50 Fun Facts About Natural History

Which 3.2-million-year-old Ethiopian fossil was nicknamed after a Beatles song played in the dig camp?

Lucy is about 40% complete, and her bones showed that human ancestors walked upright long before their brains grew large.

Which egg-laying Australian mammal did British scientists first judge to be a stitched-together fake?

Platypus males also carry venomous spurs on their hind feet, one more oddity on an animal that looked like a duck's beak sewn onto a beaver.

Which Ice Age mammal lingered on Russia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, long after vanishing elsewhere?

Woolly mammoth herds also clung on at St. Paul Island until about 5,600 years ago, millennia after mainland Siberia's last ones died around 10,000 years ago.

Which plated dinosaur's tail spikes are informally called a thagomizer, a name invented in a 1982 Far Side cartoon?

Stegosaurus tail spikes had no name of their own until cartoonist Gary Larson's joke label was picked up by paleontologists.

Which Indian Ocean island was the only home of the dodo, a flightless bird wiped out soon after sailors arrived?

Mauritius lost the dodo within about 65 years of Dutch sailors first recording the bird in 1598.

Which animal's 25-metre skeleton has hung in the entrance hall of London's Natural History Museum since 2017?

Blue whale bones took the place of a much-loved Diplodocus cast; the young female had stranded on an Irish sandbar in 1891.

Which phrase, often credited to Charles Darwin, was actually coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer in 1864?

Survival of the fittest first appeared in Spencer's Principles of Biology, and Darwin added it to the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species in 1869.

Which broadcaster, brother of the director of the film Gandhi, presented the BBC's 1979 series Life on Earth?

David Attenborough and a team of 30 spent three years filming at more than 100 locations, and an estimated 500 million people watched the result.

The thylacine, a marsupial predator whose last known member died in a Hobart zoo in 1936, is better known as what?

Tasmanian tiger stripes ran across its back and rump, and Australia marks the 1936 death each 7 September as National Threatened Species Day.

Which blue gem with a reputation for being cursed was posted to the Smithsonian in 1958 by registered mail?

The Hope Diamond arrived in a box wrapped in brown paper, insured for $1 million, with just $2.44 of the fee going on postage.

Which Royal Navy survey ship carried Charles Darwin around the world on a voyage that lasted almost five years?

HMS Beagle was expected to be away for two years; while the crew surveyed coasts, Darwin explored onshore, studying geology and wildlife.

Which small Galápagos birds, whose beaks vary with diet from island to island, are named after Charles Darwin?

Finches from the islands are really tanagers, and Darwin took several for blackbirds and wrens until ornithologist John Gould sorted them out.

Which Indonesian reptile, first recorded by Western scientists in 1910, is the largest living species of lizard?

The Komodo dragon drew a 1926 expedition that came home with two live animals, and the trip inspired the 1933 film King Kong.

Which orange-and-black butterfly flies thousands of miles each autumn to spend the winter in Mexican fir forests?

Monarch butterflies make the trip south in one generation, but the return north in spring is a relay spread over several generations.

Which golden gem, often washed up on Baltic beaches, sometimes holds insects trapped tens of millions of years ago?

Amber is fossilized tree resin, and because it starts out soft and sticky it can seal in small animals and plants for good.

Which supercontinent, proposed by Alfred Wegener, held most of Earth's land before splitting into today's continents?

Pangaea takes its name from Greek words for 'all' and 'Mother Earth', and it was surrounded by a superocean called Panthalassa.

Which primatologist first saw wild chimpanzees fish for termites with grass stalks, at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960?

Jane Goodall's sighting led her mentor Louis Leakey to say science would have to redefine both tools and humankind, or count chimpanzees as human.

Which carnivorous plant, native only to bogs in the Carolinas, snaps shut when prey touches its trigger hairs?

The Venus flytrap effectively counts: a trap closes fully only if a second hair is touched within about twenty seconds of the first.

Which extinct human relatives, named after a German valley, still account for about 2% of many living people's DNA?

Neanderthals were first recognised from bones found in the Neander Valley in 1856, and the 2010 sequencing of their genome revealed the interbreeding.

Which country was home to the moa, flightless birds up to 3.6 metres tall, until hunters arrived around 1300?

New Zealand's moa had just one predator, the massive Haast's eagle, until people arrived; overhunting then wiped them out within about 100 years.

Which North American bird, once numbering in the billions, vanished when Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914?

The passenger pigeon may once have been the most numerous bird on Earth; one 1866 flock was described as taking 14 hours to pass.

Which Swedish naturalist gave living things the two-part Latin names, such as Homo sapiens, still used by scientists?

Carl Linnaeus filed humans among the primates, and he himself is designated as the type specimen for our own species.

In which US city does the Field Museum display Sue, a Tyrannosaurus rex bought at auction for over $8 million?

Chicago won the skeleton in under ten minutes of bidding, with McDonald's and Disney among the backers; it is about 90% complete by bulk.

Which seabird sees two summers a year by flying roughly from pole to pole and back, the longest migration of any animal?

The Arctic tern can cover about 70,000 km in a year, and by chasing the sun it sees more daylight than any other creature on the planet.

Which group of insects, with about 400,000 described species, makes up roughly a quarter of all known animal species?

