Facts Archive - Page 50 of 76 - Interesting Facts

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Most of our pet cats and dogs know their names, but they (probably) didn’t come up with those names on their own. In fact, only one nonhuman primate is known to use names: the humble marmoset. The small, chatty monkeys have joined a highly exclusive club that also includes parrots and dolphins, as research from 2024 notes that marmosets use unique vocalizations to label one another.

Marmosets frequently give birth to twins.

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Unlike just about every other primate species, marmosets don’t always give birth to just one infant at a time. Twins are common, and triplets, though rare, have been known to occur as well.

Marmosets are highly social creatures, and their whistle-like “phee calls” are meant to inform fellow group members of their location. The study found that when marmosets who knew each other were placed in the same room with a barrier that blocked them from seeing one another, they not only engaged in chitchat but used unique vocalizations for one another — essentially, names. Conservation biologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who led a similar study that found African elephants “name” each other as well, believes the list of animals who engage in this practice could continue growing. He told The New York Times, “It’s likely that animals actually have names for each other a lot more than maybe we ever conceived.”

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Numbers Don't Lie

Length (in inches) of the average Goeldi’s marmoset, not including the tail

8-9

Average number of marmosets in a troop

4-15

Marmoset species

20+

Average length (in days) 0f the common marmoset’s gestation period

148

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Marmosets are native to ______.

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Marmosets are native to South America.

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A parrot named Puck knew 1,728 words.

There are talkative parrots, and then there’s Puck. The budgerigar (also known as a budgie or common parakeet) was entered into the 1995 Guinness World Records for his astonishing vocabulary, which was estimated at 1,728 words. He was observed by 21 volunteers over a six-month period to verify his abilities. In addition to mimicking, Puck also formed sentences of his own — on December 25, 1993, for instance, his owners overheard him say, “It’s Christmas. That’s what’s happening. That’s what it’s all about. I love Pucky. I love everyone.”

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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It’s a common misconception that potatoes hail from Ireland, or elsewhere in Europe, but they were actually first cultivated in the New World — specifically, South America’s Andean region. Archaeologists uncovered fossilized sweet potatoes in Peru’s Chilca Canyon dating back to around 8080 BCE, making them the oldest known remains of domesticated tubers. There’s also evidence of potatoes having grown along Peru’s coast some 4,000 years ago, as well as along the shores of Lake Titicaca (an area shared by modern-day Bolivia and Peru) roughly 2,500 years ago.

The earliest spuds were cultivated by ancient civilizations that inhabited the Andes, including the Aymara, who settled on the Titicaca Plateau no later than 1500 BCE. The Aymara managed to grow more than 200 potato varieties, despite extreme heights and adverse climatic conditions. Potatoes were also a popular crop among the Inca, who used them for pottery, medicine, and even to predict the weather.

Thomas Jefferson helped popularize french fries in the United States.

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According to the Monticello estate, Jefferson once returned from a trip to France with a recipe roughly translating to “deep-fried potatoes in small cuttings,” an early incarnation of the modern french fry. He also helped popularize other foods in the U.S., including ice cream.

Potatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century, when they were brought back to the continent by Spanish conquistadors. According to the Irish Potato Federation, the spuds arrived in Ireland between 1586 and 1600 CE, though there’s no written evidence of their early cultivation there. Potatoes, which could be grown in cheap soil, quickly became a staple crop among poorer Irish communities. When the Irish Potato Famine struck in 1845, an estimated 1.5 million Irish fled to the United States to avoid hunger. This largely accounts for why many of us draw a connection between Ireland and potatoes, despite the spud’s South American origins.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Weight (in pounds) of the heaviest recorded potato

10.875

Water content in an uncooked potato

79%

Year potatoes became the first vegetable grown in space

1995

Most recorded wins in the Mashed Potato Wrestling championships

4

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In Britain, fries are called "chips," while chips are called "______."

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In Britain, fries are called "chips," while chips are called "crisps."

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Mr. Potato Head was the first toy advertised on TV.

On April 30, 1952, a television ad aired to promote the new Mr. Potato Head toy. This marked the first televised toy advertisement and also the first ad to speak directly to children rather than their parents. Mr. Potato Head was originally much different than its modern incarnation. The packaging contained 30 plastic accessories (facial features, hands, feet, etc.) that could be affixed to real potatoes instead of a plastic body.

