Turtle

Turtles, tortoises and terrapins form a reptilian order “chelonians”, (from the Latin for “turtles”).

ETOMOLOGY 

The words turtle, tortoise and terrapin are often used interchangeably but the general rule is to call them tortoises if land-based, turtles if river or sea-based, and terrapins if amphibian.

Pixabay

In Britain, 'turtle' is generally used for saltwater species, 'terrapin' for freshwater varieties. However in the USA the word ‘turtle' covers all types while Australians use ‘tortoise' for any of them.

One way to tell a turtle and a tortoise apart is by looking at their feet – water turtles usually have flippers or webbed feet and their shells are flatter while tortoises have stubby feet and domed shells.

ANATOMY

Turtles don't have ears. They do have an eardrum-like structure which enable them to hear low-frequency noise.

A turtle shell is comprised of 60 connected bones, including the spine and ribcage.

Turtles have nerve endings in their shells. It can feel every scratch, pet and rub.

The upper part of a turtle's shell is called the 'carapace', the lower portion is the 'pastron'.

The average turtle swims at a pace of 10 to 12 mph and walks at 3 to 4 mph.

Pixabay

BEHAVIOR

Experiments have shown that turtles show most interest in things colored red, orange or yellow.

Turtles don't have vocal cords, and as a result the noises they make tend to be more like clucks or even belches.

A turtle's diet varies greatly depending on the environment in which it lives. Adult turtles typically eat aquatic plants. Some small freshwater species are carnivorous. Sea turtles typically feed on jellyfish, sponges, and other soft-bodied organisms.

A green sea turtle grazing on seagrass By P.Lindgren 

Turtles do not produce saliva and must go underwater to swallow their food.

You can tell a turtle's gender by its sound. Males grunt, females hiss.

The temperature a turtle egg is kept at can actually determine the gender of the baby turtle inside. Eggs kept warmer tend to produce females, while eggs kept at a lower temperature will generally produce males.

No species of turtle nurtures their babies. Turtles mothers find a location on land to dig a nest and lay their eggs. After they lay their eggs, they walk away. It’s up to the little turtles to fend for themselves once they hatch.

Turtles age so slowly that their organs barely deteriorate, leading some scientists to believe they might be biologically immortal if they dodge predators and disease. 

UNUSUAL TURTLES 

There are 356 species of turtle. They live on every continent on Earth except Antarctica.

The Alligator Snapping Turtle of North America has a tongue that bears resemblance to a worm. This enables it to lure fish into its mouth.

Alligator Snapping Turtle

The Fitzroy River tortoise of Australia breathes through its rear end.

The African Helmeted Turtle has glands under each of its legs, which release a nasty-smelling liquid to repel predators.

Chinese softshell turtles urinate using their mouths.

FUN TURTLE FACTS 

A collective group of turtles as pets is called a herd but in the wild they are considered a "bale of turtles".

Japan makes train tracks safe for turtles by creating underground walkways for them. This stops them being killed or derailing a train.

It is illegal in the US to sell any turtle or tortoise less than four inches long.

The earliest use of the word ‘tinned’ to refer to food given by the Oxford English Dictionary is an 1861 reference in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management to "tinned turtle."

In the movies Rocky, (1976) and Rocky Balboa, (2006) Rocky's pet turtles were played by the same two turtles.

World Turtle Day is observed on May 23 each year. The purpose of this holiday is to bring attention to, and increase knowledge of and respect for, turtles and tortoises, and encourage human action to help them survive and thrive.

Sources Daily Express. Midday

Tortoise

A tortoise is a reptile of the order Chelonia.

Pixiebay

Best known species are the small spur-thighed tortoise Testudo gracea, found in Asia minor, the Balkans and North Africa.

Strictly speaking every tortoise is a turtle, but only land-dwelling turtles are tortoises. (Of course, there's always an exception. In this instance, the land-dwelling box turtle.)

ANATOMY

17th century Italian biologist Francesco Redi found that tortoise's brains are so small and irrelevant that when he surgically removed them, they could continue to live for up to six months. When he entirely decapitated one, it still lived for 23 days.

Most tortoises are quite small, but the giant tortoises of the Galapagos and Seychelles reach a huge size - maybe 120 cm/4 feet long.

Pixiebay

The top shell of a tortoise is the “carapace”; the bottom half of the shell is the “plastron”; the individual interlocking plates are called “scutes”.

The tortoise's shell consists of a curved upper carapace and flattened lower plaston which are joined at the sides, and the head and limbs may be withdrawn within it, to a greater or lesser extent, in times of danger.

