die or get buried under snow in winter, so it’s a good time for them to go undercover and live off their fat for three to seven months. […]
To a bug or snail, armadillo bites are painful and deadly most of the time. However, to anything bigger like humans, armadillo bites aren’t really painful, unless you’re a wuss. Armadillos aren’t poisonous either, so there’s no need for a trip to the hospital. An armadillo’s teeth are located at the back of its mouth, […]
If you have a sweet tooth, you should have been in Baltimore, Maryland, during the 1976 celebration of America’s Bicentennial. In honor of the event, bakers put together a cake that weighed more than 70,000 pounds. The huge dessert, the largest cake ever baked, contained some 120,000 eggs and more than 20,000 pounds of sugar! […]
Corn is the second most widely grown crop on earth today, after wheat, and in the United States it’s the largest crop. But no one in Europe knew about corn until Columbus sailed for the New World. Corn probably first grew in Central America and, by at least 2000 B.C., was cultivated by the Indians […]
Tree kangaroos are macropods that live in trees in the mountainous rainforests of New Guinea, northeastern Queensland Australia, and a few islands nearby. Tree-kangaroos evolved from animals similar to modern kangaroos, and have strong hind legs and very long tails for balance, and stronger forelimbs with longer claws for climbing. On the ground, tree-kangaroos are […]
Both male and female goats can have beards, just like humans. Got more questions? Is goat hair used for anything? Mohair and cashmere are both fancied-up names for material made from goat hair. Neutered horses are geldings, but what’s a neutered goat called? A neutered goat is called a wether. How rude is it to […]
The Tigers is the most common nickname for College Football teams in the United States. Felines do very well in the NCAA. Cat nicknames like the Tigers, Cougars, Lions, and Pumas outnumber dog nicknames like Bulldogs, Terriers, Wolves, and Huskies by more than two to one. Other common names for college football teams include Eagles, […]
Poor old Hogan is merely an innocent bystander in the modern Americanism “like Hogan’s goat”. Just as with “Hogan’s brickyard,” a slang designation of a baseball diamond, the goat could be the property of Jones, Smith, or Rockefeller, or VanTassel. That is, the name of the owner has no bearing whatever on the meaning of […]
An equestrian statue is a statue of a horse-mounted rider, and the term comes from the Latin word “eques”, meaning “knight” and a derivative of “equus”, which means “horse”. Statues of horse and rider are exclusively of monarchs or great warriors and are usually found in places of honor. The tradition is that if the […]
The silkworm is the larva of the domesticated silkmoth known as Bombyx mori, which means “silkworm of the mulberry tree” in Latin. Bombyx mori is a domesticated variety bred from the Bombyx mandarina species from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan and eastern Russia. As hinted by its Latin name, the Silkworm loves white […]
Brown eggs being healthier than white eggs is a stupid myth that started because people assumed that brown foods like breads, sugar, flours are healthier than white ones. In fact, the fictional James Bond would only eat one type of egg, the one from the Helsumer chicken. Its egg is a dark, chocolaty brown, sometimes […]
The person who says, “The coast is clear,” sounds as though he or she is being cautious about avoiding legal detection, and so it should. It originated as the standard cry from the man in the crow’s nest of every pirate ship before it chanced a landing. When the captain verified with his telescope that […]
Elephants make several sounds when communicating, and are famous for their trumpet calls made by blowing through its nostrils. Trumpeting is often made when an elephant is excited or startled. Researchers have known for years that elephants use their trunks to interact socially. However, they’ve more recently discovered that elephants use low-frequency verbal communication as […]
Although lions are not exactly the most cooperative animals, people have been training them since nearly the beginning of recorded history. The annals say that the Egyptian pharoah Ramses II (1290-1224 B.C.) had a tame lion that he took into battle as a mascot, and the Roman emperor Elagabalus (A.D. 218-222) paraded in a chariot […]
Mammals are one of the classes of animals. Scientists have classified, or divided, all animals into groupings according to the ways in which they are alike. All mammals have one characteristic that no other animal have, mammals are the only animals whose females produce milk to feed their young. The word mammal comes from the […]
Beluga whales are mammals, and like all but two species of mammals, they don’t lay eggs. It would be impossible to slice them open as we do fish and pull out their eggs to salt, pickle, and sell to status seekers with too much money. But the word belukha means “white” in Russian, meaning there […]
The Adam’s Apple, also known as the laryngeal prominence, is a feature of the human neck. Both men and women have the thyroid cartilage, but it is usually more prominent in adult men. The Adam’s apple got its name from an ancient embellishment of the story of Adain and Eve. Folklore had it that when […]
The Box jellyfish is a cube-shaped jellyfish known for its potent venom and can be found in northern Australia, Indonesia, Hawaii, and other tropical waters. The Box jellyfish uses its venom to catch prey and as a defense against predators. Its sting is extremely painful and sometimes fatal to humans, making it one of the […]
In 1845, some astronomers believed that the only explanation for Mercury’s confusing and erratic orbit of the sun would be the presence of gravitational pull from an unseen nearby planet, which they named “Vulcan.” French mathematician Le Verrier, who came up with the hypothesis to explain Mercury’s orbit, died in 1877, still convinced of having […]
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 […]
Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer made his debut in 1939. Not surprisingly, Rudolph was originally created as part of an ad campaign. The Chicago-based Montgomery Ward department store asked an employee, veteran copywriter Robert May, to come up with a character the store could use in holiday coloring books to pass out at Christmas. As he […]
If you’re concerned about being attacked or eaten by tigers, staying in America and away from zoos and circuses is a safe bet. On their own turf, tigers can be a real menace, more so, even, than the other big cats. For example, one female tiger in Champawat, India, was blamed for killing at least […]
We don’t know what the local aborigines thought when they first saw what they called a tambreet, or boonaburra in the Mallangong language. Although an aboriginal myth about how the platypus evolved has to do with a teenage duck disobeying her father by going ashore and getting raped by a water rat. The name “platypus” […]
In 1980, Rubik’s Cube became a worldwide craze. Its Hungarian inventor, Professor Erno Rubick, had created the cube as a math aid for his students. After realizing the cube’s potential as a toy, he sold two million in Hungary alone before introducing it to the West, making him the Communist world’s first self-made millionaire. The […]
The subject is a confusing one because of the rather inexact use of terms in most post-Roman cultures. Especially large or poisonous snakes are commonly called serpents, and biblical tradition calls the shape Satan assumed to tempt Eve a serpent. But technically speaking, all snakes can be called serpents, from the Latin derpere, meaning to […]
Thousands of years ago, vast empires rose and fell in Egypt, Greece, Italy, the Middle East, northern Africa, China, and India. Bold explorers from these civilizations, such as Pytheas and Hanno, ventured into unknown lands and seas. Most of them searched for new trade routes or places to settle. Today, scholars have limited knowledge of […]
The weight of an object is really a measure of the force of gravity exerted on it by the earth. So bodies such as the earth and the moon don’t really “weigh” anything. But the earth and the moon do have mass, which is a measure of how much matter these bodies are composed of. […]
A donkey and an ass aren’t quite the same thing. An ass is a smaller relative of the horse, with longer ears and a shorter mane. A donkey is a domesticated ass. So all donkeys are asses, but not all asses are donkeys. The word “ass” is much older than the word “donkey.” The Latin […]