Page 191 - Animal Facts

Worker ants live for only 45-60 days, but queen ants have been known to live as long as 29 years!

If it wasn't obvious already, the worker ants do all the WORK in the ant colony. This means foraging for food, looking after the colony's young, and defending their home for unwanted intruders. One nest in South America has had up to 700,000 members, so as you can plainly see, worker ants are basically expendable.

The queen ant, on the other hand, has a unique job and therefore lives a significantly longer life than her workers. A queen of the species Lasius niger in Europe lived for 29 years in captivity! Queen ants lay all the eggs that grow into the colony's worker ants. A leafcutter ant queen in South America lived for 14 years and bred over 150 million worker ants in her lifetime!
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The banana slug can have up to 27,000 teeth on its tongue!

It uses these teeth to scrape off pieces of live and dead plants and fungi, which it eats. (source)

The world's most expensive fruitcake was worth $1.65 million.

This exorbitant dessert took six months to design and another full month to construct! Baked back in 2005 by a Tokyo pastry chef, this treat is fully edible...other than the 223 diamonds it is adorned with! This expensive treat was put on display in an exhibit called "Diamonds: Nature's Miracle" along with other diamond-related designs. So they finally made a fruitcake you wouldn't be disappointed to get for Christmas.
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Dinosaur fossils were known as "dragon bones" until about 200 years ago.

In 1824, Dean William Buckland of Oxford discovered a dinosaur fossil which he named Megalosaurus, which means "great lizard." This was the first dinosaur to be accurately described as a reptile!

The word "dinosaur" comes from Sir Richard Owen in 1842. He used the term "Dinosauria" to mean "fearfully great reptiles". By putting the dinosaurs in their own taxonomic group, Owen was intending to make an argument against progressive evolution, but really the dinosaurs served as strong evidence in favor of evolution.

More information is available in this short article about early dinosaur discoveries.

A dog skydived from a height of 15,000 feet.

Brutus the dachshund is the only dog to be certified as a skydiver (accompanied by his faithful human, Ron Sirull, of course!). This wonderdog has fallen out of the sky at speeds of 128 mph and from heights of 15,000 feet above the ground! As of 2002, Brutus had logged 100 total jumps, about which his owner joked, "That's equal to 700 jumps in dog years!"
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