A species of sponge called the red sponge, can be pushed through a piece of fabric so that it is broken into thousands of tiny pieces. The animal does not die. All the pieces reassemble until the sponge is back to its original, whole self and continues with its life.

The vampire bat is not as vicious as its image. It does not puncture the skin of the victim’s neck, but instead scrapes exposed patches of skin with its teeth until it draws blood. So gentle is the scraping that the sleeping prey does not wake up while the bat is at work.

Female lions do more than 90 percent of the hunting because males are afraid to risk their lives or simply prefer to rest.

The koala of Australia is perfectly adapted to one specific tree, the eucalyptus, and doesn’t need anything else, not even water. It is one of the few land animals that does not need water to supplement food.

The genre of art known as Cubism derived its name from a belittling remark made by Henri Matisse in reference to a Georges Braque painting. Matisse said that the landscape looked as though it were made up of little cubes.

Not a single bank existed anywhere in the 13 colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.

Since 1851, the U.S. Post Office has taken in more money than it has spent in only 13 years. Congress has made up the difference in the deficit years.

Because the lemur, a primitive monkey, exists in Madagascar and in a few places in Southeast Asia, some romantic people imagine there was once a continent in the Indian Ocean that connected Madagascar and Malaya and that most of it sank, marooning its lemur inhabitants at the two ends that remained above water. (This imaginary continent, which was named, naturally enough, Lemuria, has entered fiction as a kind of second Atlantis.)

Pierre and Marie Curie refused to take out a patent on the process of making radium. Radium, they declared, belonged to the world – no one had any right to profit from it.