AMAZING ANIMAL FACTS!

Here are some amazing and sometimes humorous facts about the fantastic world of animals.

There are only three animals with blue tongues: the black bear, the Chow Chow dog and the blue-tongued lizard.

Bonobos are the only non human primates that engage in oral sex, tongue kissing, and face-to-face genital sex.

Dolphins sleep with one eye open.

Camels have three eye lids.

Bulls are color blind.

A cow’s only sweat glands are in its nose.

The Poison Arrow frog has enough poison to kill 2,200 people.

Emus can’t walk backwards.

Some fleas have split penises like a Y shape

An elephant can be pregnant for up to 2 years

Chickens can’t swallow while they are upside down.

The average garden-variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.

A goldfish has a memory span of 3 seconds.

More people are killed annually by donkeys than in airplane crashes.

Animal breeders in Russia once claimed to have bred sheep with blue wool.

Penguins are the only bird that can leap into the air like porpoises.

By some unknown means, an iguana can end its own life.

Americans spend around $3 billion for cat and dog food a year.

Pigs can cover a mile in 7.5 minutes when running at top speed.

The shell constitutes 12 percent of an egg’s weight.

A squid has 10 tentacles.

A snail’s reproductive organs are in its head.

When a horned toad is angry, it squirts blood from its eyes.

The typical hen lays 19 dozen eggs a year.

The ostrich has a 46-foot long small intestine.

A scallop has 35 blue eyes.

A swan is the only bird with a penis

The left leg of a chicken in more tender than the right one.

The only dog that doesn’t have a pink tongue is the chow.

Dogs and humans are the only animals with prostates.

The giraffe has the highest blood pressure of any animal.

Zebras can’t see the color orange.

There are more insects in ten square feet of a rain forest than there are people in Manhattan.

It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs.

The smartest dogs are the Jack Russell Terrier and Scottish Border collie. Dumbest: Afgan hound.

The fat molecules in goat milk are 5 times smaller than those found in cow milk. It takes 20 minutes  for the stomach to breakdown as opposed to the hour that it takes to break down cow milk.

Flying squirrels don’t really fly, they glide from branch to branch. A blanket-like furry skin stretches their front and hind legs, and acts as a parachute, enabling the squirrel to soar like a kite.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

No two zebras have the same striped pattern.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

A beaver can hold it’s breath for 45 minutes.

Toucans are found only in tropical areas of Central and South America. Some Toucan species have bills more than half as long as their bodies.

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.

The longest recorded life span of a tapeworm was 35 years!

Roadrunners are large (about two feet long) crested birds that prefer to run rather than fly. They eat rattlesnakes whole, and they can sprint 15 miles per hour.

A purple finch is really crimson in color.

You’re 20 timesstruck by lightning than to be bit by a rattlesnake.

A male Angler fish attaches itself to a female and never lets go. Their vascular systems unite and the male becomes entirely dependent on the female’s blood for nutrition.

Bengal tigers are the most water loving of the big cats. They will even chase prey into the water.

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times its own weight each year.

A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.

A cat sees about six times better than a human at night because of the tapetum lucidum , a layer of extra reflecting cells which absorb light.

A cat uses its whiskers to determine if a space is too small to squeeze through. The whiskers act as feelers or antennae, helping the animal to judge the precise width of any passage.

A cat will clean itself with paw and tongue after a dangerous experience or when it has fought with another cat. This is believed to be an attempt by the animal to soothe its nerves by doing something natural and instinctive.

A cat’s arching back is part of a complex body language system, usually associated with feeling threatened. The arch is able to get so high because the cat’s spine contains nearly 60 vertebrae which fit loosely together. Humans have only 34 vertebrae.

A cat’s jaws cannot move sideways.

A cat’s tongue consists of small “hooks,” which come in handy when tearing up food.

A capon is a castrated rooster.

A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body.

A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can’t.

A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

A father Emperor penguin withstands the Antarctic cold for 60 days or more to protect his eggs, which he keeps on his feet, covered with a feathered flap. During this entire time he doesn’t eat a thing. Most father penguins lose about 25 pounds while they wait for their babies to hatch. Afterward, they feed the chicks a special liquid from their throats. When the mother penguins return to care for the young, the fathers go to sea to eat and rest.