That inaugural advertisement featured a cartoon mascot informing kids about all the fun they could have playing with Mr. Potato Head, and the campaign proved so successful that more than a million kits sold in the first year alone. But in the 1960s, new government safety regulations prohibited the sale of sharp accessories that could, for instance, be stuck into spuds as toys. In response, the Hasbro toy company pivoted and began selling a plastic potato body with premade holes and more kid-friendly accessories.

Bennett Kleinman

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Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Inbox Studio, and previously contributed to television programs such as "Late Show With David Letterman" and "Impractical Jokers." Bennett is also a devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.

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The Grand Canyon attracts millions of visitors to northern Arizona each year, all hoping to snap an amazing photo of the canyon’s vast landscape. The mile-deep gorge is the centerpiece of such an expansive view that it can’t all be seen at once; at 277 miles long and up to 18 miles wide, the Grand Canyon is so large, it creates its own weather. In fact, getting a view from its two most popular rims (aka tops) requires nearly five hours of travel time.

The Grand Canyon is under the care of the National Park Service, yet the park boundaries don’t contain it entirely; the portion protected by Grand Canyon National Park totals 1,904 square miles, a span larger than the smallest U.S. state. In comparison, the tiny East Coast state of Rhode Island contains just 1,214 square miles.

Dinosaur bones have been discovered in the Grand Canyon.

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Despite the fact that the Grand Canyon formed millions of years ago, evidence of dinosaurs has never been found there. While the canyon’s rock walls are about a billion years older than dinosaurs, scientists believe its depths had yet to form when dinosaurs were walking the Earth.

Today, the Grand Canyon is the second-most-visited national park (bested only by the Great Smoky Mountains in 2022). Until the mid-1800s, however, little was known about the area, thanks to its remoteness. Spanish conquistadors who explored the region in 1540 had little to note of its magnificence, and an 1857 report from an American expedition through the canyon described the 6 million-year-old area as “altogether valueless,” with “nothing to do but leave.” Such declarations impeded progress in turning the natural wonder into a national park when President Benjamin Harrison first moved to protect the area in 1893 as a forest reserve; President Theodore Roosevelt designated it a national monument in 1908. It would take a third president — Woodrow Wilson — and 11 more years for the Grand Canyon to become the awe-inspiring national park it is today.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Estimated number of caves within the Grand Canyon

1,000

Miles of the Colorado River that run through the Grand Canyon

278

Species of rattlesnakes found in Grand Canyon National Park (including the pink Grand Canyon rattlesnake, only found there)

5

Visitors to Grand Canyon National Park in 2022

4.7 million

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The Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon, found in ______, is the world’s deepest canyon.

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The Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon, found in Tibet, is the world’s deepest canyon.

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Mail is delivered to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Most visitors to the Grand Canyon admire the landscape from overlooks, never venturing to the gorge’s bottom. Yet mail-carrying mules trek down into the canyon five days a week, delivering packages, food, and supplies to the Supai village, where the Indigenous Havasupai people have lived for nearly 1,000 years. (It’s unclear how long mail has been delivered this way, but mule postal deliveries were first documented in 1938.) Up to 22 mules are part of the daily, all-weather mail train, carrying up to 200 pounds of goods each, and traveling 9 miles down into the canyon outside the national park’s boundaries. The trip takes three hours down and five hours on the return, and according to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, is the last official mail-by-mule route in the country (and possibly, the world).

Nicole Garner Meeker

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Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.

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While Washington, D.C., is the U.S. capital we’re most familiar with today, it’s far from the country’s first. In fact, it came at the end of a long road. When the Second Continental Congress declared the independence of the United States of America in 1776, its home base at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) made Philadelphia the first capital of the brand-new nation. But arriving waves of British soldiers made life dangerous in the major coastal cities of the former colonies, and congressional delegates often found themselves on the move during the Revolutionary War years. Following a two-month stay in Baltimore, the Continental Congress returned to Philadelphia for six months before reconvening for one September 1777 day in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Next, they moved the capital a little farther west to York for nine months, before going back to Philadelphia again.

Congressional representatives from Washington, D.C., cannot vote on bills.

