Did You Know? Amazing Animal Facts for Students

The elephant is the largest animal living on land.

The blue whale is the largest animal known ever to have lived on Earth.

The giraffe is the tallest animal and can reach about 5.5 metres.

A camel stores fat in its hump, not water.

A baby kangaroo is called a joey, and it lives in its mother's pouch for months after birth.

The penguin is a bird that cannot fly, but it is an excellent swimmer.

Butterflies taste their food with their feet.

A spider has eight legs, so it is not an insect.

All insects have six legs.

A frog starts life as a tadpole that lives in water and breathes through gills.

A group of lions is called a pride, and the lionesses do most of the hunting.

An owl can turn its head about 270 degrees.

Bees make honey from the nectar of flowers.

The dolphin is a mammal and comes up to the surface to breathe air.

Snakes have no eyelids; a clear scale protects their eyes.

Every zebra's stripes are different, like human fingerprints.

The ostrich lays the largest egg of any living bird.

A cow has one stomach divided into four compartments.

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.

A chameleon can move each of its eyes in a different direction.

A sea star can grow a new arm to replace one it has lost.

The cheetah is the fastest land animal, reaching about 100 to 110 km/h.

The peregrine falcon goes faster than 320 km/h when it dives on its prey.

Elephants communicate with very low sounds that human ears cannot hear.

The Arabian oryx died out in the wild in the 1970s and was brought back by breeding programmes, including Shaumari Reserve in Jordan.

A worker bee makes only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life.

Sea turtles return to lay their eggs on the same beach where they hatched.

The Arctic tern makes the longest migration of any animal, more than 70,000 km a year there and back.

Ants can carry loads many times heavier than their own bodies.

Sharks have no bones; their skeletons are made of cartilage.

Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight.

A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue, because it is attached to the bottom of its mouth.

Koalas sleep up to 18 to 22 hours a day.

The axolotl can regrow its limbs and even parts of its heart and brain.

The platypus is a mammal, but it lays eggs.

A polar bear's skin is black, and its fur is actually see-through, even though it looks white.

Some kinds of parrot can live for more than 60 years.

The Arabian horse is one of the oldest horse breeds in the world.

The Arabian camel (dromedary) has one hump, while the two-humped Bactrian camel lives in Central Asia.

A woodpecker's skull protects its brain from the thousands of blows it strikes on trees every day.

An electric eel can release a shock of more than 600 volts.

An elephant's trunk contains tens of thousands of muscles.

Tardigrades (water bears) can survive extreme cold and heat, radiation and even the vacuum of space.

A jellyfish known as the 'immortal jellyfish' can return to its young stage after becoming an adult.

The mantis shrimp's eye has up to 16 types of colour receptor, while the human eye has only three.

Scientists classify living things in ranks: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.

In the 18th century Carl Linnaeus created the two-part naming system for living things, such as Panthera leo for the lion.

Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of kilometres every year between North America and Mexico.

Scientists believe birds descend from a group of meat-eating dinosaurs.

Al-Jahiz wrote 'The Book of Animals' in the 9th century, describing animal behaviour and the influence of the environment.

Coral is neither a plant nor a rock but colonies of tiny animals called polyps.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system and can be seen from space.

Some sharks have to keep swimming so that water flows over their gills and they can breathe.

Mimicry is when a harmless animal looks like a dangerous one to protect itself, like flies that resemble wasps.

During hibernation, an animal's heart rate and body temperature drop sharply to save energy.

The Greenland shark may live for around 400 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate known.

Homing pigeons use Earth's magnetic field and the position of the Sun to find their way.

Cows and sheep chew the cud, re-chewing their food to digest tough plant fibres.

Spider silk is stronger than steel of the same weight.

The dodo bird of Mauritius became extinct in the late 17th century.

Dolphins use echolocation, sending out sounds and reading the echoes to sense what is around them.

Cheetahs have very low genetic diversity, because their numbers fell drastically in the distant past.