You can't see them, but every tortoise has ribs, a collar bone, and a spine inside its shell.

Tortoises from hot places tend to have lighter-colored shells than tortoises from cooler areas. The light tan sulcata originates from the southern part of the Sahara Desert.

Shells have nerve endings, so tortoises can feel every touch ... and sometimes they love it.

Most have no teeth but their mouth forms a sharp-edged 'beak.'

Like other reptiles, tortoises detect the faintest of smells with the vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson's Organ, on the roof of their mouths.

Pixiebay

You won't be able to tell a tortoise's sex until it reaches a certain size, which varies by breed. The most obvious tell is the plastron—for mating purposes, it's flatter on females and curved on males.

Male tortoises tend to be larger than females and have longer tails.

BEHAVIOR 

Tortoises generally have one of the longest lifespans of any animal, and some individuals are known to have lived longer than 150 years.

Tortoises live so long partly because their slow metabolisms burn less energy, which means less harm to the cells in their bodies.

The fastest recorded tortoise speed is 5 mph.

Galapagos tortoises sleep for 16 hours a day and can go a year without food or water.

Most land tortoises are herbivorous, feeding on grasses, weeds, leafy greens, flowers, and some fruits. However there are some omnivorous species are in this family. 

Pixiebay

Tortoises have to empty their lungs before they can go into their shells. You'll often hear them exhale when they're startled and decide to hide.

Eggs are laid in earth and hatched by the sun.

FAMOUS TORTOISES 

The oldest tortoise ever recorded for a long time was Tu'i Malila, which was presented to the Tongan royal family by the British explorer Captain James Cook shortly after its birth in 1777. A female radiated tortoise from Madagascar, Tu'i Malila remained in the care of the Tongan royal family until its death by natural causes on May 19, 1965, at the age of 188. 

TuiMalila

A Seychelles giant tortoise called Jonathan (hatched c. 1832) became in 2020 the oldest known living land animal. when he reached 188 breaking Tu'i Malila's record. Jonathan resides on the island of Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. He lives on the lush lawns of Plantation House, the official residence of the Governor of Saint Helena.

Two Russian tortoises were aboard the first spacecraft, Zond 5, to return safely from a trip around the Moon on September 21, 1968. As well as the tortoises, Zond 5 also carried fruit fly eggs, and plants. 

A tortoise called Adwaita died of liver failure in Calcutta Zoo on March 23, 2006 aged 255 years old. Adwaita was reportedly given to Robert Clive (1725–1774) of the East India Company by British seafarers who captured it in the Seychelles. This anecdotal report has not been confirmed so claims that Adwaita was 255-years old when he died cannot be substantiated. 

Charles Darwin brought a 5-year-old Tortoise named Harriet back from the Galápagos Islands in 1835 that eventually wound up at Australia Zoo, founded by Steve Irwin's parents. Harriet, the Tortoise, died on June 23, 2006 at the age of 176, the same year as the Crocodile Hunter's fatal encounter with a stingray.

Harriet at the Australia Zoo wikipedia

After several years as a mascot on a series of navy vessels, Timothy the tortoise was taken in by the Earl of Devon at his home, Powderham Castle in Exeter, SW England, in 1892. The creature was, in fact, female, but the Victorians were not aware of how to tell the sex of tortoises. She died aged about 160 on April 3, 2004.

Two Soviet tortoises were sent on the Russian Zond 5 spacecraft in 1968. They were the first ever creatures to orbit the Moon (three months before the first humans did) and survived the journey despite losing 10 per cent of their weight.

After escaping from his owner's garden in West Hougham, SE England, Toby, a 109-year-old pet tortoise, was returned 11 months later from Margate — 24 miles away.

CONSERVATION 

The tortoises of the Galapagos and Seychelles yield about 90 kg (198 lb) of meat which is delicious, even tastier than pork and chicken, with their oil tasting like butter. As they can survive for an entire year without food or water, the giant tortoises were a dream come true for sailors who had access to fresh meat throughout their voyages. However this resulted in their almost complete extermination by passing ships.

In the 1990s, the Galapagos Conservancy launched Project Isabela, an all out war against around 200,000 goats in the Galapagos Islands to save the dwindling population of Galapagos tortoises. 

Sharpshooters from New Zealand were flown in to kill the goats from helicopters. Project Isabela ended up successfully restoring the population of the tortoises.

A 100-year-old giant Galapagos tortoise named Diego has nearly single-handedly saved his species from extinction, fathering 800 offspring in the past 50 years! The breeding program, which started in 1970, helped increase the tortoise population to 2,000 from 15. Paternity tests indicate that Diego is responsible for about 40 percent of the offspring produced.

