Fascinating Facts

•  Peregrine falcons are the fastest animals in the world. They fly at an average speed of 90 mph (145 km/h).

•  An elephant, despite its ponderous appearance, can reach speeds of up to 25 mph (40 km/h) on an open stretch.

•  Sloths move so slowly that algae is formed on their fur – this is advantageous as it serves as camouflage and provides nutrients for the sloth to lick off.

Fascinating Facts

•  A cockroach can survive without its head; entomologist Christopher Tipping decapitated cockroaches under a microscope and a couple lasted for several weeks in a jar.

•  Many birds migrate, but the Arctic tern travels furthest. It flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again each year – a round trip of about 32,000 km.

•  The iguana can survive in exceptionally high temperatures.
Conversely, a thick layer of blubber provides polar bears with such excellent insulation that their body temperature and metabolic rate remain the same, even at –37°C.

Fascinating Facts

•  There have been 5,568 recorded deaths worldwide caused by box jellyfish since 1954. They have up to 60 tentacles and each one contains enough toxins to kill 50 people.

•  The inland taipan carries enough venom to kill 100 people but there are no recorded fatalities.

Fascinating Facts

•  The first fossil ever investigated was the femur of a megalosaurus found in 1676 in England. When the fragment was discovered, one Oxford professor concluded that it belonged to a giant human!

•  The fossilised remains of an archaeopteryx were discovered in 1860–62 in Solnhofen, Germany. They were found not long after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published, and this fossil offered support for an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.

Fascinating Facts

•  Weighing less than an ounce, Peewee, the smallest hamster in the world, was only just bigger than a fifty-pence piece and could fit inside a matchbox.

•  The world’s smallest recorded insects are feather-winged beetles and parasitic wasps found in the New World tropics. The smallest ones are 0.21 mm long and they outwardly show the features of an insect while having the full complement of internal organs.

Fascinating Facts

•  The zorilla, or striped polecat, lives in arid regions of southern Africa. Its smell is so potent that it can tickle your nostril hairs from half a mile away!

•  Herrings communicate through farting. And they fart all the time, which means they must have a lot to talk about!

•  The elusive, sweet-toothed binturong is a member of the civet family and lives in the tropical forests of southern Asia. It’s a bizarre animal with a scent that is said to be like buttered popcorn.

•  Termites, not cows, are the undisputed fart champions of the world. It is estimated they are responsible for as much as 11 per cent of all global methane emissions – twice as much as cows.

Fascinating Facts

•  When three ski-masked men snatched a Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh and a Monet, together worth an estimated $163 million, from a Zurich museum, they failed to take the most expensive paintings in the collection.

•  Benvenuto Cellini’s Saliera, known as ‘the Mona Lisa of sculpture’ and worth $60 million, was stolen from a museum in Vienna in 2003 and spent two years under the bed of the first-time thief before any attempt was made to ransom it; the piece was recovered, and the thief caught, in 2006.

•  While revellers partied during the 2006 Rio de Janeiro carnival, four armed men used the chaos to make off with paintings worth at least $20 million from a nearby museum.

•  Goya’s famous painting of the Duke of Wellington was snatched from London’s National Gallery in 1961 only to reappear in the lair of Doctor No during the first James Bond film. The real painting was returned voluntarily six years later.

Fascinating Fact

•  Large-scale artist Ando ‘painted’ onto the landscape of the Mundi Mundi Plains in New South Wales, Australia, creating an artwork more than six times larger than the previous ‘largest work of art in the world’ completed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude when they wrapped 11 islands in Florida in floating fabric.

Fascinating Facts

•  Damien Hirst is known for his controversial artworks, none more so than his Mother and Child Divided, which shows a cow and a calf cut into sections and exhibited in a series of separate vitrines.

•  Tracey Emin’s infamous installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 consisted of a tent which had the 102 names of her past lovers sewn into the lining. It was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004.

Fascinating Facts

•  Visitors to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, have to walk 15 miles to see the 322 galleries, housing nearly three million works of art.

•  As an engineer, Leonardo da Vinci conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing a helicopter, a tank, the use of concentrated solar power, a calculator, a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics, the double hull and many others.

•  In 1961, Matisse’s Le Bateau (The Boat) hung upside down for two months in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (none of the 116,000 visitors had noticed).

•  Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime; The Red Vineyard at Arles was bought for 400 francs by Anna Boch.