The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (15 page)

CIRCUS PERFORMERS

There once were more sea lions on Earth than people.

Male sea lions may have more than one hundred wives and sometimes go three months without eating.

The rare Hawaiian monk seal has been known to dive to about 1,650 feet. The animal doesn’t “bark” like sea lions, but has a number of different vocalizations it produces, including a deep, guttural call that sounds much like a belch. Seals and whales keep warm in the icy polar water thanks to a layer of fat called blubber under their skin. Whale blubber can reach up to twenty inches thick.

Seals can sleep underwater and surface for air without even waking.

The elephant seal is the heaviest seal in the world; males can reach twenty feet in length and eighty-?eight hundred pounds.

Researchers have determined that the elephant seals off the Baja coast dive deeper than whales—sometimes as deep as a mile.

Seals can withstand water pressure of up to 850 pounds per square inch.

Seals have back flippers that can’t bend under the body to “walk” on land, while sea lions use their leg-?like hind flippers to “walk” on land.

Fur seals get miserably sick when they’re carried aboard ships.

Seals must teach their young how to swim.

The Weddell seal can travel underwater for seven miles without surfacing for air.

HUNGRY, HUNGRY HIPPOS

The hippopotamus is, next to the elephant, the heaviest of all land mammals. It may weigh as much as eight thousand pounds. It is also a close relative of the pig. It has skin an inch and a half thick; it’s so solid that most bullets cannot penetrate it.

The hippopotamus has the world’s shortest sperm.

The hippopotamus gives birth underwater and nurses its young in the river as well, although the young hippos must come up periodically for air. Hippopotami cannot swim.

Sea otters have the world’s densest fur—a million hairs per square inch.

Sea otters inhabit water but never get wet because they have two coats of fur.

It is estimated that manatees live a maximum of fifty to sixty years.

DOGGY STYLE

There are more than one hundred million dogs and cats in the United States

Dogs that do not tolerate small children well include the Saint Bernard, the Old English sheepdog, the Alaskan malamute, the bull terrier, and the toy poodle.

Studies show that the breeds of dogs that bite the least are, in order: the golden retriever, Labrador retriever, Shetland sheepdog, Old English sheepdog, and the Welsh terrier.

The only dog to ever appear in a Shakespearean play was Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The onomatopoeia for a dog’s bark in Japanese is “wan-?wan.”

The fastest dog, the greyhound, can reach speeds of up to forty-?five miles per hour. The breed was known to exist in ancient Egypt more than five thousand years ago.

The prescribed diet of the Polish lowland sheepdog in present-?day Poland consists of bread, potatoes, cottage cheese, milk, and an occasional egg.

The New Guinea singing dog’s most unique characteristic is its dramatic ability to vary the pitch of its howl. The animal does not bark repetitively but has a complex vocal behavior, including yelps, whines, and single-?note howls.

Terrier is from the Latin word terra meaning “earth.”

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.

Jackals have one more pair of chromosomes than dogs or wolves.

The gray wolf is the largest wild dog alive today. As an adult a gray wolf can weigh up to 176 pounds.

There is no record of a nonrabid wolf attack on a human.

The last wolf in Great Britain was killed in Scotland, in 1743. Wolves were extinct in England by 1500.

To safeguard its food when away, the wolverine marks it with a strong musk so foul smelling that other animals won’t touch it.

Very unusual for carnivores, hyena clans are dominated by females.

ELEPHANTS ON PARADE

The elephant is the only mammal that can’t jump.

Elephants perform greeting ceremonies when a member of the group returns after a long time away. The welcoming animals spin around, flap their ears, and trumpet.

Elephants communicate in sound waves below the frequency humans can hear.

Elephants have been known to remain standing after they die. It takes eleven truckloads of wood to make a proper funeral pyre for a full-?sized elephant.

Elephants and short-?tailed shrews get by on only two hours of sleep a day.