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The district’s lone member of the House of Representatives can sit on committees and introduce legislation, but cannot vote on final bills. The district also has a “shadow delegation” of two senators and one representative, who primarily advocate for D.C.’s statehood.

While the American Revolution was effectively over by summer 1783, a domestic threat from Continental Army soldiers seeking overdue wages again sent congressional delegates scurrying, this time to the campus of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). From there, it was on to Annapolis, Maryland, and then to the future New Jersey capital of Trenton through late 1784, before the government began to stabilize with the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and the election of President George Washington during its nearly six-year tenure in New York City.

Following the passage of the Residence Act in 1790, the seat of government again temporarily returned to Philadelphia, as a new federal city was built on land appropriated from Maryland and Virginia around the Potomac River. Although Philadelphians attempted to convince President Washington to stay with the offer of a lavish mansion, political horse trading had already ensured that the capital would be set in a more southern location. When Congress met for the first time in the brand-new U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in November 1800, shortly after President John Adams moved into what eventually became known as the White House, the government’s days as a peripatetic entity were officially over.

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Area (in square miles) covered by Washington, D.C.

68.3

Population of Washington, D.C., in 1800

14,093

Capital cities in South Africa

3

Stanley Cups won by the NHL’s Washington Capitals

1

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The Virginia city that was initially part of the land apportioned to Washington, D.C., is ______.

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The Virginia city that was initially part of the land apportioned to Washington, D.C., is Alexandria.

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A movement to relocate the U.S. capital gathered steam following the Civil War.

The U.S. capital hasn’t budged from its current location for more than 200 years, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been attempts to make it happen. Perhaps the strongest movement to relocate the capital emerged in the years after the Civil War, when advocates pointed to the ever-expanding nation as justification for reestablishing government operations in a centralized location such as St. Louis, Missouri. Following a few failed attempts to resolve the matter through legislation, some 80 representatives from 17 states and territories convened in St. Louis in October 1869 to debate proposals at the National Capital Removal Convention. A second convention was held the following year in Cincinnati, Ohio, but President Ulysses S. Grant got involved by pressing Congress to devote more resources to the existing capital. With the infusion of new sidewalks, office buildings, sewers, and other hallmarks of modern life spread across Washington, D.C., the city was transformed into a capital that better reflected the ideals of a world power, and the movement to uproot the government from its East Coast moorings largely ground to a halt.

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Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.

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On May 23, 1903, Vermont doctor Horatio Nelson Jackson, along with his mechanic Sewall Crocker, drove down San Francisco’s Market Street, hopped on the Oakland ferry, and traveled east into the history books — the first U.S. cross-country road trip was officially underway. This historical moment was born from a $50 wager to see if Jackson could travel from San Francisco to New York in under 90 days. It’s a wager easily won on today’s 164,000 miles of paved highway, but in the early 20th century, most byways west of Nebraska were little more than dirt roads.

Pit bull isn’t a dog breed.

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The American Kennel Club doesn’t recognize “pit bull” as an official breed. Instead, “pit bull” generally refers to a variety of breeds, including American Staffordshire terriers and American pit bull terriers — all descendants of the English bull-baiting dog.

The challenge was daunting, but Jackson accepted. He didn’t head due east, which would have sent him straight into California’s unforgiving desert, but instead traveled north into Oregon before making a sharp right turn into Idaho, where he picked up his second passenger — a pit bull named “Bud.” Averaging only 71 miles per day in his Winton touring car on the rough western roads, Jackson also had few reliable maps to navigate his way across Idaho and Wyoming. However, once Jackson, Crocker, and Bud entered Nebraska, paved roads appeared with increasing regularity, and the trio could cover 250 miles in a single day. Yet there were plenty of breakdowns, wrong turns, and other misadventures, and the whole trip took 63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes to complete — still well under the original 90-day bet. Jackson was greeted by cheering crowds as the group traveled down the Hudson River in New York toward their final destination. Finally, at 4:30 a.m. on July 26, 1903, the well-worn Winton parked in front of the Holland House hotel in midtown Manhattan. Jackson joyously honked his horn to announce their long-awaited arrival.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Year Cleveland bicycle manufacturer Alexander Winton founded his eponymous motor car company

1897

Estimated total cost of the famous 1903 road trip, according to Horatio Nelson Jackson

$8,000

Estimated distance (in miles) of the road trip in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”

17,527

Number of the longest interstate in the U.S., at 3,020.44 miles

90

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The first hybrid car was invented by ______ in 1898, nearly a century before the Toyota Prius.