FUN TORTOISE FACTS

The word for ‘pertaining to tortoises' is testudinate. 

A group of tortoises is a creep.

Sources Daily Mail, Daily Express, Mental Floss 

Snake

There are over 2,900 species of snakes ranging as far northward as the Arctic Circle.

Pixiebay

Snakes are found on every continent except Antarctica, and many smaller land masses. There are some larger islands from which snakes are absent, such as Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, and New Zealand.

SNAKES IN HISTORY

After being kept captive at Caesarea for two years, Saint Paul had appealed to Nero Caesar, and been sent to Rome. En route to the Roman city with other prisoners the Christian apostle was shipwrecked on the island of Malta. He gathered a pile of brushwood and as he put it on the fire, a poisonous viper driven out by the heat, bit him on the hand. Paul shook the snake off into the fire and suffered no ill effects. When the superstitious local population saw that Paul was unhurt, they decided he was a god.

For 40 days St Patrick had been on the Crough Patrick mountain, weeping, fasting and praying that Ireland might be delivered from the hands of the pagans. Every night an angel appeared to him bringing along a list of God's promises. Patrick stubbornly refused to leave the mountain top until the Lord promised him one more thing, that at the last judgement it would be Patrick who pronounced sentence on the Irish people. At last he obtained the promise and Patrick descended the mountain only to cast all snakes out of Ireland.

Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice had a pet snake named Emily Spinach. She liked to carry it around the White House in her purse and take it out at unexpected moments.

A number of snakes that had disappeared from London Zoo were found by police in the cellar of a North London house on March 21, 1967. A 16-year-old boy was charged with stealing 24 snakes and a snake bag. Eight poisonous reptiles and one harmless sand boa were found dead. An official said: "Whoever handled the snakes is the luckiest person in London tonight."

In the 1970s shock rocker Alice Cooper's stage act featured a boa constrictor hugging him on-stage. Sadly in 1977, the singer's snake was bitten by a live rat as it was being fed for breakfast and the boa constrictor died.

ANATOMY 

The legless reptiles range in size from the tiny, 10.4 cm (4 inch)-long thread snake to the reticulated python of 6.95 meters (22.8 ft) in length. The latter is the longest snake in the world and can be found in South Asia.

Reticulated python By Mariluna, 

Medusa - the longest snake ever living in captivity - was measured and found to be 7.67 m (25 ft 2 in) long on October 12, 2011.The reticulated python is owned by Full Moon Productions Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Snakes have no ears so they flick their tongues in and out to pick up sound waves.

Snakes have forked tongues to be able to smell in three dimensions. By picking up odors from slightly different locations they are able to tell the direction and source of the smell.

Snakes have transparent eyelids, which means even when the reptile has its eyes closed, it can still see through its eyelids. This means snakes can't blink and they must sleep with their eyes still seeing.

Rattlesnake Pixiebay

Snakes can open their mouth up to 150 degrees.

BEHAVIOR 

Because they are cold-blooded, snakes do not have to eat so regularly as mammals. Some snakes can go as long as six months without a good meal.

Snakes swallow their food whole, and they cannot chew.

Neonate queen snake eatimg a crayfish | by Pete & Noe Woods

Snakes yawn regularly as a way of keeping their jaws limber or adjusting their bite after they’ve swallowed a large meal.

A garter snake can give birth to 85 babies.

When you put a snake into space, some tie themselves in knots while others attack themselves.

The puff adder is the first terrestrial snake observed using "lingual luring"—it tricks frogs into thinking its tongue is food.

FUN SNAKE FACTS

A collar and lead to enable snake owners to take their pet for walks was patented in the US in 2002.

The fastest moving land snake is the Black Mamba. They can reach top speeds of 10-12 mph in short bursts over level ground.

Only about two per cent of the world’s snakes are poisonous.

Australia is the only continent with more venomous snakes than there are non-venomous ones.

The Inland Taipan or "fierce snake", which is endemic to semi-arid regions of central east Australia, is the most venomous snake in the world. However, because of its shy nature and timid nature there has never been a recorded death caused by its bite. The word "fierce" describes its venom, not its temperament.

The original "Snake Oil Salesman" wasn't convicted of selling snake oil, he was convicted of selling FAKE snake oil. Oil from Chinese Water Snakes was considered a legit medicine at the time, but Clark Stanley was convicted in 1917 of selling fake snake oil.

Ophidiophobia (phobia of snakes) is one of the most common and intense phobia among the general population. A study reported that around 50% of people experience dreams about snakes.