The massive skeleton of the African elephant accounts for about 15 percent of its body weight, just as in a man of slender build; however, the elephant’s skeleton supports as much as four tons per leg, and is thus stressed close to the physical limit for bone. To keep from damaging its skeleton, an African elephant has to move sedately, never jumping or running. The “charge” of these animals is a fast walk on long legs, at about fifteen miles per hour.

Until he’s about twenty-?one years old, the male Indian elephant isn’t interested in romancing a female elephant.

The elephant’s closest relative is the hyrax, which is found in the Middle East and Africa and is only about one foot long. Like its gigantic cousin, the hyrax has hoofed toes and a two-?chambered stomach for digesting a vegetable diet.

HORSING AROUND

There are more than 150 breeds of horses in the world.

The part of the foot of a horse between the fetlock and the hoof is called the pastern.

Today’s oldest form of horse is the Przewalski, or Mongolian Wild Horse. Survivors of this breed were discovered in the Gobi Desert in 1881.

Thoroughbred horses are so thin-?skinned their veins are visible beneath the skin, especially on the legs.

Though small, the Shetland pony is strong. It was once used to haul heavy cars in coal mines.

The normal body temperature of the Clydesdale horse is 101 degrees Fahrenheit.

With nearly eleven million horses within its borders, China is the leader of all nations for horse population.

Racehorses have been known to wear out new shoes in one race.

The now-?extinct ancestor of the horse, the eohippus, had a short neck and a pug muzzle and stood no higher than a medium-?sized dog.

Rhinos are in the same family as horses and are thought to have inspired the myth of the unicorn. A rhinoceros’s horn is made of compacted hair.

STRANGE SPECIES

A geep is a cross between a goat and a sheep.

The only purple animal is the South African Blesbok.

The world’s smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat of Thailand, weighing less than a penny.

There have been more than fifteen hundred documented sightings of Bigfoot since 1958.

The largest known egg ever laid by a creature was that of the extinct Aepyornis of Madagascar. The egg was nine and a half inches long.

The pichiciego is a little-?known burrowing South American animal that is related to the armadillo but is smaller in size. The ending of the animal’s name is derived from the Spanish word ciego, meaning “blind.”

Unrelated to the chicken, the male cock-?of-?the-?rock bird earned the name “cock” because of its roosterlike appearance and combative behavior. The female of the species influenced the word rock being added to the name because of her habit of nesting and rearing the young in sheltered rock niches.

HUMP DAY

The world camel population is approximately twenty million.

The longest recorded life span of a camel was thirty-?five years, five months.

A camel’s backbone is just as straight as a horse’s.

Camel’s milk does not curdle.

Camels have three eyelids to protect their eyes from blowing sand.

Traveling at a rate of two to three miles per hour, camels can carry five hundred to one thousand pounds on their backs. They are able to keep up this pace for six or seven hours a day. Camels will refuse to carry loads that are not properly balanced.

There are fewer than one thousand Bactrian camels left in the wild. They have survived in a land with no water in an area used for nuclear testing. Their numbers, however, are falling dramatically as humans encroach farther and farther into China’s Gobi Desert.

The fur of the vicuna, a small member of the camel family that lives in the Andes Mountains of Peru, is so fine that each hair is less than two-?thousandths of an inch thick. The animal was considered sacred by the Incas, and only royalty could wear its fleece.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

There are fewer than one thousand giant pandas left alive in the world.

The giant African snail grows to a foot long and reaches weights greater than a pound.

The giant armadillo has as many as one hundred teeth, although they are small and fragile.

The giant flying foxes that live in Indonesia have wingspans of nearly six feet.

Giant tortoises can live to be 150 years old or older.

The giant Pacific octopus can fit its entire body through an opening no bigger than the size of its beak. The giant squid is the largest creature without a backbone. It weighs up to two and a half tons and grows up to fifty-?five feet long. Each eye is a foot or more in diameter.

TALL TALES

Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes, and humans all have seven neck vertebrae.

The gait of the giraffe is a pace, with both legs on one side moving together. Because of its long stride, a giraffe is quicker than it appears. At full gallop, the animal can run about thirty miles per hour.