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The first hybrid car was invented by Ferdinand Porsche in 1898, nearly a century before the Toyota Prius.

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The first person to drive a car long distance was a woman named Bertha Benz.

Karl Benz is often credited as the inventor of the automobile, but few know about his pioneering wife, who made major auto innovations of her own. Her greatest contribution came in August 1888, when — in an effort to prove the importance of her husband’s invention — she set off on a 65-mile journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, with her two teenage sons in Benz’s Model III Patent Model Car. Without telling her husband of her plan, Bertha and the boys quietly rolled the car out of the workshop and were soon undertaking the world’s first road trip — traveling at a max speed of 14 miles per hour. The biggest concern was getting enough gas to complete the journey (gas tanks didn’t exist yet), but luckily a pharmacist in Wiesloch, Germany, sold ligroin, a petroleum spirit used as an early motor fuel as well as a chemical solvent for laboratories. Bertha stopped by to top off the carburetor, and today the pharmacy is considered by some to be the world’s first gas station. During this laborious test drive, Bertha also cleaned fuel lines with a hat pin and even insulated an ignition wire with a garter. But most importantly, Bertha’s successful trip proved that Benz’s invention could survive rough roads and still deliver its passengers safely.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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French flag with a clock on top of a building

Seeing as Russia is the largest country in the world by land area, you may suppose it also contains the most time zones. And while it does have a lot (11, to be precise), it actually has fewer than France, which contains 12 time zones. France’s main landmass, France métropolitaine, keeps Central European Time, while its many dependencies observe 11 others. Those other regions include French Polynesia (Tahiti Time), Martinique (Atlantic Standard Time), and Mayotte (Eastern Africa Time), to name just a few, and when Saint-Pierre and Miquelon observes daylight saving time, the total number of time zones goes up to 13.

North America used to have more than 144 local times.

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Before official time zones were established by the railroads, keeping track of time was a ramshackle, decentralized affair that occasionally resulted in trains arriving in their destination earlier than they’d departed.

Russia might technically be more impressive in this regard, however, as 10 of its 11 time zones are contiguous; the only exception is Kaliningrad, which is situated between Poland and Lithuania. The United States has nine official time zones, four of which are contiguous — the rest are kept by the likes of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Time zones in Australia

9

Different local times in use around the world

38

Countries that observe daylight saving time

~70

Administrative regions of France (13 metropolitan, five overseas)

18

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The two U.S. states that don’t observe daylight saving time are ______.

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The two U.S. states that don’t observe daylight saving time are Arizona and Hawaii.

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China has only one time zone.

As the world’s third-largest country by area and second-largest by population (having recently been surpassed in the latter category by India), China could reasonably be expected to have many time zones. So you may be surprised to learn it observes only one, Beijing Time, which was implemented by the Communist Party in 1949 in the name of national unity. Reducing the number of time zones from five to one means that residents of the western city Ürümqi now keep the same time as those in Shanghai, despite being more than 2,000 miles apart. This has resulted in any number of oddities and logistical issues, including midnight sunsets and confusing business hours.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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Michelangelo is one of the few people in history whose work has spanned the centuries with no need for a last name. Hundreds of his surviving works of art — including sculptures, paintings, and drawings — don’t even bear an artist’s mark. That’s because the artist only ever signed one piece, the Madonna della Pietà, and his doing so likely stemmed from misplaced credit.

Michelangelo’s David sculpture was carved from scrap stone.

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Michelangelo was known for being selective about the marble used to chisel his sculptures. However, David was produced from a partially carved slab discarded by other artists due to its poor quality. Repurposing the stone into the famous statue took Michelangelo nearly three years.

Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt the Pietà in the late 1490s. As he was just 24 years old at the time, it was one of his earliest projects, and a piece that helped launch him into the spotlight. The sculpture, which was created as a funeral monument for French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères, depicts the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus following the Crucifixion. The young artist sculpted the piece from one cut of marble and finished the job in under two years. According to fellow Renaissance artist and friend Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo’s statue initially bore no indication of its creator, but the artist supposedly changed his mind after overhearing his work credited to a rival; he snuck back to chisel his name prominently onto the sash across Mary’s chest.