Sea turtle

The term "Sea Turtle" is US English. In British English they are simply called "turtles". They are also sometimes called "marine turtles."

Green seas turtle By User:Simm 

There are seven types of sea turtles: green, loggerhead, kemp's ridley, olive ridley, hawksbill, flatback, and leatherback. All but the leatherback are in the family Chelonioidea. The leatherback belongs to the family Dermochelyidae and is its only member.

ANATOMY 

The leatherback is the largest sea turtle, measuring six or seven feet (2 m) in length at maturity, and three to five feet (1 to 1.5 m) in width, weighing up to 2000 pounds (about 900 kg).

A leatherback sea turtle weighs as much as a Smart car.

The other species of sea turtles are smaller, being mostly two to four feet in length (0.5 to 1 m) and proportionally narrower.

The majority of a sea turtle's body is protected by its shell. The leatherback is the only sea turtle that does not have a hard shell. Instead, it bears a mosaic of bony plates beneath its leathery skin.

Sea turtles don’t have teeth.

Sea turtles have lungs and breathe atmospheric air and they need to come back to the surface to breathe.

BEHAVIOR 

Male sea turtles never return to the shore once they are hatched, whereas females come to the shore only during nesting season.

Sea turtles have a built-in GPS. They use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate their epic voyages.

Loggerhead turtle

Thousands of sea turtle hatchlings die annually due to artificial light—they can only find the sea by using the natural glow of the horizon.

Leatherback turtles feed almost exclusively on jellyfish and help control jellyfish populations.

HABITAT 

Sea turtles are found in all the world's oceans except the Arctic Ocean, and some species travel between oceans.

The Flatback turtle is found solely on the northern coast of Australia.

The Kemp's ridley sea turtle can only be found in the Gulf of Mexico and along the East Coast of the United States.

Jairo Mora Sandoval dedicated his life to protecting leatherback sea turtle nests from poachers on Moin beach in Costa Rica. Him and volunteers, would collects the eggs and guard them in a hatchery. On May 30, 2014 Mora and four female volunteers were abducted by a group of masked men. The women eventually escaped and informed the police. 26-year-old Mora's bound and beaten body was found on the beach the next morning

FUN SEA TURTLE FACTS

Turtle gender depends on sand temperature while the egg is incubating. Warmer temperatures produce female hatchlings, while cooler temperatures produce male hatchlings.

Sea turtle eggs. By Yosri at ms.wikipedia 

In 1974 52 year old Candelaria Villanueva was thrown overboard when her passenger ship sank off the coast of Manila, Philippines, but survived for two days at sea on the back of a giant sea turtle.

In the United States, sitting on a sea turtle is a third degree felony.

Python

On April 1st, 2007 (April Fool's Day) Google sent an e-mail to its employees saying a python was loose in their office. They weren't joking.

Python

Pythons are not venomous. As constrictors, they squeeze their prey to death and swallow them whole.

Attacks on humans are rare, but a ten-year-old boy was killed in South Africa in 2002 and in 1999 a three-year-old boy died in the US.

They can detach their jaws, allowing the python to stretch to three times the size of their head.

Pythons mainly live on small mammals but have been known to eat dogs and cats, which take weeks or months to digest.

In the wild they frequently eat antelope, which weigh up to 140lbs (10st.) One python in Florida ate a 1.83 metre (6ft) crocodile.

Pythons eat only 4 to 5 times a year if their prey is large.

When a python eats something, 37 percent of the energy in the food is spent just digesting it.

After a meal, a Burmese python’s heart grows by 40%.

Burmese python

Python can grow to 30 feet and typically weigh 260 to 300lb.

Pythons live 20-30 years on average in the wild and up to 40 years in captivity.

In the wild, they are found in rainforests, savannas and deserts.

Flat out, pythons can reach speeds of 32.18 kilometres per hour (20mph).

Source Daily Mail

Lizard

There are about 6,000 lizard species found all over the world except for the continent of Antarctica where it is too cold for them to survive.

All lizards are reptiles but not all reptiles are lizards. Lizards usually have four legs, external ear openings, scaly skin and movable eyelids.

The term "dinosaur" was coined in 1842 by the English paleontologist Richard Owen, and derives from Greek δεινός (deinos) "terrible, powerful, wondrous" plus "lizard".

By the 1300s it was common for European women to condition their hair and scalp with dead lizards boiled in olive oil.

Muppets creator Jim Henson first created Kermit in 1955 - as a lizard. He was made from Henson's mother's coat and two halves of a Ping-Pong ball (no flipper feet or eleven-point collar).

