Page 188 - Animal Facts

The hyoid bone is the only bone in the human body not connected to any other.

This small U-shaped bone can be found amid the muscles of a human neck. Insignificant as it may seem, it serves a VERY important purpose: the hyoid bone allows human beings to speak! It helps to support your tongue and raise your larynx whenever you talk and swallow. The hyoid exists in other animals also, but humans are the only species where the location of their hyoid bone permits it to work together with the tongue and larynx to articulate a large variety of distinct sounds! (More info on the hyoid bone).

The small bones in our ear (the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup) are also not connected to the rest of the skeletal system, but they are at least attached to each other. These bones connect the ear drum to the cochlea (which transmits sound to the brain). They are necessary to convert vibrations of the eardrum into the fluid of the inner ear so that we can perceive those vibrations as sound.

A Malaysian man received a $218 trillion phone bill!

Yahaya Wahab in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, had disconnected his deceased father's phone line in January 2006, so you can imagine his surprise months later that his phone company still sent him a bill. He was more surprised to see the bill: 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit (the equivalent of 218 TRILLION US dollars) to be paid in the next 10 days. For comparison, the US National Debt is just over $13.8 trillion.

Yahaya's father had left behind an outstanding 84 ringgit ($23) bill, which Wahab said he took care of before the disconnection. The multi-trillion dollar bill from Telekom Malaysia was probably a mistake, and Yahaya said he would fight it if it he ever had to go to court for it.
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Out of the 200 million eggs a female oyster produces only a handful grow to adulthood.

Oysters can produce up to 200 million eggs in a mating season, but only a few of these offspring will develop into mature larvae and even fewer reach adulthood. (The larvae are called "spat")

However, one oyster species, the Olympia oyster, doesn't release its babies until they have grown to be larvae with a protective shell. These female oysters hold onto the fertilized eggs for 2 weeks. After that, many of these oyster moms turn into males.

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Kangaroos can produce two different types of breast milk simultaneously.

Baby kangaroos, also called joeys, spend their first several months attached to a teat inside their mother's pouch. After it leaves the pouch, it typical will continue to drink its mother's milk until it is over a year old!

If the mother gives birth to another child, an amazing phenomenon occurs - one teat will produce a milk that is high in carbohydrates for the older joey, and the other produces a fattier milk for the newborn. This allows mother kangaroos to care for up to three offspring at once - an older joey outside the pouch, a younger one attached to a teat in her pouch, and an unborn joey inside her womb!

More facts about kangaroos!

When the Allies invaded Normandy on D-Day in 1944, "Mickey Mouse" was used as a password between intelligence officers.

More facts about Mickey Mouse:

Mickey Mouse was the first talking cartoon character. In 1929's "The Karnival Kid," Mickey's first spoken words were "Hot dogs!"

Only one Mickey Mouse short has won an Academy Award. The 1941 cartoon "Lend a Paw" received the Academy Award for best animated short. And the star of that cartoon was actually Pluto, not Mickey Mouse.

Disney stopped producing Mickey Mouse cartoons for 30 years! Walt Disney's last Mickey Mouse cartoon was "The Simple Things" in 1953. Disney died in 1966 and another Mickey Mouse cartoon wouldn't come out again until 1983. That cartoon was "Mickey's Christmas Carol".

More Mickey Mouse facts!