49 Fun Facts About Camel

What does a camel actually store in its hump?

Fat: the hump is an energy store, and as a hungry camel burns through it the hump shrinks and can flop over to one side until the animal feeds again.

Camels can close which part of the body to keep out blowing sand?

Their nostrils: a camel pinches them shut at the onset of a sandstorm, while a double row of long eyelashes keeps the grit out of its eyes.

Camelopard, an old English name combining camel and leopard, referred to which animal?

Giraffe: to the ancient Greeks it looked like a camel wearing a leopard's spots, a label that lives on in the species name camelopardalis.

When a camel 'spits' at something that bothers it, what is it mostly throwing?

Stomach contents: the camel brings up part of its last meal and hurls it out along with saliva, a defence meant to startle or distract whatever is threatening it.

Roughly how much water can a thirsty dromedary drink in one go?

About 140 litres: a camel can lose a quarter or more of its body weight to dehydration, then make up the loss in a single drinking session lasting around 13 minutes.

Cyrus the Great put camels in his front line to panic the horses of which famously rich king?

Croesus: Herodotus says horses cannot bear the sight or smell of camels, so the Lydian cavalry turned back and Cyrus went on to capture Sardis.

Unlike most mammals, a camel's red blood cells are what shape?

Oval: the shape lets the cells keep circulating even when the camel is dehydrated.

What does a camel let climb on a hot day so it barely sweats?

Body temperature: a camel starts the day at about 34°C and lets itself warm to 40°C or more by evening, then sheds the heat in the cool of night instead of sweating water away.

What is the translucent third eyelid that a camel uses to sweep sand from its eye called?

The nictitating membrane: it sweeps grit off the eyeball, and because it is see-through a camel can keep it closed and still find its way through a sandstorm.

Which author's Just So Stories tell how the camel got his hump as a punishment for refusing to work?

Rudyard Kipling: his idle camel answers every request with 'Humph!', until a djinn turns the word into a hump that lets him work three days without eating.

What is a baby camel called?

Calf: a camel mother leaves the herd to give birth, her calf is on its feet within about half an hour, and the pair rejoin the others around two weeks later.

In GEICO's viral 2013 ad, a camel strolls through an office cheering that it is Hump Day, meaning which day?

Wednesday: it is the hump in the middle of the working week, and once you are over it the run down to the weekend begins, which is why the camel is so pleased with himself.

Why does a dromedary sometimes blow a pink, balloon-like sac out of the side of its mouth?

To attract females: the sac is the dulla, part of a male's soft palate, which he inflates in the mating season until it hangs from his mouth like a swollen pink tongue.

The camel family first evolved, and later died out, on which continent?

North America: the camel family arose there tens of millions of years ago, and only the branches that had crossed land bridges into Asia and South America survived.

Which four South American animals belong to the camel family, Camelidae?

Llama, alpaca, guanaco and vicuña: the guanaco and vicuña still run wild in the Andes, while the llama and alpaca exist only as domestic animals bred by Andean peoples.

Dromedary shares its Greek root with the word hippodrome: what does that root mean?

Running: Greek dromas kamelos meant 'running camel', at first a swift riding breed that compared with a baggage camel as a racehorse does with a carthorse.

The two-humped Bactrian camel is named after an ancient region in which part of the world?

Central Asia: Bactria lay south of the Oxus river in what is now Afghanistan and its neighbours, and its camels grow a shaggy coat for winters of minus 29°C, then shed it when summer comes.

Wild Bactrian camels went on breeding in China's Lop Nur desert while it was being used for what?

Nuclear tests: China began exploding bombs at Lop Nur in 1964, yet the camels, which can drink salt water no other large mammal tolerates, carried on breeding regardless.

Which country is home to the world's largest population of feral camels?

Australia: camels were shipped in to haul freight across the outback, their descendants went wild, and the country now even exports live camels and camel meat, some of it to the Middle East.

Which New Testament preacher wore clothes of camel's hair and lived on locusts and wild honey?

John the Baptist: dressed in camel's hair with a leather belt, he preached in the Judean wilderness and baptised the crowds who came out to him in the River Jordan.

Which ill-fated 1860 expedition across the Australian interior was the first major one to rely on camels?

Burke and Wills: they set out with over two dozen imported camels, and the leaders died on the way back after reaching their Cooper Creek depot hours after it was abandoned.

Which Secretary of War, later a leading Confederate, persuaded Congress to fund the US Army's Camel Corps in 1855?

Jefferson Davis: he won $30,000 from Congress for the experiment, which worked well enough in trials, but it collapsed when the Civil War came and he left to lead the other side.

The U.S. Army's first shipload of camels was landed in 1856 at Indianola, in which state?

Texas: the herd was marched inland to Camp Verde, and after the Civil War the Army auctioned its camels off, while others were simply turned loose on the range.

Besides Australians and Britons, which country's soldiers formed two companies of the Imperial Camel Corps?

New Zealand: the cameliers rode to battle but fought on foot, and a bronze trooper on a camel in London's Victoria Embankment Gardens still honours the corps's dead.

Since the 2000s, what has largely replaced child jockeys in Gulf camel racing?

Remote-controlled robots: after Qatar and the UAE banned child riders, owners strapped on small whip-wielding robots and worked them by remote from cars driving alongside the race.

Camel wrestling, in which two rutting males grapple, is most associated with which country?