World Lizard Day is celebrated annually on August 14. The day was created to raise awareness of lizards and the threats they face. Lizards are an important part of the ecosystem, and they play a vital role in controlling populations of insects and other pests. However, lizards are also facing a number of threats, including habitat loss, climate change, and the pet trade. Nobody seems to know why that particular date was chosen.

The largest lizard species, the Komodo dragon, reaches 11 feet (3.3 m) in length and weighs up to 265 lb (166 kg). It can double its body weight with a single meal!

Komodo dragons on Rinca.

The Gila monster and the beaded lizard are the only poisonous lizards. They are both found in northwestern Mexico.

Some Lizards can self-amputate their tails. They wiggle and move on the ground to distract predators.

These Lizards can regrow their tails but the new tail is never quite as good as the original.

If a tail shed by a lizard as a decoy was not eaten by the chasing predator (and the lizard gets away too) the lizard would return to eat its own tail. The shed tail is a great source of fat to regain the energy lost in its getaway.

Not all lizards have legs. The glass lizard, which is found in southeastern North America has no legs, but unlike snakes, it has moveable eyelids.

Some lizards must hold their breath as they run, since the same musculature used to work the lungs is also used for locomotion.

In Fresno, California it is against the law to annoy a lizard in a city park.

Source Daily Express

Iguana

The Iguana is a type of lizard that lives in tropical areas of Central and South America and the Caribbean.

There are only two species of Iguana: the Green Iguana and the Lesser Antillean Iguana.

A Green iguana (Wikipedia Commons)

The iguana not only use their eyes to to navigate through trees and forests and find food, but also to communicate with members of the same species.

Iguanas have a third eye (Parietal) on the top of their head that is a transparent scale that detects light and dark. They use it to alert them to aerial predators.

Green iguanas can stay submerged for up to thirty minutes.

The Marine Iguanas of Galapagos fight duels by standing forehead to forehead and pushing against each other.

Green iguanas are eaten in Central America, where they are referred to sometimes as "chicken of the tree" after their habit of resting in trees and their supposed chicken-like taste.

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous eras between about 230 million and 65 million years ago.

Dinosaur bones were first found in Sussex in 1822 when Gideon Mantell found some teeth and bones in Sussex, England. He called it ‘Iguanodon’ (‘iguana tooth’).

On August 2, 1841, English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur during a lecture on fossil reptiles given to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Plymouth. The term derives from Greek δεινός (deinos) "terrible, powerful, wondrous" + "lizard".

By Uploader: User:DrKay Wikipedia Commons

Scientists have no clue how dinosaurs mated, due to their enormous weight, plates, spikes and tails.

The low numbers of injuries in carnivorous dinosaurs indicate they may have been less aggressive with individuals of their own species than modern crocodilians.

The extinct reptile Nyasasaurus is described as the possible oldest known dinosaur from 243-million-year old fossils discovered in Tanzania.

Micropachycephalosaurus, a small herbivore from China, is the dinosaur with the longest name.
The shortest names are Mei and Kol, two feathered dinosaurs from China and Mongolia.

The nine-ton titanosaurus was the heaviest animal that ever walked on land.

The first dinosaur to be given a name was megalosaurus (great lizard) in 1842.

The first evidence of dinosaurs was a tooth dug up by English obstetrician Gideon Mantell in 1822.

The Borogovia, discovered in 1982, was named for Lewis Carroll's borogoves in Jabberwocky. (“All mimsy were the borogoves”.)

The first dinosaur in space was a Maiasaura fossil taken on a space shuttle mission in 1985.

The spiked tail of a stegosaurus didn’t have a scientific name until one was made up in the Far Side comics. Paleontologists loved the joke so much that they began using ‘thagomizer’ formally.

For a long time the smallest known dinosaur was the Fruitadens haagororum, which was only 4 inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than two pounds, that's about the size of the smallest chihuahua.

In 2020 Paleontologists discovered Oculudentavis, the smallest dinosaur known thus far. The Oculudentavis is known from a complete skull preserved within hardened resin retrieved from 99-million-year-old deposits of the Hukawng Basin in Kachin State, northern Myanmar. The skull of Oculudentavis was only 1.4 centimetres (0.55 in) in length, indicating that the animal would have been comparable in size to the modern bee hummingbird.

The biggest known dinosaur is Dreadnoughtus, which was 130 feet long and about 65 feet tall, and weighed 65 tons. It was discovered in 2005 in Argentina.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, The 'Tallest dinosaur skeleton mounted', is a 13.27 m (43 ft 6 in) tall Brachiosaurus brancai, which can be found in the Natural History Museum of Berlin.

