Amazing Animal Facts

FACT: The Himalayan mouse cat, although only two inches high is technically a big cat as it has the ability to roar.

FACT: Pet mice and other rodents can detect if a human being has recently had sex and will squeak to be fed, realising that their owners will likely be in a good mood and more likely to feed them after sex.

FACT: Many people know that a rhinoceros horn is made of the same substance as human nails. It is less widely known that the horns do not naturally grow perfectly horn shaped and have to be sharpened by the rhino by rubbing them against stones. If there are no stones available they sharpen the horn by rubbing it against their own bottoms.

FACT: Female gorillas in captivity will often try to mate with their keepers but only if there are no anacondas nearby.

FACT: When tigers that kill their keepers are put down, it’s traditional to give them a last meal of kippers, which are a favourite food of tigers.

FACT: If a mirror is placed in front of a cobra the snake will hypnotise itself.

FACT: Humans and dolphins are the only animals that have sex for pleasure. In the wild dolphins have been known to practice safe sex using their blow holes.

FACT: The female manhole spider is 1400 times larger than the male. The male inseminates the female by climbing inside her vagina and spitting sperm at her ovaries from several times his body length away.

FACT: If an albatross flaps its wings more than three times in succession it passes out from exhaustion.

FACT: Apart from humans, dolphins, and chimpanzees, sheep have the largest vocabulary of any animal with over seven hundred forms of baah.

FACT: A blue whale’s fart bubbles are large enough to enclose a horse. The forward thrust generated with each fart can propel the whale fifteen metres.

FACT: Tigers have a taste for human foetuses and can smell if a woman is pregnant. They will often kill a pregnant woman, rip out and eat the foetus and leave the woman otherwise untouched.

FACT: Despite having a sense of smell millions of times more powerful than ours, dogs are completely unable to smell their own faeces.

MORE AMAZING FACTS!

Strange History

FACT: In medieval England riding an inebriated horse was punishable by death. Although there is now no death penalty in England this law has never been repealed.

FACT: In ancient Sparta training for war began practically as soon as a child left the womb. At the famous battle of Khrappopyle 10,000 Persian warriors were held at bay by five hundred Spartan children, the youngest of whom was only six months old!

Weird Movie Facts

FACT: The original mask of Darth Vader was completely opaque meaning that the actor, David Prowse, had to be given directions for most scenes (a stunt double was used for the lightsaber duels who had to memorise all the moves). During the memorable scene in which Vader informs Luke he is his father Prowse was looking in entirely the wrong direction and delivered the line, ‘No, I am your father,’ to Chewbacca who was standing off screen.

Yucky Food Facts

FACT: Every 1000lb of mince contains on average: 4 cows, 142 fleas, 77 flies, 44 beetles, 26 moths, 19 cockroaches, 2 rats, 1 pigeon, 1/25th of a cat, 550 undigested blades of grass, 7 gallons of urine, 32lb of faeces, 24lb of vomit, 3lb of snotters, 1 pint of semen and 1/40^th of a human finger.

FACT: 100 litres of spring water contains enough microscopic life to feed a human for a day.

FACT: Tomato ketchup is deadly poisonous to Japanese people.

Startling Space Facts

FACT: A little known fact is that the Apollo 11 mission that first put men on the moon had a mouse on board. Although the crew joked that this was to test the quality of the green cheese its real purpose was to give forewarning of any physiological problems the crew might face. However, the mouse did not return to earth and no one aside from the crew members knows what happened to it.

FACT: It’s a myth that humans explode in space. Although this has never been tested with humans NASA did expose a goat to the vacuum of space. The goat turned bright green and suffered severe hallucinations until it died twenty seconds later.

FACTS

Amazing Animal Facts

FACT: Baleen whales don’t just swallow krill. Often fish, penguins and even medium sized sharks can be unintentionally swallowed by the giant filter feeders. Smaller fish are usually digested whereas larger fish, penguins, and sharks are often expelled through the whale’s blowhole, shooting them fifty feet or more into the air.

FACT: Hippos seldom swim in the sea in case they get attacked by sperm whales, which have mouths and stomachs exactly big enough to swallow them whole.

Hard to Believe History

FACT: The ancient Greek ruler Thermystopyle was born with only one eye and had a false one made out of marble. During the first Olympic games a javelin thrower tripped on his run up. Thermystoplye laughed so hard that his false eye popped out and could not be found, which is where the expression, ‘it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye’ comes from.

FACT: After Hiroshima the Russians began their own programme to make the atomic bomb. In parallel, just in case they could not build atomic weapons, they planned rockets using conventional explosives with the same yield. The largest rocket planned was the size of the empire state building and weighed almost a million tonnes. Any larger than this and the rocket would need so much fuel it would be too heavy to get off the ground.

Bizarre Human Body

FACT: The average human produces eighteen tonnes of snot in their lifetime. Roughly two percent of this is expelled through sneezing. The rest is inadvertently eaten.

FACT: It is impossible to keep your eyes open when chewing penguin meat.

Incredible Technology

FACT: The world’s largest hard drive is three metres across. It is used in information diagnosis and logic testing in political decision making.