Shame at the rash decision likely kept Michelangelo from signing his future works of art, though the artist did find other ways of inserting his likeness into his work. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo imposed his own features onto St. Bartholomew — who was skinned alive — possibly as a joke meant to share his disdain for the physically grueling project.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Years Michelangelo spent painting the Sistine Chapel

4

Number of people who visit the Sistine Chapel daily

25,000

Months of repair work needed after the Pietà was vandalized in 1972

10

Weight (in pounds) of Michelangelo’s David sculpture

12,000

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Michelangelo wrote more than 300 ______ during his lifetime.

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Michelangelo wrote more than 300 poems during his lifetime.

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Michelangelo’s David sculpture was once censored thanks to Queen Victoria.

A replica of Michelangelo’s David has been housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London since 1857, but there was a time when it underwent some adjustments thanks to the queen of England. Several plaster replicas of David have been made, and in the mid-1800s, one was shipped to Great Britain as a gift from Leopold II, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to Queen Victoria. Victoria had two main issues with the sculpture — its staggering 20-foot height and its nudity — and sent the statue to the museum, where, based on the queen’s initial horrified response, curators created a 2-foot plaster fig leaf to cover the offending organ. According to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the leaf was attached with the help of “strategically placed hooks” any time museum staff believed royal ladies might visit. However, today the David replica stands frondless, as the artist originally intended.

Nicole Garner Meeker

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Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.

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There are people who commit to a cause, and then there’s Julia Butterfly Hill. At age 23, the environmental activist protested the planned logging of a 200-foot-tall redwood tree near Stafford, California, by climbing it and living there for 738 days. Luna, as the famous tree has since come to be known, is 1,500 years old and was occupied by Hill from December 10, 1997, to December 18, 1999 — a two-year "tree sit" that was ultimately successful. Pacific Lumber Company agreed to save Luna in addition to every other tree within a 200-foot buffer zone after being paid $50,000; the company, which was founded in 1863, ultimately went out of business in 2008.

Redwoods are the tallest trees on the planet.

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Sequoia sempervirens, also known as coastal redwood and California redwood, is indeed the tallest tree species on Earth. These trees frequently live between 1,000 and 2,000 years.

Hill’s stay in the tree was far from ideal. She lived on a pair of 6-by-4-foot platforms, had supplies hoisted to her by a group of supporters, and zipped a sleeping bag around her entire body (save for a small hole to breathe through) on cold nights. On top of all that, she also braved El Niño winds up to 40 mph and harassment and intimidation from Pacific Lumber (including helicopter flyovers). Hill achieved a kind of celebrity status throughout her two years atop Luna, appearing on radio shows with the help of a satellite phone and earning the admiration of many.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Estimated age of Methuselah, the oldest living nonclonal tree

4,850+

Percentage of original old-growth redwoods that remain on the Pacific Coast

5%

Height (in feet) of Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree

380

Estimated number of trees on Earth

3.04 trillion

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The country with the most trees is ______.

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The country with the most trees is Russia.

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Trees can theoretically live forever.

The aforementioned Methuselah isn’t the only extremely old tree. Fellow bristlecone pine Prometheus was at least 4,900 years young when it was cut down in 1964, and a Patagonian cypress in Chile called Gran Abuelo is somewhere between 3,653 and 5,484 years old. Living or otherwise, these super-agers share an important trait: They all have the potential to live indefinitely. There’s little scientific evidence suggesting that trees can or do die of old age in the same way many other organisms do; instead, they’re usually felled by external forces such as storms, fires, or axes. Of course, as “forever” hasn’t happened yet, no tree has lived that long yet — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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We hate to break it to you penguin lovers, but those flightless birds we know and adore aren’t actually penguins — in fact, there are no true penguins left anymore. The term “penguin” was originally used as an alternative name for the great auk, whose binomial name is Pinguinus impennis, meaning “plump or fat without feathers.” Great auks sadly went extinct more than 180 years ago. The birds we call penguins today aren’t closely related to those original penguins at all. They belong to the Spheniscidae family rather than Alcidae, and the Sphenisciformes order rather than Charadriiformes, which is to say that puffins, guillemots, and other auks are more closely related to actual penguins than today’s penguins are.

