Amazing Facts and Trivia Archives

April 20

Ant who? -- Some researchers believe that 30% of the animal biomass of the Amazon Basin is made up of ants.

My you have big eyes! -- "The Tarsier is one of the smallest primates and lives in the forests of Borneo and Sumatra and the Philippines. Tarsiers have a maximum body length of 6-1/3 inches and a 10-1/2 inch tail. Their eyes are so large that they would be equivalent to grapefruit-sized eyes in a human being. Tarsiers, along with animals from the genus Galago, are the only primates able to turn their heads through 180-degrees in each direction. Galagos, known as bush babies, also share the Tarsier's large eye-to-body ratio. They can be found in sub-Saharan African forests"

Huge leaves -- The plant with the largest leaves is a kind of palm tree called raffia (RAF-ee-uh). It has leaves that are up to 65 feet (20 m) long. That's about as long as two school busses parked end to end.

The "largest" city in the United States is Juneau, Alaska. It covers about 3,000 square miles. That's larger than the state of Delaware. In case you are wondering, Jacksonville, Florida is the largest in the lower 48 at just over 800 square miles.

The botanical name for the cacao bean is Theobroma, which is Greek for "food of the gods".

April 13

The American cat population reached nearly 68 million in 1996. American Demographics magazine estimates that's about 200 million kitty yawns per hour and a whopping 425 million catnaps each day!

Fact: In one square inch of skin there are four yards of nerve fibers, 1300 nerve cells, 100 sweat glands, 3 million cells, and 3 yards of blood vessels.

The nylon-bristle toothbrush is a descendant of the "chew stick," a twig with a frayed end of soft fibers that was rubbed against the teeth to clean them. Chew sticks have been found in Egyptian tombs dating to 3000 B.C

Assuming that all the offspring survived, 190,000,000,000,000,000,000 flies could be produced in four months by the offspring of a single pair of flies.

The Ostrich people in Africa are a group of people who have only 2 toes due to inbreeding (From Ripley's believe it or not)

April 7

The IRS employees tax manual has instructions for collecting taxes after a nuclear war.

The United Parcel Service shipped the killer whale Keiko (star of Disney movie "Free Willy") from Mexico City to Newport, Oregon in 1998.

25% of cat owners blow dry the cat's hair after giving it a bath. (And 87% of cat owners make a trip to the emergency room after giving it a bath! :) sm)

Corcoran Jump boots (Army Jump Boots) have 82 stiches on the inside of the sole and 101 stitches on the outside of the sole in honor of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions actions during WWII.

If you stimulate the Medulla, which is part of the brain stem, you will barf so violently that it will shoot about 3 feet.

April 1

There are nearly 1000 species of bats in the world, about one quarter of all mammal species. Of these, only three species are vampire bats, limited in range to Latin America. All bat species in Canada are insect-eaters.

Cats can scoot up trees quickly and easily because their claws act as hooks. Coming down is more difficult because they can't turn their paws sideways to get a good grip. The South American margay is one of the few cats that can run down a tree head first, because its ankle and foor joints swivel.

They say...Nero fiddled madley while Rome was burning in A.D. 64 Not true! The violin hadn't even been invented yet. (The first came along in the 1500's.) Rumor has it Nero was an accomplished bagpipe player, though.

Chess is believed to date from the second or third century BC, originating in India. Experts believe it served as a form of strategic military training for the ruling elites of states perpetually at war.
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