He may not be as dedicated as the Emperor penguin, but you can still

Find Romance with Yahoo! Personals

You can see the photos so you won’t have to worry about kissing Frogs

A father sea catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they are ready to hatch. He will not eat until his young are born, which may take several weeks.

A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.

A Holstein’s spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length

A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.

A rat can last longer without water than a camel can.

A typical bed usually houses over 6 billion dust mites.

A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.

A zebra is white with black stripes.

According to ancient Greek literature, when Odysseus arrived home after an absence of 20 years, disguised as a beggar, the only one to recognize him was his aged dog Argos, who wagged his tail at his master, and then died.

Adult cats with no health problems are in deep sleep 15 percent of their lives. They are in light sleep 50 percent of the time.

All clams start out as males; some decide to become females at some point in their lives.

All pet hamsters are descended from a single female wild golden hamster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.

An adult lion’s roar can be heard up to five miles away, and warns off intruders or reunites scattered members of the pride.

An American Animal Hospital Association poll showed that 33 percent of dog owners admit that they talk to their dogs on the phone or leave messages on an answering machine while away.

Ancient Egyptians believed that “Bast” was the mother of all cats on Earth. They also believed that cats were sacred animals.

Animal gestation periods: the shortest is the American opossum, which bears its young 12 to 13 days after conception; the longest is the Asiatic elephant, taking 608 days, or just over 20 months.

Ants are social insects and live in colonies which may have as many as 500,000 individuals.

Ants don’t sleep.

Aphids are born pregnant without the benefit of sex. Aphids can give birth 10 days after being born themselves.

At 188 decibels, the whistle of the blue whale is the loudest sound produced by any animal.

Australian termites have been known to build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.

Barbara Bush’s book about her English Springer Spaniel, Millie’s book, was on the bestseller list for 29 weeks. Millie was the most popular “First Dog” in history.

Beaver teeth are so sharp that Native Americans once used them as knife blades.

Before the enactment of the 1978 law that made it mandatory for dog owners in New York City to clean up after their pets, approximately 40 million pounds of dog excrement were deposited on the streets every year.

By feeding hens certain dyes they can be made to lay eggs with varicolored yolks.

Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.

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

Cat scratch disease, a benign but sometimes painful disease of short duration, is caused by a bacillus. Despite its name, the disease can be transmitted by many kinds of scratches besides those of cats.

Catfish have 100,000 taste buds.

Catnip can affect lions and tigers as well as house cats. It excites them because it contains a chemical that resembles an excretion of the dominant female’s urine.

Cats are the only domestic animals that walk directly on their claws, not on their paws. This method of walking is called “digitigrade.”

When cats scratch furniture, it isn’t an act of malice. They are actually tearing off the ragged edges of the sheaths of their talons to expose the new sharp ones beneath. Cats have a third eyelid called a haw and you will probably only see it when kitty isn’t feeling well.

Cats have amazing hearing ability. A cat’s ear has 30 muscles that control the outer ear (by comparison, human ears only have six muscles). These muscles rotate 180 degrees, so the cat can hear in all directions without moving its head. A cat has four rows of whiskers.

Cats have better memories than dogs. Tests conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that while a dogs memory lasts no more than 5 minutes, a cat’s can last as long as 16 hours – exceeding even that of monkeys and orangutans.

Cats have more than one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

Cats purr at about 26 cycles per second, the same frequency as an idling diesel engine.

Cats step with both left legs, then both right legs when they walk or run. The only other animals to do this are the giraffe and the camel.

Cat’s urine glows under a black light.

Cats, not dogs, are the most common pets in America. There are approximately 66 million cats to 58 million dogs, with Parakeets a distant third at 14 million.

Certain frogs can be frozen solid then thawed and continue living.

Cheetahs make a chirping sound that is much like a bird’s chirp or a dog’s yelp. The sound is so an intense, it can be heard a mile away.

Cojo, the 1st gorilla born in captivity, was born at the Columbus Zoo, in Ohio, in 1956 and weighed 3 1/4 pounds.

Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not sweat by salivating. They sweat through the pads of their feet.

Dachshunds are the smallest breed of dog used for hunting. They are low to the ground, which allows them to enter and maneuver through tunnels easily.

