Animals
The woolly mammoth, extinct since the Ice Age, had tusks almost 16 feet high.
Pigs, walruses, and light-colored horses can be sunburned
A baby giraffe is about six feet tall at birth.
A baby gray whale drinks enough milk to fill more than 2,000 bottles a day.
A bear in hibernation loses up to 25 percent
of its body weight
The world's largest mammal, the blue whale, weighs 50 tons at birth. Fully
grown, it weighs as much as 150 tons
In one year, hens in America lay enough eggs to encircle the globe a hundred times.
The word "puppy" comes from the French poupee, meaning "doll."
In ancient Rome, auburn-haired puppies were sacrificed to ensure a plentiful corn crop.
The chameleon, a small lizard generally measuring 6 or 7 inches, has a tongue several inches longer than its body. With a thrust of this remarkable appendage, it can catch insects some 10 inches away.
It is estimated that a single toad may catch and eat as many as 10,000 insects in the course of a summer.
The life expectancy of the average mockingbird is 10 years.
The largest species of seahorse measures 8 inches.
The cat was the symbol of liberty in ancient Rome.
Pink elephants? In regions of India where the soil is red, elephants take on a permanent pink tinge because they regularly spray dust over their bodies to protect themselves against insects
Ostriches are such fast runners, they can outrun a horse. Male ostriches can roar like a lion.
In Pakistan, goats are often sacrificed to improve the performance of the stock market.
The leech has 32 brains
The world's fastest reptile (measured on land) is the spiny-tailed iguana of Costa Rica. It has been clocked at 21.7 miles per hour.
The chicken can travel up to 9 miles per hour.
Cows have four stomachs
In Milwaukee during the 1900s, 12,500 horses in the city left an estimated 133 tons of manure and urine on the streets per year.
The venom of the king cobra is so deadly that one gram of it can kill 150 people. Just to handle the substance can put one in a coma.
Ostriches live about 75 years and can reproduce for 50 years.
Parrots, most famous of all talking birds, rarely acquire a vocabulary of more than twenty words. However, Tymhoney Greys and African Greys have been known to carry vocabularies in excess of 100 words
The white elephant is the sacred animal of Thailand
Pandas spend about 12 hours a day eating bamboo
The whistling swan has more than 25,000 feathers on its body
The largest order of mammals, with about 1,700 species, is rodents. Bats are second with about 950 species
