50 Awesome Facts About Animals You Probably Didn’t Know, As Shared On “Awwducational” (New Pics)

So, what's the deal with those echidnas and why do they have to blow snot bubbles to cool down? These adorable mammals are found in many parts of Australia and also in New Guinea, but the Australian desert environments are generally the most tricky for them to navigate. For a long time, people thought that echidnas were intolerant of high temperatures.

However, Christine Cooper and her fellow researchers at Curtin University in Perth found that to be false. After all, echidnas are the most widespread mammals in all of Australia! "They blow mucus bubbles from the tip of their snout and they've got a big blood sinus that sits underneath the skin at the tip of their snout," Cooper explained to ABC National Radio. "So that wets the area; as the water evaporates, it cools it, and that cools the blood."

What's even more interesting is that echidnas keep their snouts cool even in cold temperatures. As Cooper explains, they need their snouts to be moist for electroreception. "They use electroreception to find their prey, and they keep their nose moist to do that. They always tend to have a moist nose."

As many other cute animals, echidnas have fallen victim to people who would like to own them as pets. But Cooper warns that, aside from them being wild animals, they're also pretty tricky to feed. "They're eating over 20,000 individual termites a day," she notes. The ones Cooper and her team have raised in captivity are used to humans, though, and follow them around like puppy dogs. However, the reason is not as cute as we would like: they just want more food.

Let's leave patootie echidnas behind and talk more about dwarf giraffes. How did they become a thing? Well, in 2018, scientists spotted an eight-foot-and-inch-inch giraffe in Namibia and called him Nigel. The one you see on this list, Gimli, is a dwarf giraffe someone spotted even earlier, in 2015, in Uganda's Murchison Falls National Park. Named after the brave dwarf from The Lord of the Rings, Gimli is slightly taller than Nigel at nine feet and four inches.

Both dwarf giraffes are about half as short as an average giraffe, and that gives them survival disadvantages. Scientists believe that they might have a lower chance of mating and have a difficult time running from their predators because of their shorter legs.

But how do giraffes get dwarfism, anyway? For some time, observers thought that both dwarf giraffes were actually juveniles, and only later noticed that they were fully grown males. Scientists theorize that it's due to skeletal dysplasia. "Instances of wild animals with these types of skeletal dysplasias are extraordinarily rare," conservationist scientist Michael Brown explained. "It's another interesting wrinkle in the unique story of giraffe in these diverse ecosystems."

If you've never heard of the jaguarundi, don't worry – most people haven't. They're wild cats most commonly found in Central and South America. What makes them interesting is how little we know about them and how mysterious they are. They're classified as cats, but they're much smaller, more similar in appearance to the weasel-like martens. However, their behavior is more like that of a puma. They also have 38 chromosomes like most Old World cats, while most South American cats have 36.

Despite jaguarundis being one of the most widespread cats in the Americas, we know relatively little about them. Why is that? In fact, jaguarundis are the least studied cats in the world. First of all, they're incredibly difficult to trap. Arturo Caso, president of Predator Conservation, spent more than a year trying to trap two jaguarundis for his radio-collar research in Tamaulipes, Mexico.