- The membranes in a dog's nose, if unfolded and laid out, would
be larger than the dog itself.
- About 600 species of plants are carnivorous. Most eat insects
but also on the menu are frogs, birds and even small monkeys.
- If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire
town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town.
- A group of owls is called a parliament.
- Dogs and humans are the only animals with prostates.
- A flea expert is a pullicologist.
- A pig is a hog -- hog is a generic name for all swine -- but
a hog is not a pig. In the terminology of hog raising, a pig is
a baby hog less than ten weeks old.
- Ancient Romans ate flamingo tongues and considered them a delicacy.
- All elephants walk on tip-toe, because the back portion of their
foot is made up of all fat and no bone.
- A rhinoceros's horn is made of hair.
- Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing
sand.
- Elephants have been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian
Ocean.
- The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached
to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head
off.
- "Eat like a bird?" Many birds eat twice their weight a day.
- Dogs have about 100 different facial expressions, most of them
made with the ears.
- Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
- All swans and all sturgeons in England are property of the Queen.
Messing with them is a serious offense.
- Kiwi birds are blind, they hunt by smell.
- Rhinos are in the same family as horses, and are thought to
have inspired the myth of the unicorn.
- Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a
building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving
than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes
about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occuring, relax
and correct itself. At about that height it hits maximum speed
and when it hits the ground it's rib cage absorbs most of the
impact.
- Though human noses have an impressive 5 million olfactory cells
with which to smell, sheepdogs have 220 million, enabling them
to smell 44 times better than man.
- In 1888, an estimated 300,000 mummified cats were found at Beni
Hassan, Egypt. They were sold at $18.43 per ton, and shipped to
England to be ground up and used for fertilizer.
- Hummingbirds are the smallest birds - so tiny that one of their
enemies is an insect, the praying mantis.
- Neutering a cat extends its life span by two or three years.
- The first bird domesticated by man was the goose.
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