Beetles keep turning up, too: new species are found so often that estimates of the true total run from 0.9 to 2.1 million.

Which long-necked dinosaur's name, meaning thunder lizard, was scrapped in 1903 and revived by a 2015 study?

Brontosaurus was folded into its close relative Apatosaurus by Elmer Riggs, who judged the two too alike to keep apart.

Which rank in biological classification sits just above species and supplies the first word of names like Homo sapiens?

Genus names always take a capital letter and the species word never does, which is why Tyrannosaurus rex shortens to T. rex.

Which artist-naturalist painted every species life-size for The Birds of America, a set of 435 hand-coloured prints?

John James Audubon needed sheets about 39 inches tall to fit the largest birds, which is why the first edition is nicknamed the Double Elephant Folio.

Which slow-swimming fish of the cold North Atlantic can live for at least 272 years, longer than any other vertebrate?

The Greenland shark only reaches maturity at around 150 years old, and the oldest one studied was estimated to be nearly 400.

Which Lyme Regis fossil hunter was twelve when she found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton?

Mary Anning went on to unearth the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons from the same stretch of Dorset cliffs.

Which fish, thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?

The coelacanth is the best-known example of a Lazarus taxon, a line that vanishes from the fossil record only to reappear much later.

Which raven-sized feathered fossil from German limestone, with teeth and a bony tail, links dinosaurs and birds?

Archaeopteryx was named in 1861, two years after Darwin published his theory, and seemed to confirm it by mixing the features of two groups.

Which Roman author of the 37-book encyclopedia Natural History died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79?

Pliny the Elder commanded the fleet at Misenum; he set out to investigate the eruption, turned the trip into a rescue mission, and died at Stabiae.

Which geological period takes its name from a limestone mountain range on the border of France and Switzerland?

The Jurassic was named for the Jura Mountains, where limestone of that age was first identified; it is the middle period of the Mesozoic Era.

Which striped-legged forest relative of the giraffe, native to the Congo, was only recognised by science in 1901?

The okapi was first described from pieces of striped skin as a kind of horse, Equus johnstoni, until a skull showed where it really belonged.

Which so-called living fossil has blue, copper-based blood that is harvested to detect bacterial toxins?

The horseshoe crab is not a crab at all: it is more closely related to spiders, ticks and scorpions than to any crustacean.

Which predator is so common in the La Brea Tar Pits that 404 of its skulls went on show at the museum?

The dire wolf is so plentiful there because of the predator trap: hunters came to eat animals mired in the asphalt and got stuck themselves.

Which supposed missing link from Sussex was exposed in 1953 as a human skull paired with an orangutan jaw?

Piltdown Man was accepted by many scientists for four decades; a 2016 review pinned the forgery on its finder, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson.

Which London district houses the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum?

South Kensington was chosen when the British Museum's natural history departments ran out of room; the new building opened by 1881.

Which English city has been home since 1957 to the BBC Natural History Unit, maker of Planet Earth?

Bristol's link goes back to The Naturalist, a 1946 radio series by local BBC producer Desmond Hawkins, whose success led to a dedicated wildlife unit in the city.

Which naturalist's 1858 paper from the Malay Archipelago described natural selection independently of Charles Darwin?

Alfred Russel Wallace also mapped the faunal boundary, now named after him, that divides Indonesia's Asian animals from its Australasian ones.

Which biologist, nicknamed Darwin's Bulldog, took on Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the 1860 Oxford evolution debate?

Thomas Huxley also coined the word agnosticism in 1869, to frame the difference between what is knowable and what is not.

Which Victorian anatomist coined the word dinosaur and drove the founding of London's Natural History Museum?

Richard Owen built the name Dinosauria from Greek for 'terrible reptile', and argued that the British Museum's nature collections needed a building of their own.

Which industrialist paid for Dippy, the Diplodocus cast displayed at London's Natural History Museum from 1905 to 2017?

Andrew Carnegie had further casts made for museums from Berlin to Mexico City, making Dippy the most-viewed dinosaur skeleton in the world.

Which metal, rare in Earth's crust but common in meteorites, marks the thin rock layer from the end of the dinosaurs?

Iridium turns up in that layer at hundreds of times its normal level, the clue that led Luis and Walter Alvarez's team to propose an impact in 1980.

Which Hampshire parson-naturalist's 1789 book about the wildlife of his village, Selborne, has never gone out of print?

Gilbert White's book is presented as letters to two fellow naturalists, though some were never posted and were written specially for it.

Which French zoologist, called the founding father of paleontology, established extinction as a scientific fact?

Georges Cuvier showed that elephant-like bones from North America belonged to a vanished animal he named the mastodon, yet he strongly opposed evolution.

Which physician's collection of 71,000 objects, left to the nation on his death in 1753, founded the British Museum?

Hans Sloane is also credited with inventing chocolate milk, though he more likely learned to add milk to drinking chocolate while working in Jamaica.

Which artist sailed from Amsterdam to Suriname in 1699 to paint tropical insects and record their metamorphosis?

Maria Sibylla Merian took her younger daughter Dorothea along, and published Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium in 1705.

What term names the one specimen, often given a red label, on which a species' formal description is based?

A holotype is one of the name-bearing types under the international code of zoological naming, and a replacement can be designated if it is lost.