40 Fun Facts About Mammal

Which of these features is found in mammals and no other class of animal?

Birds are also warm-blooded with four-chambered hearts, and every vertebrate has a spine; only mammals nurse their young. Even the egg-laying platypus does it, sweating milk through patches of skin.

What is the largest mammal on Earth?

It is the largest animal known ever to have lived, at up to about 30 metres and 190 tonnes, bigger than any dinosaur.

What group of mammals is known for laying eggs instead of giving birth to live young?

Monotremes, which include the platypus and echidnas, are the only group of mammals that lay eggs. Despite this, they still feed their young with milk, a defining mammalian trait.

Which land mammal is recognized as the fastest over short distances?

It hits roughly 93 to 104 km/h in short bursts and can run down antelopes given a 137-metre head start, but it tires within seconds.

What unique physical ability do bats possess among all mammals?

Flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders can only glide. Echolocation is not unique either: some shrews and tenrecs, and toothed whales, use it too.

Nearly 70% of the world's 334 marsupial species live on which continent and its islands?

The name comes from marsupium, the Latin term for the abdominal pouch in which the underdeveloped young are raised.

Which animal carries its young for around 22 months, the longest gestation of any mammal?

The female's reproductive cycle is correspondingly slow, lasting several months between seasons, and calves are born weighing around 100 kilograms.

How many middle-ear bones set mammals apart from other vertebrates?

A broad neocortex region of the brain is the other feature commonly listed among the defining traits.

Whales, dolphins and porpoises are grouped together in which infraorder of fully aquatic mammals?

Despite their fish-like shape they must surface to breathe air, and they sit within the order Artiodactyla, alongside hoofed animals.

Lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys, apes and humans all belong to which order?

Carl Linnaeus chose the name because he considered it the highest order of animals.

The word 'mammal' comes from the Latin word mamma, meaning what?

Around 6,640 living species have been described, split across 27 orders.

Roughly how many living mammal species have been described?

Rodents, bats and eulipotyphlans such as hedgehogs and shrews are the largest orders by species count.

Which is the largest order of mammals by number of species?

Bats come second, accounting for about 20% of all classified mammal species.

Mammals are the only living members of which larger clade of amniotes?

Early members of the group are called pelycosaurs, and mammals arose from cynodonts around the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

Mammals originated from cynodonts, an advanced group of what?

That happened during the Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, long before mammals dominated after the dinosaurs' extinction.

How many living species of egg-laying mammals are there?

They are the platypus and four species of echidna.

In 1799, the first scientists to examine a preserved platypus concluded it was what?

Robert Knox even suspected Chinese sailors had assembled it, since it arrived via the Indian Ocean.

Where does the male platypus deliver its venom from?

It is one of the few venomous mammals, and it also hunts using electrolocation with its eyes, ears and nostrils shut.

Which animal, weighing about as much as a paperclip, is the world's smallest mammal by mass?

It averages 1.8 grams and its heart can beat up to 1,511 times a minute.

Kitti's hog-nosed bat, arguably the smallest mammal, lives in Myanmar and which other country?

Also called the bumblebee bat, it measures just 29 to 33 mm and weighs about 2 grams.

The bat order name Chiroptera comes from Ancient Greek words meaning what?

With at least 1,500 species, bats make up about 20% of all classified mammals.

The archaic English name 'camelopard' for the giraffe combines 'camel' with which other animal?

The Greek word referred to its camel-like shape and spotted colouring; Linnaeus first filed it as Cervus camelopardalis in 1758.

How many living species of elephant are currently recognised?

They are the African bush, African forest and Asian elephants; the African species have larger ears and concave backs.

An elephant's tusks are modified versions of which teeth?

They serve as weapons and as tools for digging and moving objects.

The naked mole-rat is the only mammal that is almost entirely cold-blooded. What term describes this?

It is also eusocial, lacks pain sensitivity in its skin, and is famously resistant to cancer and low oxygen.

Which is the only other known eusocial mammal besides Heterocephalus glaber, the hairless East African burrower?

Eusociality means a reproductive division of labour with castes and cooperative care of young, as in ants and bees.

Which cetacean may be the longest-lived of all mammals, reaching more than 200 years?

It is the only baleen whale endemic to Arctic waters and uses its huge triangular skull to break through ice.

How many toes do all sloths have on each rear limb, regardless of their common names?

Two-toed sloths only differ by having two digits on each forelimb; there are seven living species in two genera.

Sloths are most closely related to which other animals, together forming the order Pilosa?

Both belong to the xenarthran group native to the Neotropics.

Which mammals, poached for meat and keratin scales, are the world's most trafficked?

All eight recognised species are threatened, and the order name Pholidota means 'clad in scales' in Greek.

What are baby echidnas called?

Echidnas may be named after a half-woman, half-snake creature of Greek myth, since they seemed part mammal and part reptile.

The word 'kangaroo' comes from gangurru, a word in which Aboriginal language?

Joseph Banks first recorded it as 'kanguru' in 1770 while HMS Endeavour was beached for repairs near modern Cooktown.

Which is the largest species in the family Macropodidae?

A kangaroo appears on the national coat of arms and as the logo of Qantas.

What are the closest living relatives of the koala?

Koalas sleep up to twenty hours a day and are inaccurately called 'koala bears'.

Koalas typically sleep for up to how many hours a day?

Their diet of eucalyptus leaves is low in energy, and joeys spend their first six to seven months in the pouch.

The name 'armadillo' is Spanish for what?

Only the South American three-banded armadillos rely heavily on their armour by rolling into a ball.

Which Cingulata species has spread into the United States as far as Nebraska and Indiana?

The earliest armadillos appeared in South America some 52 to 55 million years ago.

What is the largest bat species, with a wingspan of about 1.6 metres?

Acerodon jubatus can weigh 1.5 kg; delicate bat skeletons mean only about 12% of bat genera that ever lived are known from fossils.

Besides being the tallest land animals, giraffes are the largest members of which group?

Recent genetic work suggests there may be four giraffe species and seven subspecies rather than one.

How many electroreceptors does a platypus have on its bill?

The long-beaked echidna has only 2,000 and the short-beaked echidna no more than 400.