Pets & Animals

Nature Is Strange: Unusual Facts About the World's Animals

Animals are way weirder than we give them credit for. Take hippos—they can easily outrun a person on land, but put them in a river and they sink like stones because they can't actually swim. They just walk on the bottom. Other animals have wild social quirks. Bison basically hold a vote to figure out which way the herd should move, and baby pygmy goats pick up "accents" from the peers they hang out with. From puffins going completely drab in the winter to pandas peeing while upside down, nature gets pretty creative just to get by. Hippos can run much faster than humans Unsurprisingly for an animal weighing an average of 3.5 tonnes, hippos can hit a top speed of approximately 19 miles per hour (30km/h), well above the roughly 10 miles per hour (16km/h) typical of an average human. Living in sub-Saharan Africa, this “water horse,” or “hippopotamus” from ancient