Penguins are the only birds that can’t fold their wings.

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Penguin wings are short, stiff, and fused straight in such a way that they’re unable to fold. Their strength and rigidity has earned more comparisons to flippers rather than conventional wings.

It’s believed that everyone’s favorite Antarctica residents got their name from errant sailors who called them penguins simply because of their strong resemblance to the great auk. Both species are flightless yet excellent swimmers, with black backs, white bellies, an upright stance, and webbed feet. Pinguinus impennis lived in the coastal waters of the North Atlantic and could be found everywhere from the East Coast of the United States to the western shores of Europe, as well as Iceland and Greenland. They went extinct for the same reason that many other species did: People liked the way they tasted and were careless, even cruel, in their treatment.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Living species in the Alcidae family

24

Year of the last confirmed great auk sighting

1844

Species of modern-day penguins

18

Estimated number of Antarctic penguin breeding pairs

20 million

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The most abundant penguin species in the world is the ______.

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The most abundant penguin species in the world is the macaroni penguin.

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Several penguin species mate for life.

Among those penguins that choose one partner and stick with them through thick and thin are the macaroni, gentoo, Adélie, and Magellanic penguins. Others, such as the mighty emperor, stick with one mate per breeding season. Monogamy isn’t the only romantic practice among gentoos, either: Males have been known to offer rocks and pebbles to females as a courtship ritual. Only the smoothest, shiniest stones will do, and the bachelor in question also has to first ensure their would-be mate is single.

Michael Nordine

Staff Writer

Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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Original photo by Philip Thurston/ iStock

Compared to other members of the animal kingdom, humans are pretty good at tasting things. Our primate biology gives us the ability to detect five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (or savory). These five basic tastes create the nearly limitless flavor profiles of all the foods we enjoy (or detest) — but not all animals are so lucky. Birds, for example, can’t detect spiciness in foods, which is why a pigeon could munch on a Carolina Reaper without a second thought. Taste also varies widely among mammals, and dolphins and whales may be some of the worst off, because they have devolved to only taste salt. That’s right — these unfortunate creatures have slowly lost their sense of taste over millions of years.

Taste buds are only on your tongue.

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Humans have between 2,000 and 10,000 taste buds (we lose some as we age), and a majority of them are located on the tongue. However, other parts of the mouth, including the soft palate, inner cheek, esophagus, and epiglottis, also contain taste buds.

In 2014, scientists analyzed the genomes of 15 species of baleen and toothed whales, and found a massive loss of taste receptors across the board. Although these receptors were technically still present, they had been irreparably damaged by genetic mutations. Researchers were particularly surprised by the loss of bitter receptors, as many toxins in the sea have a bitter taste. This slow-but-steady loss of taste is likely tied to how whales and dolphins eat, as they tend to swallow prey whole rather than chew like many fellow mammals do. So while slowly losing their sense of taste is certainly a bitter pill to swallow, luckily these cetaceans can’t taste it anyway.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Weight (in pounds) of a blue whale’s tongue

5,400

Number of dolphin species in the world

42

Year the Miami Dolphins became the first (and still only) U.S. football team to achieve a perfect, 17-0 season

1972

Maximum number of taste buds found in catfish, the most of any animal in the world

175,000

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Beagle puppy in car window looking at camera

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The world’s largest dolphin species is the ______.

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The world’s largest dolphin species is the Orca (Orcinus orca).

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Whales and dolphins sleep with only half of their brain at a time.

Whales and dolphins are mammals, and that means they breathe air into lungs just like we do. So without water-breathing evolutionary advantages like gills, how do whales and dolphins sleep without drowning? One big benefit is that marine mammals are much better at holding their breath underwater than us primates. Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), for example, can go 90 minutes without having to come up for air. But over millions of years, whales and dolphins have also developed a few strategies for catching some z’s on the go. Young cetaceans, for example, will swim alongside their mothers and rest within her slipstream. This gives calves time to develop sleeping strategies as well as put on enough blubber to keep them afloat. As adults, whales and dolphins will sleep with half of their brain still operating at a low level of alertness. The other half, along with the opposite eye, is completely asleep. This helps a cetacean keep one eye out for predators, while also periodically breaching the water’s surface to take in gulps of air through its blowhole.

Darren Orf

Writer

Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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