15 weird facts about animals you probably didn’t know

Our world is a wonderful place but it's also filled with quirky animals that do weird things, here are fifteen weird facts about animals that you probably didn't know. 

While working with koalas at a wildlife sanctuary in Australia, anthropologist Maciej Henneberg made a weird discovery—his koalas had intricate fingerprints. According to PBS Nova, Henneberg later discovered they were human-like and published a paper on it! 

According to the University of Oxford, rhinoceros horns aren’t actually horns at all but rather a tightly packed tuft of hair that grows and becomes glued together by the fluid that forms sebaceous glands on the animal's nose. 

That’s right, elephants can’t jump and it has everything to do with how they carry their weight according to Tony Barthel of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Elephants carry all their mass in their legs which Barthel said: “is not a good design for leaping.”

I know what you’re thinking, “narwhals don’t have horns, they have tusks.” Well, that’s actually wrong too according to the World Wildlife Fund. The long spike protruding out of a narwhal's head is a really large tooth with sensory capabilities and millions of nerves. 

According to Live Science, sloths take longer to digest their food than they do to eat it and it can take upwards of a month to fully digest a single meal. 

Flamingos are born gray or white according to New Scientist and it’s their diet of algae, shrimp, and crustaceans that eventually turns them pink. Well, it's the beta-carotene in their diet that does the job, this chemical gets deposited in a flamingo’s feathers and skin as it grows giving the animal its telltale color. 

According to the World Health Organization, mosquitos are responsible for the deaths of roughly 750,000 people each year—making them more deadly than any other animal on Earth. 

In 2007, Scientific American’s Charles Choi spoke with entomologist Christopher Tipping to understand how it was that cockroaches could live after decapitation. Turns out they seal off the wound quickly and could survive for weeks before finally dying…

Dolphins are some of the smartest creatures in the world after humans and according to a 2013 study explained by BBC News, they can call each other by their names using “unique signature whistles.”

Another animal with near-human intelligence is the octopus, which actually has a total of nine brains according to the Natural History Museum. Octopi also have three hearts and are seriously clever, they can use tools and recognize people. 

While most snails look like they might not even have one tooth, they actually can have as little as 1000 and as many as 12,000 according to BBC Science Focus’s Thomas Ling. Snail teeth are very different from human teeth, though…

According to Science Magazine, the gray-headed albatross can fly around the world in as little as 46 days. Sure it's not the same as our 48-hour flights, but it's still incredibly fast for an animal!

Ostriches can throw a kick so hard they can kill a lion according to Encyclopedia Britannica. They can also achieve speeds upwards of 45 miles per hour when frightened, so they’re probably not an animal you want to mess with. 

According to Discover Magazine, roosters crow at 140 decibels if it's right next to your ear. To protect their own ears from this noise, roosters have their own set of built-in ear plugs that close down around their ear canals when they move their heads to crow.  

In 2016, Phys Org reported on work from a group of researchers that found sperm whales living in the Caribbean had a unique accent, one wholly different from other ocean whales.