Scientists announced on April 29, 2015, the discovery of the first known dinosaur with membranous wings, Yi qi. The first and only known fossil specimen of Yi qi was found by a farmer, Wang Jianrong, in a quarry near Mutoudeng Village (Qinglong County, Hebei) in China ). Wang sold the fossil to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature. The initial study of Yi was published in the journal Nature.

Restoration of the membrane-winged scansoriopterygid Yi qi. By Emily Willoughby, Wikipedia Commons

The title of most expensive dinosaur specimen and fossil ever sold belongs to Stan the Tyrannosaurus rex. This magnificent beast fetched a whopping $31.8 million at Christie's New York auction in October 2020, shattering the previous record held by Sue, another T. rex, which sold for $8.36 million in 1997. It's 70% complete and is the fifth most complete T-Rex fossil ever discovered.

Velociraptors were feathered, weighed less than a human three-year-old, and looked like little, long-tailed chickens.

The four-ton Stegosaurus was equipped with an unusually small brain, comparable to that of a modern Golden Retriever.

Male stegosauruses had wide, ornamental back plates to impress females, while females had spiny, tall back plates to deter predators.

Tyrannosaurus Rex had eyes that were 13 times as precise as a human's eyesight, meaning it could see prey from almost four miles (six kilometers) away.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex would barely outrun a professional soccer player, reaching an all-out speed of 18 mph.

Dinosaurs didn’t roar; they mumbled or cooed.

Most dinosaurs walked on their toes.

Scientists discovered a dinosaur tail perfectly preserved in amber. It belongs to a young coelurosaurian - from the same group of dinosaurs as the predatory velociraptors and the tyrannosaurus. The creature had a whip-like tail like a mouse, which was covered with feathers similar to those that give shape to birds.

In 1982, the comic The Far Side jokingly referred to the set of spikes on a Stegosaurus's tail on a cartoon as a "thagomizer". A paleontologist who read the comic realized there wasn't any official name for the spikes and began using the new word; Thagomizer is now the generally accepted term.

Wikipedia

Some dinosaurs had a possible lifespan of 300 years due to their slow metabolisms

The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

If Jurassic Park was real, it would cost an estimated $11,907,000,000 a year to maintain.

The puppeteers who animated the raptors in Jurassic Park had to take a six-week-long class on how to move like a dinosaur.

The only dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that lived in the Jurassic era was brachiosaurus. All the others all from the later Cretaceous period.

Tyrannosaurus rex and Brachiosaurus, both depicted in Jurassic Park, existed further apart from each other in time than humans do to T. Rex. The time gap between the existence of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brachiosaurus is estimated to be around 90 million years, while the time gap between the extinction of Tyrannosaurus Rex and the appearance of modern humans is estimated to be around 65 million years.. 

Recordings of an angry goose, mating tortoises and a Jack Russell playing with a toy were all used to help create the dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park.

Source Daily Express

Crocodile

In 2001 it was announced that scientists had unearthed the remains of an ancient crocodile which lived 110 million years ago. The animal, found in Gadoufaoua, Niger, grew as long as 40 feet and weighed as much as eight metric tons.

A crocodile escaped out of a duffel bag onboard an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on August 25, 2010. This caused the frightened passengers to move to the front of the plane, resulting in the aircraft crashing on approach to Bandundu Airport, killing 20 people.

The phrase "crocodile tears" refers to a medieval belief that crocodiles shed tears of sadness when killing and consuming their prey.

An Indonesian prison announced in 2015 a plan to use crocodiles as guards for death row drug convicts.

The Nile crocodile and similar species, unlike other animals known to be "man-eaters", are one of the few predators that see humans as actual reliable food and it will attack to predate unprovoked or when they see the opportunity.

There is a village in Africa's Burkina Faso where crocodiles and humans have lived side-by-side in peace for over 600 years

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

Crocodiles have no lips and can hold their breath for an hour.

A crocodile in cold water can hold its breath for eight hours. In warm water, its only 15 minutes.

The Nile Crocodile can hold its breath underwater for up to two hours while waiting for prey.

Prior to Steve Irwin's death the Australian naturalist designed and funded a study which discovered that crocodiles can "surf" long distances across the ocean. One of the crocodiles in this study surfed 366 miles within 25 days.

The dwarf crocodiles living in the Abanda cave system in Gabon have turned bright orange, due to bat guano bleaching their skin.

A crocodile cannot chew. Its digestive juices are so strong that it can digest a steel nail.

