11 Fascinating Facts that Amaze.

These amazing and interesting facts are just some of the many Things, Activities and People in our wonderful World which it is hoped you will find fascinating and surprising.

1. The tail propulsion of Dolphins is superior in efficiency to that of a ship propeller.  They use less energy to achieve a given speed.

2. The largest animal that ever lived is alive right now.  It is the Blue Whale which can grow to about 180 tons, much larger than known dinosaurs.  The Blue Whale grows to about 30 metres (100 feet).

3. Spanish soldiers in Francisco Pizarro’s expedition in Peru in 1532, found emeralds as large as pigeon eggs.  In the mistaken belief that true emeralds could not be broken, they pounded their finds with hammers and decided that due to the stones shattering, that all they had found was coloured glass.

4. Not all fish live only in the water.  Walking catfish, mudskippers, and flying fish, are among many species that can live on land.

5. The world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, Damascus in Syria, was inhabited at least as early as 2,000 BCE.

6. The first known needles were made by Cro-Magnon man about 30,000 years ago.  Made of bone, the needles contained eyes for the insertion of some type of thread, probably made of animals sinews.  Consequently Cro-Magnon man wore clothing made of stitched animal pelts.

7. The ring-tailed cat, the crayfish, the firefly, the glass snake, the horned toad, and the civet cat have something in common.  None is what it’s name implies.  The ring-tailed cat is a raccoon like animal.  The crayfish is a crustacean.  The firefly is related to beetles.  The glass snake and the horned toad are lizards.  The civet cat is related to the mongoose.

8. Elephants, lions and camels roamed Alaska about 12,000 years ago, when the climate in Alaska was very different to what it is now.

9. At birth, a Panda is smaller than a mouse and weighs about 100 grams (0.2 pounds).  That is about 1/900 of their mother’s weight, compared to about 1/20 for a human.

10. Henri Matisse’s artwork Le Bateau hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for forty seven days in 1961 before someone noticed it was upside down.  About 116,000 people had passed in front of the artwork before the error was noted. This the artwork, so you can appreciate the confusion.

11. Beneath the long, shaggy hair of the Musk Ox, which inhabits the Arctic tundra, is a dense woolly undercoat.  It is such a good insulator that when the Musk Ox lies down, it’s body heat does not melt the snow it lies on.

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