Fun Facts to Start July: Stream of Consciousness Again

Well, I figured, since I didn't post at all yesterday, that I'd do another "stream of consciousness" style fun fact pack for this evening. So, let's get started shall we?

• Elephants (the new title picture, like it?) often are major factors in open woodland environments in Africa because of their tendency to topple trees to get at the tasty leaves at the top. Giraffes evolved the neck, elephants just knock the whole affair down.
• Sperm whales are well known for hunting squid, some of their favorite prey. To do so, they dive to enormous and highly pressurized depths, and use sonar to find prey while holding their breath, sometimes for more than two hours. But one remarkable adaptation they are believed to have is the ability to focus the sound that they use in such a concentrated manner that they can use it to stun nearby squid.
• "Daddy-long legs" are not actually spiders. They are members of the order Opiliones, while spiders are in the order Araneae. Opliliones contains over 6,400 species, all known as harvestmen.
• There once was an enormous varanid (monitor lizards and their kin, including Komodo Dragons) known as Megalania, which lived in Australia after the last ice age. Fossils indicate that the animal grew over 20 feet long, making the largest known lizard in history
• According to a recent calculation, social insects alone (ants, bees, and some wasps) actually equal or perhaps exceed the biomass of humans on the planet.
• Sharks do not get cancer
• Most owls keenest sense is hearing, and some, such as the widespread Barn owl (Tyto alba) can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from 40 feet in the air
• Polar bears are known to hunt seal breathing holes in the polar ice, even punching their own and waiting for unwary mammals to surface. They wait by the holes laying down in the snow, and some actually cover their noses for complete camoflauge, since their nose is the darkest part of their face
• an octopus 15 feet across can fit through a space the size of a quarter
• The archerfish of Southeast asia has a groove on the roof of it's mouth that it uses to squirt water upwards with it's tongue, shooting insects off of overhanging branches to eat
• Pterodactyl is not a defined species, bu rather refers to the group (pterosaurs as a whole). The most typified image of a "pterodactyl" is a species called Pteranodon. They were also not dinosaurs, but flying reptiles.
• Sandtiger Sharks (also known as Grey Nurse and Raggedtooth Sharks in Australia and South Africa, respectively) have young that develop live in the womb. It is common for one baby, larger than the rest, to eat many of it's siblings while still inside the mother
• Badgers are rumored to be able to dig so fast, they appear to sink into the ground in a spray of dirt. This is due to their large digging claws and strong muscles, which assist them in digging, both for shelter and for prey
• The largest frog in the world is the african Goliath Frog, which can be nearly three feet long
• The evolution of color vision was driven largely by the need to differentiate between poisonous and non-poisonous plants for food
• Whale baleen, used to strain plankton in many species, is made out of the same material as fingernails, a protein called keratin
• Wolverines, the largest mustelid in the world, are said to be able to kill and eat snowbound moose in the winter, despite being barely the size of a small dog
• The average shrew must eat 80-90% of it's own weight in food every day in order to stay alive with it's breakneck metabolism
• Beavers' teeth never stop growing, they are constantly worn down by the tree-chewing habits of the animal, as well as it's diet of bark
• A cougar can jump nearly 20 feet straight into the air from a standing position
• Batman is much better than Superman

Hope you enjoyed the vomit of tidbits.