A crocodile's mouth can be held shut with a rubber band because its jaws have very little opening strength.

The saltwater crocodiles of Australia have brains the size of a walnut.

Every year on average in Australia, 2.5 people are attacked and 0.7 killed by crocodiles.

Ninety-nine per cent of crocodile offspring are eaten in the first year after birth, by large fish, herons, monitor lizards and adult crocodiles.

During the water bird’s nesting season, crocodiles will balance sticks over their snouts in order to lure birds that are searching for nesting material.

Crocodiles are fast on their feet, but cannot turn very well. If one is chasing you, run in zig zag lines.

Technically Crocodiles do not die. Instead of aging biologically, they just keep on growing physically. They keep eating more and more food as they grow until they finally die of hunger, get diseases or get killed by a predator.

A group of crocodiles is called a bask.

Cobra

The name "cobra" is short for cobra de capelo or cobra-de-capelo, which is Portuguese for "snake with hood", or "hood-snake."

In 1978, the Skansen Zoo in Stockholm let a king cobra wander across zoo grounds at night to stop a spate of burglaries—it worked.

In March 2006, Shahimi Abdul Hamid of Malaysia set a world record by kissing a king cobra 51 times in three minutes, one second.

Cobras, which may live up to 20 years, are found from southern Africa, through southern Asia, to some of the islands of Southeast Asia.

A Snake charmer is a person who seems to make snakes (mainly cobras) rise up by playing a pungi. The wind instrument consists of a mouth-blown air reservoir made from a gourd, which channels air into two reedpipes. Snake charming is most common in India though other Asian nations and some North African countries are also home to performers.

Although snakes are able to sense sound, they lack the outer ear that would enable them to hear the music. The cobra that sits up and sways to and fro is following the rhythmic movements of the player, who himself sways in time with the melody. The snake considers the charmer and pungi a threat and responds to it as if it were a predator.

King Cobra is called as "King" because it can eat other species of snakes, and their poison doesn't affect it.

King Cobras aren't actually true cobras and are called that because their diet consists of other snakes, including Cobras.

The bite of a king cobra can kill a human in as early as 30 minutes. Snakebites from this species are rare, however, and most of their victims are snake handlers.

One gram of King Cobra venom can kill 150 people.

King Cobra females are the only snakes that build nests. The female stays with the eggs and the male stays near by. '

Cobras eat a diet of mostly snakes, including other King Cobras, and some develop a rigid diet of a single species of snake and will refuse any other type.

Still-beating hearts of live cobras are eaten as a delicacy in Vietnam.

Chameleon

There are about 160 species of chameleon living in Africa, Madagascar, Spain and Portugal, and across south Asia as far as Sri Lanka.

Some species can change the color of their skins. Their skin is made up of tiny, mirror-like crystals that reflect differing levels of light, allowing it to change color.

Primarily, Chameleons change their color to warm up (dark colors absorb more light) or to signal mood to other chameleons, Not to camouflage themselves (as many people believe).

A completely blind chameleon will still take on the colors of its environment.

The world's tiniest chameleon has been found on Madagascar. At 2.9 cm, it is one of the world's smallest lizards.

The tail is long and highly prehensile, assisting the animal when climbing. Most chameleons live in trees and move very slowly.

A chameleon's tongue is nearly twice as long as its body.To grab prey the tongue shoots out of its mouth at more than 26 body lengths per second—13.4 miles (21.6 kilometers) an hour.

The tiny Rhampholeon spinosus chameleon’s tongue can accelerate the equivalent of a car going 0 to 60 mph in one-hundredth of a second.

Chameleons have the most distinctive eyes of any reptile. They can rotate and focus separately to observe two different objects simultaneously. This gives them a full 360-degree arc of vision around their bodies and gives them stereoscopic vision for ‘shooting.’

Some species of chameleon, such as the African species C. bitaeniatus give birth to a fully-formed young enclosed in a membrane, which is immediately shed. The  newly hatched chameleon frees itself and climbs away to hunt for itself and hide from predators. The female can have up to 30 live young from one gestation

The actress Sarah Bernhardt was fond of wild animals and had at home six chameleons.

The word is used figuratively to describe a fickle person who shifts according to the opinions of others just as a chameleon can change its color to blend with its background.

Anaconda

The Anaconda is the common name for a large South American snake of the boa family. 

The name anaconda originated from Tamil Language. anai-kondra meaning elephant killer.

The anaconda is one of the largest and most powerful snakes in the world, and the largest in the western hemisphere. A large adult green anaconda may be 6 m (19 ft) long and weigh 107 kg (235 lb). 

