The "powder" on the wings of moths and butterflies is really a layer of any, coloured scales which `overlap each other almost like the tiles on a roof. If you touch the wing with a finger the "powder" is rubbed off, leaving the wing mo...

Millions of birds of many different varieties migrate at the end of summer. With unfailing regularity they leave the regions where they were born to fly to warmer climates for the winter. The following spring they return to their breeding grounds.

Eac...

The male stickleback's belly turns red at the start of the breeding season in spring. Normally the belly of this small fish is silver-coloured, the rest of it varying from brown to green. But when the time comes for him to mate he becomes very active ...

A loofah is a fib us, cylinder-shaped vegetable product often used in rooms as akind of rough sponge or gentle brush. It is the dried -interior of the fruit of a plant know, to botanists as Luffa aegyptiaca. Less dignified, though more descriptive, names for this tropical c...

Birds which peck grain and other seeds also peck grit to help them to digest these hard foods. Because bird has no teeth, the work of chewing, which would require muscles and strong jaw bones, is done by the gizzard. This makes it possible for the skull to be delicate-...

The mammoth fed entirely, on plants. In other words, it was a herbivore like its smaller relative, the elephant of today. These colossal animals, whose name has become another word for hugeness, must have needed a great amount of vegetation to keep them alive. In a br...

A flying fox is a kind of bat and is so called because its head somewhat resembles that of the fox. Most bats are small and look like winged mice. But flying foxes can be as big as little dogs and have a wing span of up to six feet.

Their habits are ra...

If you want to sound extremely clever you can confuse your friends by telling them that the real name for truffles is Ascomycetes. That's what the botanists call them. But you're most likely to come across truffles in the very beat French pates-for example, in ...

The word "crustacean" comes from the Latin crusts meaning a hard covering shell or crust. Apart from crabs, lobsters sand shrimps, there are thousands of different crustaceans. They live in the sea, except for a few species such as the ...

When spring water passes through rocks containing different type of minerals, it absorbs them during its underground flow. Generally the water of all the springs contains some kind of minerals. When there is abnormal amount of mineral in any spri...