We’re not as arrogant as those gold medalists!
Second only to the slightly bigger blue whale, the fin whale is the world’s second-biggest animal. An adult fin whale male can grow to over 25m in length (about 75ft), and a female can top out at 27m (about 85ft). As for mass, male fin whales grow to about 70,000kg (about 154,000lbs), while their female counterparts can grow to 120,000kg (about 265,000lbs). Please have a look at the feature article, “Fin Whale — World’s Second-Largest Animal” for more information.
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Cheetahs are cool. They’re sleek. They’re majestic. They’re hunters who use their speed to chase down their prey. They’re the fastest land animals around, topping out in some measures at 60-70 mph. True, cheetahs can only maintain their sprints for maybe a half mile to a mile at most before needing a rest, but we don’t care. Cheetahs are just…read more
Finner, razorback, flathead, common rorqual, herring whale, finback whale — these are all names for the fin whale, an animal that few outside of the marine biology or maritime communities know or care about. But it is a majestic animal with sleek hydrodynamic lines and curves that roams the world’s oceans gulping down plankton and fish in astonishing quantities. Second…read more
Sputnik 1 was successfully launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, becoming the first artificial object to reach Earth orbit. Having been launched during the Cold War era, this tiny, beeping, ball-shaped satellite caused great concern among many paranoid red-scared Americans for whom the event was not so much a great moment of scientific achievement, but rather a disconcerting development…read more
It looks like we can add “survivor of mass extinction” to the list of awesomeness associated with pronghorns. According to this piece on the BBC website, while mastodons, giant sloths, and camels were dying off like a bunch of evolutionary wimps 11,000 years ago, the pronghorn kept bounding along the American plains and deserts like a happy-go-lucky little smart-ass. That part…read more
