766
It’s all about the facts, and we have plenty to give you! You can also find more here.
Small But Mighty
- The smallest known dinosaur was about four inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than a chihuahua.
- The word “Dinosaur” comes from the ancient Greek and means “terrible lizard”.
- One-third of Earth’s land surface is partially or totally desert.
- The word “desert” comes from the Latin “desertum” which means “an abandoned place”.
- Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal eyeglasses in 1784.
What An “A-Muse-Ing” Fact!
- Vending machines kill four times as many people as sharks per year.
- Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank in Frankfurt on June 12th, 1929, but her family moved to Amsterdam in the early 1930s when the Nazis gained control.
- The duration and frequency of a donkey’s bray is unique to each individual animal.
- Ancient Rome was eight times more densely populated than modern New York.
- 144 prisoners have escaped Auschwitz successfully.
‘I’ll Be Bac’
- The Berlin Wall was more than 87 miles long.
- Theodore Roosevelt Jr was the only General involved in the initial assault on D-Day, after insisting to his superiors to be one of the first ones off the boats. He survived, then died of a heart attack one month later.
- Some 15,152 types of life forms, from insects to bacteria, have been identified on the New York subway.
- In Japan, Ronald McDonald is Donald McDonald due to a lack of a clear “r” sound.
- Sand from the Sahara is blown by the wind all the way to the Amazon, recharging its minerals. The desert actually fertilizes the rainforest.
Don’t Take the World for “Planted”
- The Amazon rainforest has been in existence for at least 55 million years.
- The bacteria in our body collectively weigh about four pounds.
- A starfish arm can regenerate a whole body.
- Argentina’s national sport is not soccer. It’s pato, an ancient game played on horseback.
- Your brain uses 20% of the total oxygen and blood in your body.
This Will Bow Your Mind
- It’s scientifically proven that even a small amount of power changes how a person’s brain operates and diminishes empathy.
- Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world’s lakes combined.
- Licence plates in the Canadian Northwest Territories are shaped like polar bears.
- In Turkmenistan, car drivers are entitled to 120 litres of free petrol a month.
- Cockroaches appeared 120 million years before dinosaurs.
It Really Makes You “Sphinx”
- Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, was actually Greek, not Egyptian.
- Cy Twombly’s painting “Untitled” is worth up to US$41.6 million.
- In 1967, the Nigerian Civil War ground to a halt for two days because both sides wanted to watch soccer player Pelé in an exhibition match.
- Mathematician Paul Erdos could calculate in his head how many seconds a person had lived when he was just four years old.
- In 2015, a man dressed up as an armoured truck driver and tricked Walmart into giving him US$75,000.
- An average four year-old asks over 400 questions a day.
- A TI-83 calculator from 1986 had six times more processing power than the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969.