Rowdy was one of two cubs Gable intended to bring back to surprise paramour Carole Lombard, who had jokingly told him to bring her back 'a wildcat or two.' According to Stanley P. Florida calls them 'panthers,' and in South Carolina they’re 'catamounts.' The name 'Rowdy' applied to just one, a cub captured by Clark Gable on a 1937 hunting expedition.

'Mountain lion,' 'cougar,' and 'puma' are regional names for the same species. A fleeing, sword-waving elephant storming its own battalion likely racked up as many causalities as it would have inflicted on the enemy.ģ. Records exist of elephants turning and breaking ranks at the sound of musket fire or the sight of flaming arrows. Though the sight of armor-sided 'elephantry' with swords lashed to their trunks conferred, from a distance, a psychological advantage, this quickly evaporated as the two sides drew closer. They smell like roots and earth and that is all.Ģ. That elephants are reliably spooked by fire and sudden loud noises limited their usefulness in war.

According to a scientist who has taken blood samples from hibernating black bears, they do not have sleep breath and their dens don’t stink. They deliver a couple of cubs, snack on the placenta, then go back into hibernation, nursing and tending their cubs in a state of semi-alertness until spring. Surreally, black bear sows give birth halfway through their hibernation. They’re just sort of slowed down and out of it. Black bear hibernation isn’t the same as sleep. Not a problem, because the mother bear eats it-partly as cleanup, but mostly as food. Hibernating bears reabsorb their urine and form a 'fecal plug.' Cubs, on the other hand, let it go inside the den.

Erin McCarthyġ. You may be wondering: When you live off your own fat, do you need to use the toilet? If you are a bear, you do not. The footnotes in Roach’s latest offering, Fuzz : When Nature Breaks the Law, are as funny and interesting as ever from Clark Gable's mountain lion to the incredible aim of seagulls, below are a few of our favorites. in a folder and I can’t find a way to fit it in that isn’t distracting or annoying for the reader, I’ll put it in a footnote.” So it’s just me being indulgent,” Roach told us in 2014 of her process for deciding what becomes a footnote. “It’s material that doesn’t really fit the narrative, but I can’t bear to leave out. There are few diversions more delightful than the footnotes in author Mary Roach’s books, which are anything but boring-instead, like the rest of her work, they take the reader to places both informative and hilarious.

Mary roach fuzz