Despite its reputation for being finicky, the average cat consumes about 127,750 calories a year, nearly 28 times its own weight in food and the same amount again in liquids. In case you were wondering, cats cannot survive on a vegetarian diet.

Developed in Egypt about 5,000 years ago, the greyhound breed was known before the ninth century in England, where it was bred by aristocrats to hunt such small game as hares.

Dogs are mentioned 14 times in the Bible.

Dragonflies are one of the fastest insects, flying 50 to 60 mph.

Each day in the US, animal shelters are forced to destroy 30,000 dogs and cats.

Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the Earth’s food crop.

Elephants can communicate using sounds that are below the human hearing range: between 14 and 35 hertz.

Every known dog except the chow has a pink tongue – the chow’s tongue is jet black.

Every year, $1.5 billion is spent on pet food. This is four times the amount spent on baby food.

Felix the Cat is the first cartoon character to ever have been made into a balloon for a parade.

For Stephen King’s “Cujo” (1983), five St. Bernards were used, one mechanical head, and an actor in a dog costume to play the title character.

French poodles did not originate in France. Poodles were originally used as hunting dogs in Europe. The dogs’ thick coats were a hindrance in water and thick brush, so hunters sheared the hindquarters, with cuffs left around the ankles and hips to protect against rheumatism. Each hunter marked his dogs’ heads with a ribbon of his own color, allowing groups of hunters to tell their dogs apart.

George Washington’s favorite horse was named Lexington. Napoleon’s favorite was Marengo. U.S. Grant had three favorite horses: Egypt, Cincinnati, and Jeff Davis.

German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog.

Goldfish lose their color if they are kept in dim light or are placed in a body of running water, such as a stream.

Howler monkeys are the noisiest land animals. Their calls can be heard over 2 miles away.

Hummingbirds are the smallest birds – so tiny that one of their enemies is an insect, the praying mantis.

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.

In ancient Egypt, entire families would shave their eyebrows as a sign of mourning when the family cat died.

In cats, the calico and tortoiseshell coats are sex-linked traits. All cats displaying these coats are female… or occasionally sterile males.

In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.

Infant beavers are called kittens.

It takes 35 to 65 minks to produce the average mink coat. The numbers for other types of fur coats are: beaver – 15; fox – 15 to 25; ermine – 150; chinchilla – 60 to 100.

It takes a lobster approximately seven years to grow to be one pound.

Korea’s poshintang – dog meat soup – is a popular item on summertime menus, despite outcry from other nations. The soup is believed to cure summer heat ailments, improve male virility, and improve women’s complexions.

It takes forty minutes to hard boil an ostrich egg.

Large kangaroos cover more than 30 feet with each jump.

Lassie was played by several male dogs, despite the female name, because male collies were thought to look better on camera. The main “actor” was named Pal.

Lassie, the TV collie, first appeared in a 1930s short novel titled Lassie Come-Home written by Eric Mowbray Knight. The dog in the novel was based on Knight’s real life collie, Toots.

Lions are the only truly social cat species, and usually every female in a pride, ranging from 5 to 30 individuals, is closely related.

Macaroni, Gentoo, Chinstrap and Emperor are types of penguins.

Marie Antoinette’s dog was a spaniel named Thisbe.

Mockingbirds can imitate any sound from a squeaking door to a cat meowing.

Moles are able to tunnel through 300 feet of earth in a day.

Mosquitoes are the common vector for malaria, encephalitis, yellow fever and dengue fever.

Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.

Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.

Neutering a cat extends its life span by two or three years.

No two spider webs are the same.

Only full-grown male crickets can chirp.

Owls have eyeballs that are tubular in shape, because of this, they cannot move their eyes.

Parrots, most famous of all talking birds, rarely acquire a vocabulary of more than twenty words, however Tymhoney Greys and African Greys have been know to carry vocabularies in excess of 100 words.

Pekingese dogs were sacred to the emperors of China for more than 2,000 years. They are one of the oldest breeds of dogs in the world.

Pet parrots can eat virtually any common “people-food” except for chocolate and avocados. Both of these are highly toxic to the parrot and can be fatal.

Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.

Prairie dogs are not dogs. A prairie dog is a kind of rodent.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)