Fact-based Weird Facts
Flamingos Are Not Born Pink
A baby flamingo hatches fluffy and pale grey, and it only turns that famous pink because of what it eats, a colour its parents can lose again while feeding it.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
Oxford University Is Older Than the Aztec Empire
Students were being taught in Oxford more than two hundred years before the city of Tenochtitlan was founded, and over three centuries before the Aztec Empire took shape.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Scotland's National Animal Is the Unicorn
Other countries picked eagles, bears and lions, and Scotland chose a creature nobody has ever seen, then kept it in golden chains just to be on the safe side.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Lightning Does Strike the Same Place Twice
The old saying is wrong: tall, pointy, isolated things are struck again and again, and New York's Empire State Building takes an average of 23 hits a year.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Tardigrades Spent Ten Days in Open Space and Lived
Three thousand microscopic animals were bolted to the outside of a spacecraft, the lids were opened, and most of them came back perfectly fine.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Sloths Are Secretly Excellent Swimmers
Slow on the ground, sloths float thanks to gas from digesting leaves, keep their noses up like a snorkel and swim about three times faster than they walk.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Koalas Have Fingerprints Almost Identical to Ours
Under a microscope a koala's fingertip carries the same loops and whorls a human one does, close enough that specialists have struggled to tell the two apart.
Fact-based Weird Facts
The Shrimp Whose Punch Boils the Water
The mantis shrimp swings its club so fast that the water in front of it boils into bubbles, and their collapse adds extra damage and tiny flashes of light.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Day Was Half an Hour Shorter When Dinosaurs Were Alive
A 70-million-year-old fossil shell shows that a day then lasted about 23 and a half hours, and a year held 372 of them.
Fact-based Weird Facts
The Dot on an i Is Called a Tittle
The dot over a lowercase i or j has its own name, it began as a handwriting helper in medieval manuscripts, and it may be hiding inside the phrase to a T.