- The anaconda, one of the world's largest snakes, gives birth
to its young instead of laying eggs.
- Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.
- Beaver teeth are so sharp that Native Americans once used them
as knife blades.
- A cat's tongue consists of small "hooks," which come in handy
when tearing up food.
- Rats are omnivorous, eating nearly any type of food, including
dead and dying members of their own species.
- Elephants can communicate using sounds that are below the human
hearing range: between 14 and 35 hertz.
- The normal temperature of a cat is 101.5 degrees.
- The fastest moving land snail, the common garden snail, has
a speed of 0.0313 mph.
- The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
- A 7-year study, which concluded in the summer of 2000, found
that 33 U.S. deaths were caused by rottweilers, pit bulls were
responsible for 27 deaths.
- The average adult male ostrich, the world's largest living bird,
weighs up to 345 pounds.
- When ants find food, they lay down a chemical trail, called
a pheromone, so that other ants can find their way from the nest
to the food source.
- The turbot fish lays approximately 14 million eggs during its
lifetime.
- The bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers.
- Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been
hit by a lightning strike.
- A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
- The 1st buffalo ever born in captivity was born at Chicago's
Lincoln Park Zoo in 1884.
- Moles are able to tunnel through 300 feet of earth in a day.
- Howler monkeys are the noisiest land animals. Their calls can
be heard over 2 miles away.
- A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic
in 1872.
- The fastest bird is the Spine-tailed swift, clocked at speeds
of up to 220 miles per hour.
- There is no single cat called the panther. The name is commonly
applied to the leopard, but it is also used to refer to the puma
and the jaguar. A black panther is really a black leopard.
- A capon is a castrated rooster.
- The world's largest rodent is the Capybara. An Amazon water
hog that looks like a guinea pig, it can weigh more than 100 pounds.
- The poison-arrow frog has enough poison to kill about 2,200
people.
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