Welcome to a journey through some fascinating, mind-boggling, and downright funny facts about your fellow earthlings in the animal kingdom. Brace yourselves for a whimsical expedition that will amuse, amaze, and possibly make you question what you know about animals.
Ready to dive into this bizarre, hilarious, and unexpected world?
There will soon be pages with weird animal facts, cool animal facts for kids, strange animal facts and rare animal facts, but for now lets start with these first:
15 “Did You Know” Animal Facts
Let’s start with the Koala.
A Koala will sleep for 18-20 hours a day, so it’s not so strange that almost every picture you see of a Koala portraits it with it’s eyes closed.
One more strange animal fact about the Koala: Did you know koalas have fingerprints just like humans? Actually are the fingerprints of a koala so indistinguishable from humans that they have on occasion been confused at a crime scene. – So if you ever find yourself a suspect in a crime scene with a koala nearby, you might just have an unusual suspect to pin it on!
Sloths go to the toilet only once a week. And it’s quite an adventure! – They descend their tree to do their business and can lose one-third of their body weight during this toilet trip.
As vultures often live in very hot surroundings, with no or only little shadow, they have to have some special ways to keep cool. – And they do have a special way, as they keep cool by pooping on their own feet
Here is something unexpected: wombats, those cute rotund marsupials from Down Under, produce nicely shaped cubed poo! These geometrical wonders are an outcome of their digestion process which dries out their feces in the last sections of their intestines, leading to the cube shape.
Read more about the wombats and their poo here.
Kangaroos can’t walk backwards
Moving on to the biggest cuddle-loving animals. Did you know that when sea otters sleep, they hold hands? It’s not just to be cute (even though it really is), but to prevent them from drifting apart while they sleep afloat on water.
A group of porcupines is called a prickle. I guess it will take more than the two porcupines on the picture.
How about this, did you know the ostrich has the largest eye of any land animal? Their eyes are about the size of a billiard ball!
And more about the Ostrich: One of the biggest members of the bird family is the Ostrich and although evolution has taken away this bird’s right to fly, an ostrich can run at an average speed of 45 mph, and they can run faster than horses.
The proper name for a group of tigers is a streak although this is a rare occurrence as tigers are extremely solitary creatures that prefer to hunt alone.
Generally a bird’s feathers, regardless of the type of bird it is, will weigh more than its skeleton.
The Vaquita, a rare species of porpoise, is the most endangered marine mammal in the world. Only about 10 individuals are thought to exist today.
Perhaps the weirdest things about the shark and most definitely one of the lesser known facts about them are that some species bark like a dog.
As well as having no skeleton, sharks do not have one single bone in their entire bodies, their skin is made up entirely of cartilage – the rubbery component that makes up part of the human ear. In some countries, shoes made from shark skin are extremely popular. While pricier than your average shoe, shark-skin shoes last around four-times longer than shoes made from other material. Most species of shark give birth to their young, as oppose to laying eggs. The average shark has around five babies each time, although the tiger and hammerhead shark have up to 40 babies from one pregnancy.