An Anaconda Eunectes murinus By Dave Lonsdale - Anaconda

They live for around 10 years in the wild.

It kills its prey by constriction, or squeezing. 

There have been no documented cases of an Anaconda eating a human.

The anaconda's four (mostly) parallel lines of backwards-pointing teeth help them grip their prey and swallow it whole. The lower jaw adds another two for extra assistance.  

The Anaconda is found in the rivers of the Guianas and Brazil and has tiny vertical nostrils at the end of the snout which can be entirely closed while it is swimming. 

Anacondas have eyes and nostrils designed to poke above a river’s surface. Hence their alternative name of “water boas.”

Pixabay

The upper front of the snake’s head is covered with shieldlike plates, which change farther back to scales. 

The female anaconda gives birth to living young. 

When anacondas mate, several competing males can form a ball around a female in a ritual that can last up to a month.

Source Funk & Wagnells Encyclopedia

Alligator

There are only two living species: A. mississipiensis, the Mississippi alligator of the southern states of the United States, and A. sinensis from the swamps of the lower Chang Jiang River in China.

The name alligator is an anglicized form of "el lagarto," the Spanish term for "lizard", which early Spanish explorers and settlers in Florida called the alligator. While the big lizards were for a time referred to as "lagartos," the "el" accompanied often enough that it became an inseparable part of the English word.

ALLIGATORS IN HISTORY

The earliest recorded form of alligator that is similar to ours appears in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "In his needie shop a tortoyrs hung. An Allegater stuft."

The Marquis de Lafayette gave President John Quincy Adams a pet alligator. The alligator lived in the White House for several months.

An alligator named Ben appeared in over 400 films in the first half of the 20th century. The reptile began appearing in movies in 1909,. Trained by Tom Reed, Ben earned $100 a day (equivalent to $1,420 in 2019) for his services.

Muja is an American alligator at Belgrade Zoo in Serbia, who is the oldest living alligator in the world. Muјa arrived in Belgrade with another alligator, his mate, on September 12, 1936. from Germany. He not only survived World War II, (where the Belgrade zoo was almost totally destroyed) but also the 1999 NATO bombings during the war in Serbia, 54 years later. There are no records of his date of birth but Muja is estimated to be at least 85 years old.

Saturn, an American Alligator born in 1936, is the subject of an urban myth that he was once Adolf Hitler's "pet alligator." He was gifted to the Berlin Zoo in 1936, escaped during the allied bombing in 1943. British soldiers found Saturn three years later and gifted him to the Soviet Union. He died at Moscow Zoo on May 22, 2020 when was approx 83 years old. 

Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while he was host of Lorne Greene's Animal Kingdom.

ALLIGATOR FUN FACTS

The alligator is the state reptile of Florida.

An estimated five million American alligators are spread out across the southeastern United States.

The majority of American alligators inhabit Florida and Louisiana, with over a million alligators in each state.

South Florida is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist in the wild.

The Archbishop of New Orleans ruled in 2010 that Alligator meat is classified as fish, so Catholics can eat it on Fridays during Lent.

In Florida, it is a misdemeanor of the second degree to intentionally feed a wild alligator.

ANATOMY AND BEHAVIOR

An alligator has about 80 teeth in its mouth at one time and can go through over 2,000 teeth in a lifetime.

An alligator's sex is based on the average temperature of the egg during incubation. Temperatures over 93 degrees F (33.9 C) will produce only males and below 86 degrees F (30.0 C) only females. The mother can sense these changes in temperature and will alter the nest to maintain an optimum temperature.

Alligators lay their eggs in waterside nests of mud and vegetation and are good mothers.

Alligators in Louisiana have learned to balance sticks on their heads for hunting purposes. They specifically do it during egret and heron nesting season, when the birds are actively searching for nest materials.

When resting, alligators can lower their heart rate down to as low as two beats per minute.

The Mississippi alligator is the largest reptile in North America. Male alligators average 8 to 10 feet long, while females tend to be slightly smaller.

The largest alligator ever recorded was found in Louisiana and measured 19 feet 2 inches (5.84 metres).

An alligator can go two years without feeding by burning fat reserves at the base of its tail.

Alligators have an incredibly resilient immune system. They don't get serious infections from cuts and bruises even while living in bacteria infested swamps.

Alligator Pixiebay

Alligator blood is effective against 23 types of bacteria, and fungi and viruses including HIV.

Alligators and elderly people have at least one thing in common. They both can hear notes only up to 4,000 vibrations a second.

Source Wired.com