Interesting Information

About 10,000 new animal species are being discovered every year.
The bee hummingbird of Cuba is the smallest warm blooded creature. It is only 2.25" long and weighs less than 2 gm.

The Compsognathus is the smallest dinosaur. It measured slightly more than half a metre in length and weighed around 3 kg.—the weight of a large hen.
About 100,000 species of extinct animals have been identified by scientists from their fossil remains.

The Baluchitherium was the largest terrestrial mammal ever to have walked on this earth. Its length was about 12 m. and it weighed 20 tons. At present the African elephant is the largest terrestrial mammal. It weighs 6 tons.

The Brachiosaurus is considered to be the heaviest of all prehistoric animals. It weighed around 78 tons—about the weight of 13 African elephants!

The dodo was once commonly found in Mauritius. It was a heavy, large bird weighing 30 kg. and walked very slowly. Due to this, it was caught and killed very easily leading to its extinction at around the end of the 18th century.

Study of corals which lived 300 million years ago has revealed that during that time there were 400 days in a year. In a coral, a day's growth is marked by a distinct ring. The rings on the prehistoric corals revealed this surprising fact.
There are about 30,000 species of fish known to scientists, of them about 2,300 are of the fresh water species.

The King Cobra is the only snake to build a nest. It scrapes together clay and leaves and makes a nest about half a metre in height.
The king cobra is the longest venomous snake in the world. It grows to a length of 9 to 10 m.
The male snake uses the sense of smell to search for female snake for breeding purposes.

The female tropical stick insect is the longest insect in the world. It measures around 330 mm.

The queen termite is considered to lead the longest lifespan in the insect world. It can live up to 50 years.

The male cicadas are said to be the loudest of all insects. They can produce
sounds that can be detected at more than a quarter of a mile away.

The largest living bird is the ostrich, a flightless bird. The heaviest flying bird is the Kori bustard which weighs about 15 kg.

The hummingbird has the highest energy consumption per unit of weight. The average man uses about 3,500 calories in a day. If the hummingbird was the size of a man it would use 155,000 calories!

The flightless rail is the smallest of flightless birds and is the size of a newly hatched chicken. It is an inhabitant of Inaccessible Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.
The willow warbler is an unusual bird as it moults twice a year.
The heaviest bird ever to have lived1 on our earth was the Elephant bird. It weighed about 450 kg. They have become extinct recently. They inhabited Madagascar.

When the first explorers brought the skin of the duck-billed platypus from Australia, scientists did not take it seriously. The platypus, as we know, is a very strange, mixed up, peculiar animal. We can't blame the zoologists of that time for thinking it was a .hoax.

The dog was one of the first animals to have been domesticated by man as far back as 10,000 BC. The goat was domesticated around 8,000 BC, cattle around 5,500 BC, sheep 5,000 BC, horse and donkey around 3,000 BC, cat and chicken around 2,000 BC, duck and goose around 1,500 BC. and the rabbit 1,000 AD.

The flatfish, also known as Moses soles, secrete a milky substance to defend themselves from their enemies. This secretion is the poison, pardoxin and is very lethal. Just one part of it in 5,000 parts of sea water is enough to kill small fish and molluscs. It even causes paralysis in fish like the shark.