The Best Interesting Random Facts
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 […]
The blue whale has the biggest heart in the world. Its heart is about the size of a VW Beetle. The blue whale is also the largest animal ever known to have existed on earth, and can grow up to 108 feet in length and weigh up to 180 tons. Before being hunted almost to […]
An ostrich egg is about four inches tall and four to five inches wide, and weigh over three pounds. Ostriches are oviparous, and females will lay their fertilized eggs in a single communal nest, in a pit. The eggs are glossy cream-colored, with thick shells marked by small pits. There’s about as much yolk and […]
Cheetahs are currently on the US Endangered Species Act, and listed as a threatened species. Cheetah cubs have a high mortality rate because of genetic factors and predation by carnivores in such as the lion and hyena. Recent inbreeding of cheetahs that cause birth defects have led a few biologists to believe it is unlikely […]
The oxpeckers are two species of bird from the Buphagidae family which live in the savanna of Sub-Saharan Africa. Their names come from their habit of perching on large mammals such as cattle or rhinoceroses, and eating ticks, botfly larvae, and other parasites. The oxpeckers are related to mockingbirds and starlings, and possibly evolved from […]
The Kodiak bear, also known by its scientific name Ursus arctos middendorffi, is also called the Alaskan grizzly bear. The Kodiak bear is the biggest brown bear species in the world. The grizzly bear is the second biggest living bear in the world. The mighty grizzly looks mighty puny when compared to the Kodiak bear, […]
Meats, like wines, can be either red or white. Beef is red; fish and shellfish are generally white. Salmon are pink, rosé, if you like, because they eat pink-shelled crustaceans. Flamingos, if you care, are pink for a similar reason. In the kitchen, we soon learn that white fish flesh cooks much more quickly than […]
Spam isn’t that bad, there’s nothing strange in the meat even though it’s cheap. It’s pork shoulder that’s been chopped, spiced, and formed into loaves. Every meat packer runs into the problem that some parts of an animal are more popular than others. For the George A. Hormel Company in 1937, the unwanted part was […]
It may be hard to believe that a beautiful creature like a butterfly was once an ugly, worm-like creature like a caterpillar, but this is exactly how the colorful, graceful butterfly’s life cycle works. There are four stages in a butterfly’s life. The process of going from one stage to another is called metamorphosis. The […]
The word “dial” comes from the Latin word “dialis”, which means “daily”, because a sundial throws a shadow related to the time of day. The word “dialling” originally referred to the math required to create a sundial to tell time based on the position of the sun, and those skilled in the art were called […]
Mount Everest may be the world’s highest mountain, but it’s not the tallest. Hawaii’s Mount Mauna Kea is four thousand feet taller than Mount Everest, but its huge base is submerged under the sea, which means Everest rises higher above sea level. Mauna Kea is one of five inactive volcanoes in the area which together […]
The meerkat, also known by its scientific name Suricata suricatta, is a small mammal, and a member of the mongoose family. Native to South Africa, meerkats live about 12 to 14 years. The word “meerkat” means “lake cat” in Dutch, but the meerkat is not in the cat family and the name is a mis-identification. […]
A cow can drink about a bathtub of water each day, which includes the moisture it receives from the wet grasses it eats. Cows are ruminants, which means that they have a digestive system that reuses partially digested food by regurgitating and re-chewing them as “cud”. Onions could definitely cause a cow’s milk to taste […]
True crabs are crustaceans that have a short projecting “tail” or reduced hidden abdomen, while others such as hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs and crab lice, are not true crabs. Crabs can be found in oceans all over the world, and many crabs in tropical regions live in freshwater and on land. They are usually covered […]
The Portuguese Man of War is a marine invertebrate also known as Physalia physalis from the Physaliidae family, and is very similar to a jellyfish but isn’t. Technically a siphonophore, other names for the Portuguese Man of War include Portuguese Man o’ War, bluebottle, and man-of-war. The Portuguese Man of War’s name comes from a […]
The reddish-brown crust that often forms on iron and steel objects comes from changes that take place in the outer surface of the metal itself. This crust, called rust, is caused by the mixture of the metal with oxygen from water in the air. When moisture from the air, or from anywhere else, reaches an […]
A giraffe calf is born into this world by experiencing gravity and a shocking thud. The 5 foot plus baby giraffe must drop 6 feet or more from the mother’s womb to the ground because giraffes give birth standing up. Giraffe gestation lasts between 400 and 460 days and usually a single calf is born. […]
Elasmotherium was a member of the rhinoceros family back in the days of the Ice Age. The name Elasmotherium means “plate monster.” It was huge, and much larger than even an elephant. Fossils have been found that measure between sixteen and twenty-six feet tall. It’s been estimated that its horn measured up to six and […]
The Traditional Spanish Folk Song “La Cucaracha”, is literally about a stoner cockroach’s wasted life, death, and funeral, and is beloved equally by children and the sandwich trucks that serve lunch to office workers. Also known as a corrido, it became popular in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution during the 20th century, and is played […]
The giraffe heart is quite a powerful pumping machine. A giraffe’s heart can weigh up to 22 pounds and about 2 feet long in size. It must produce about double the normal blood pressure compared to other large mammals to maintain blood flow to the brain. The giraffe’s heart has to be big enough to […]
Lobsters are a little different from humans and mammals, being that they’re crustaceans n all. Many lobsters live up to 50 years and even more in some cases. Some scientists have even claimed that they could effectively live indefinitely. They start out looking like tiny bugs, smaller than crickets, and they grow and molt all […]
There are only two different species in the family Giraffidae on earth. One is the okapi, also called a forest giraffe, which looks like a cross between a zebra, a mule, and a giraffe. The other is the steppe giraffe, the one we’re most familiar with. But there are seven different subspecies of steppe giraffes, […]
Left handers can play jai alai as long as they’re willing to use their right hands. The rules and traditions specifically forbid playing left-handed. The reason is that the court has only three walls, one at each end and a side wall on the left against which the ball can be rebounded. Spectators sit behind […]
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 […]
A sloth is a small South American mammal which moves about very slowly, when it moves at all. It is considered a sluggish, or lazy, animal because of this, but scientists say that this sluggishness is caused by the sloth’s very low body temperature. Sloths spend most of their time in trees and seldom come […]
Under the icy waters of Antarctica are huge numbers of whales, but up on the surface, few things are hardy enough to spend much time on the frozen land. Even regional plants would likely prefer to live somewhere else, vegetation on Antarctica is limited to about 350 species of mosses, algae, and lichens. Oh, yeah, […]
Since the moon’s mass (the amount of matter it contains) is smaller than earth’s, the moon has a weaker gravity pull, only one-sixth the pull of earth. This means that everything is six times lighter on the moon than it is on earth. A person weighing 120 pounds on earth would weigh only 20 pounds […]
Male crickets rub their wings together to attract female crickets, and the result is the “chirping” noise we hear. Male crickets are equipped with their own built-in fiddle system, and both male and females have their “ears” in their front legs below the knee. Each of the male’s wings has a rough surface on its […]
Many people think the camel does store water in its hump, but it does not. Instead, the camel stores something else there, food. The camel’s hump is really a hump of fat. When the camel, often called a “ship of the desert,” is not traveling and is in a place where there is plenty of […]
In 1923, South Dakota’s tourism board got the idea to carve western heroes Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter into a mountain to attract out-of-state tourists. They approached John Gutzon Borglum, who had just accepted a commission to carve Robert E. Lee on the side of Georgia’s Stone Mountain. Borglum hated the idea of […]