The giraffe’s heart is huge; it weighs twenty-?five pounds, is two feet long, and has walls up to three inches thick. Thinking that a giraffe was a cross between a camel and a leopard, the Europeans once called the animal a camelopard.

THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE

Turtles, tortoises, and terrapins do not have teeth. They have hard, horny jaws that are able to cut and tear food.

The gender of a sea turtle is determined by the temperature of the sand during egg incubation. Warm temperatures produce more females; cooler temperatures produce more males.

Turtles survived the upheavals of the last two hundred million years, including the great extinction episode that eliminated the dinosaurs. Now, about half of the world’s turtle species face possible extinction—due in large part to a growing demand for turtles as a popular dining delicacy and a source of traditional medicines.

The female green turtle sheds tears as she lays her eggs on the beach. This washes sand particles out of her eyes and rids her body of excess salt.

The hare can travel up to forty-?five miles per hour, whereas the rabbit can achieve an average speed of just thirty-?five miles per hour.

Jackrabbits can reach a speed of fifty miles per hour and can leap as high as five feet. A twenty-?inch adult can leap twenty feet in a single bound.

COUNTING SHEEP

A single sheep’s fleece might well contain as many as twenty-?six million fibers.

Lanolin, an essential ingredient of many expensive cosmetics, is, in its native form, a foul-?smelling, waxy, tar-?like substance extracted from the fleece of sheep.

There are close to one million sheep in Iceland.

The horns of a bighorn sheep can weigh forty pounds.

THE ULTIMATE SURVIVORS

Skunks have more than smell to protect themselves. They can withstand five times the snake venom that would kill a rabbit.

A donkey will sink in quicksand, but a mule won’t.

A woodchuck normally breathes twenty-?one hundred times an hour, but it only breathes ten times an hour while it is hibernating.

One species of antelope, the Sitatunga, can sleep underwater.

Porcupines are excellent swimmers because their quills are hollow.

The honey badger can withstand hundreds of African bee stings that would kill any other animal.

To keep from being separated while sleeping, sea otters tie themselves together with kelp, often drifting miles out to sea during the night.

An armadillo can walk underwater.

The hedgehog has a large muscle running along its stomach so it can pull its lithe body into a tight, prickly little ball for defense.

The koala is one of the few land animals that does not need to drink water to survive.

PICKY EATERS

The porcupine’s love for salt often leads the animal to roadways or walkways where salt has been sprinkled to melt the ice. They will lick and gnaw on anything containing salt, such as saddles, canoe paddles, and axe handles.

There are more goats than cows in mountainous countries because goats can survive well by eating grass and other brush.

Anteaters prefer termites to ants. They don’t have any teeth or jaws, and their sticky tongue measures more than a foot long.

The duckbill platypus of Australia can store up to six hundred worms in its large cheek pouches.

It takes a sloth two weeks to digest the food it eats.

Mongooses were brought to Hawaii to kill rats. This plan failed because rats are nocturnal while the mongoose hunts during the day.

Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike.

THE PETTING ZOO

Americans spend more than $5.4 billion on their pets each year.

Victorian society rejected the notion that pets were capable of feelings or expressing emotion.

The dog and the turkey were the only two domesticated animals in ancient Mexico.

Llamas are reported to be inquisitive, friendly animals. A llama greeting is marked by softly blowing on each other. According to animal experts, a soft blow to a person is the llama’s way of saying hello.

Armadillos can be housebroken.

The goose was the first domesticated animal.

The guinea pig originated in South America.

MAN VERSUS NATURE

Until they were imported into the country, Australia did not have any members of the cat family, hoofed animals, apes, or monkeys.

The only country in the world that has a Bill of Rights for cows is India.

Each day, fishermen kill more than a hundred whales.

Woodpecker scalps, porpoise teeth, and giraffe tails have all been used as money.

The Kansas City Railroad used to stop their trains to allow the passengers to shoot at passing buffalo.

The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was eighty thousand dollars.

There were about sixty million bison when the Europeans landed in America. By the 1880s, all but five hundred bison were killed. Today there are 350,000 bison in America.