| ISBN |
9781849945820 (hardback) |
| Name |
Brown, Matt, 1976- author. |
| Title |
Everything you know about animals is wrong / Matt Brown. |
| Published |
London : Batsford, an imprint of Pavilion Books Company Ltd, 2020. |
| ©2020 |
| Description |
160 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm |
| Notes |
Includes index. |
| Contents |
Machine generated contents note: Beastly basics -- Animals must move, breathe and possess a head -- Animals must have sex to reproduce -- Two different species cannot interbreed -- Complex animals have more genes -- Fish were the first animals to leave the oceans -- The first animal to leave the Earth was a dog -- We've got animals well catalogued -- Humans didn't invent it -- A muddle of mammals -- All mammals are warm-blooded -- Bulls are enraged by the colour red -- Camels store water in their humps -- Bats are blind -- Lemmings commit suicide by leaping from cliffs -- Humans evolved from chimps -- Elephants use their trunks like straws -- The lion is King of the Jungle -- You're always within 6ft of a rat -- Porcupines can shoot their quills -- Marsupials are found only in Australia -- Curious diets -- Pets' corner -- Dogs see only in black and white -- One dog year is equivalent to seven human years -- Dogs say woof -- Rabbits should be fed carrots -- |
| Contents note continued: A cat can survive any fall -- Goldfish have seven-second memories -- Feathered fallacies -- Ostriches bury their heads in the sand -- Penguins hang out with polar bears -- A duck's quack does not make an echo -- Owls can turn their heads through 360 degrees -- Turkeys come from Turkey -- Magpies love to steal shiny objects -- Touching a baby bird will cause the parents to abandon it -- Pigeons are just flying rats -- Bread is bad for birds -- London's parakeets were released by Jimi Hendrix -- Just how wrong are the movies? -- Reptiles and amphibians -- You can get warts from toads -- Chameleons change colour purely for camouflage -- Boa constrictors suffocate their prey -- T-Rex was the largest upright dinosaur, and other dodgy dino myths -- Life aquatic -- All sharks are merciless killing machines -- Watch out for piranhas! They kill -- The blue whale is the world's largest living species -- Whales and dolphins are fish -- Octopi have eight tentacles -- |
| Contents note continued: All eels are born in the Sargasso Sea -- The horseshoe crab is a living fossil -- Don't mix them up -- Creepy crawlies and minibeasts -- Daddy longlegs are the most poisonous spiders -- Earwigs burrow into human ears -- Centipedes have 100 legs -- Bees always die after a sting -- All spiders have eight eyes -- A praying mantis female will always eat the male following sex -- An earthworm cut in two becomes two new worms -- Other myths and misnomers -- Are you pronouncing it wrong? -- Let's start a new wave of fake facts. |
| Summary |
A humorous and informative book, debunking a range of commonly held myths about animals. Camels store water in their humps and magpies love to steal shiny objects. Or do they? A must-read in the Everything you Know series, this book debunks a range of old-cod stories about animals in author Matt Brown's inimitable humorous and fascinating style. Covering everything from the myth that lemmings throw themselves off cliffs in suicide (they don't, but on occasion some just fall off) to bats are blind (they're not, and they can see but use the more sophisticated echolocation for certain hunting). From head in the sand ostriches to cats landing on their feet, a wealth of information on small domestic animals to the curious and giants of the animal world, plus features on the odd diets of animals and how wrongly they are portrayed in the movies. All the old stories and myths about animals we've had since childhood are gleefully debunked in a hugely entertaining book. |
| Subjects |
Animals -- Miscellanea |
| Genre |
Trivia and miscellanea |
| Series |
Everything you know about |
| Links to Related Works |
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