Turkey: the sport is strongest along the country's Aegean coast, where a female in heat is led past two males in the mating season to set them shoving.

The Pushkar Camel Fair is held every autumn in which Indian state?

Rajasthan: the fair builds to the Kartik full moon, when Hindu pilgrims gather at Pushkar's sacred lake, and its sideshows include a longest-moustache contest.

Which traditional nickname do camels owe to carrying people and cargo across the sands?

Ships of the desert: a loaded camel can walk 20 miles or more a day through waterless country, so for centuries desert trade moved on its back.

Camel spiders belong to an order whose Latin name means those that flee from what?

The sun: the order is Solifugae, and the legend that they chase people has it backwards, since they are only after the shade a person casts and pose no real danger.

The cama, first born in Dubai in 1998, is a hybrid of a dromedary and which animal?

A llama: breeders hoped for a camel's strength with a sweeter nature, but Rama, the first cama, grew up with no hump and, by one report, a filthy temper.

Which camel-family member is Peru's national animal and the source of one of the world's costliest wools?

The vicuña: under the Inca only royalty could wear its wool, and the animals are still rounded up from the wild, shorn and set free again rather than farmed.

In Jesus's saying, a camel passes through a needle's eye more easily than who enters the kingdom of God?

A rich man: Jesus says it after a wealthy young man walks away rather than give up his possessions, and the astonished disciples ask who, then, can be saved.

The First World War fighter plane called the Sopwith Camel got its nickname from a hump covering what?

Its machine-gun breeches: a metal fairing over the twin guns gave the nose a humped look, pilots' slang did the rest, and the Camel went on to shoot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the war.

R. J. Reynolds launched Camel cigarettes in 1913 using which tobacco to imitate fashionable Egyptian brands?

Turkish: only a touch of it went into what was mostly American burley and bright leaf, and the blend became the most popular cigarette in the United States.

Old Joe, the model for the original Camel cigarette pack dromedary, came from which circus?

Barnum & Bailey: a photograph of its dromedary Old Joe became the pack art, and his cartoon heir Joe Camel was dropped in 1997 after a study found six-year-olds knew him almost as well as Mickey Mouse.

The Camel Trophy, the jungle 4x4 contest of 1980 to 2000, is remembered for sand-yellow vehicles from which maker?

Land Rover: the first contest in 1980 sent German crews into the Amazon in Jeeps, but from 1981 the convoys were factory-prepared Land Rovers in matching Sandglow paint.

Which Peanuts character flies an imaginary Sopwith Camel against the Red Baron?

Snoopy: as the World War I Flying Ace he takes his doghouse up against the Red Baron again and again, and his imaginary fighter keeps getting shot down.

In programming, camel case marks the start of each new word inside a name with what?

A capital letter: the capitals stick up from the word like humps, as in iPhone or eBay, which is how the style got its name.

Camel dung comes out so dry that travellers can use it straight away as what?

Fuel for fires: a camel's gut and kidneys reclaim so much water that its droppings come out dry enough to burn, handy in country with little firewood.

In the proverb warning against small concessions, once a camel gets its nose into what, the rest will follow?

The tent: in one telling of the fable, the camel asks only to warm its head, edges in bit by bit, then tells its owner there is no room for two and he had better wait outside.

Camelops, a camel that died out alongside the mammoths, vanished roughly how long ago?

About 13,000 years: Camelops vanished with the mammoths and sabre-toothed cats as the last Ice Age ended, just as people were spreading through its range.

Breeders have long crossed Bactrian and dromedary camels because the one-humped hybrid can do what?

Carry twice the load: crossing the two gives hybrid vigour, a bigger and stronger pack animal that can haul 400 kilograms or more, about twice what either parent manages.

Jesus accused the Pharisees of straining out which tiny insect while swallowing a camel?

A gnat: the jibe is aimed at teachers who tithed their garden herbs to the last leaf while neglecting justice and mercy, fussing over the smallest rule and missing the biggest.

Camel bones from Israel's Timna copper mines suggest the camel-riding patriarchs of which biblical book are an anachronism?

Genesis: the bones show pack camels reaching the region only around 930 BC, centuries after Abraham and Jacob are set, so their camel caravans look like a later writer's touch.

In 2018, a dozen camels were thrown out of a Saudi beauty contest after being given what?

Botox: judges score the camels on shapely lips and humps, and with $57 million in prizes on offer some owners tried to improve their animals' looks with injections.

In the 1917 camel charge that opened the road to Aqaba, which British officer accidentally shot his own mount in the head?

T. E. Lawrence: his pistol shot dropped the camel in mid-gallop and threw him, and he came round to find that its body had split the charge in two and the fight was already won.

Which disease, usually spread by flea bites, struck Saudis who ate raw camel liver in 1994?

Plague: investigators traced a cluster of five cases in a remote desert town to a sick camel whose raw liver four of the patients had eaten, and found the plague bacterium in the carcass.

Why is camel meat not kosher under Jewish law?

Camels chew the cud but lack cloven hooves: Leviticus demands both signs, and the pig fails the opposite way, with a split hoof but no cud.

Genetic studies showed that the wild Bactrian camel is what, relative to the domestic Bactrian?

A separate species: the wild camels split from the domestic line roughly a million years ago, long before anyone tamed a camel, and fewer than a thousand of them survive.