| 1.The world's tallest living tree to date is the Mendocino Tree (Sequoia sempervirens), which is 367 feet and 6 inches tall (112.014 meters), located at the Montgomery Woods State Reserve, in California, U.S.A. It has a diameter of 10.3 feet, or 3.139 meters. 2.The first Welwitschia plant was discovered by Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch in 1860 in the Namib desert in the southern part of Angola. 3.One molecule of sucrose is actually one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose bonded together (covalently linked). So one glucose and one fructose combined makes one sucrose. 4.The poinsettia flower is named after a 19th-century ambassador, Joel Roberts Poinsett, who first brought the poinsettia plant to America. 5.There is a fish that can climb trees, called the mudskipper. It spends about 3/4th of its time out of water. Malaysian mudskippers live in swamps where they climb among tangled stem roots, and sometimes into branches. 6.The world's oldest living plant is estimated to be the Tasmanian king's holly, Loamtia tasmanica, a member of the Proteaceae family, which has survived for about 43,600 years. 7.A single corn plant has been estimated to transpire about 54 gallons (245 liters) of water in one growing season. 8.The family Marantaceae (Arrowroot Family) was named after Bartolomeo Maranta, an Italian botanist. 9.In the poison ivy plant, an oil called urushiol, found in the leaves, vines, and even the roots of the plant, causes the poison ivy rash. (As little as one nanogram of urushiol [billionth of a gram], causes the rash). 10.Frogs can jump up to 20 times their body length. The longest jump on record is 33 feet 5.5 inch. 11.Dolphins can empty and refill their lungs in less than 0.2 seconds (one fifth of a second). 12.The family Pontederiaceae (Water Hyacinth Family) was named after Giulio Pontedera. 13.There are two types of poison ivy: a climbing plant (toxicodendron radicans) and a shrub (toxicodendron rydbergii). Don't bother trying to tell them apart since they look similar and often grow in the same place. 14.The sacred lotus Nelumbo nucifera heats up when it is ready for pollination. For up to four days it maintains steamy temperatures of 86-95 degrees Fahrenheit (30-35 degrees Celsius) to attract insects and encourage them to move from one flower to another. 15.The country believe to have the most amount of plant species is Brazil, around or over 56,000. 16.The Compositae (Asteraceae) have more species than any other family of flowering plants with over 20,000 species recognized, mostly in the tropics. 17.Another word for fructose is laevulose. 18.When at 200 degrees Celsius, sucrose will melt into caramel. 19.One molecule of glucose with one molecule of galactose makes one molecule of lactose. 20.The first enzyme to be discovered was diastase (amylase), discovered by French chemist Anselme Payen. 21.Food storage in seeds occurs either in the cotyledon or the endosperm. 22.Lysosomes contain enzymes for breaking down macromolecules (lysozymes). 23.The animal kingdom is the largest kingdoms in terms of number of species. 24.The main function of water in photophosphorylation is to provide electrons which are energized by light energy. 25.Members of the phylum Cnidaria, whichs contains hydrozoans, jellyfish, and sea anemones, have radial symmetry. 26.Nematodes don't have a true coelom, but a psudocoelom. 27.Glucagon is a hormone secreted by the pancreas that stimulates the liver to break down glycogen into glucose (glycogen hydrolysis) and to release glucose into the blood. 28.The xylem contains many cells including fibers called schlerenchyma. 29.In most cells, the cytoplasm is divided into two parts: the ectoplasm (plasmagel), and the endoplasm (plasmasol). 30.A newly discovered frog species is so tiny that it can sit comfortably on the human fingernail. The frog, Psyllophryne didactyla, was discovered in Cuba in 1996. 31.A handful of soil contains up to 5,000 different species of bacteria. 32.Earthworms produce nitrous oxide as a by-product from digesting soil nitrates and nitrites. Soil with earthworms contains five times as much nitrous oxide as soil without. 33.The slowest-growing tree is a white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) located in Canada. After 155 years, it grew to a height of 4 inches (10.2 centimeters), and weighed only 0.6 ounces (17 grams). 34.Psilocybin (C12H17N2O4P), a hallucinogenic crystalline solid, are obtained from the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana. 35.Glycolysis is a subdivision of cellular respiration in which glucose molecules are broken down to form pyruvic acid molecules. 36.The amino acid tryptophan was discovered by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins in 1901. 37.The amino acid histine was discovered by Albrecht Kossel. 38.The most powerful health-promoting compounds in blueberries are anthocyanins, and have been proven to improve brain power, especially with rats. 39.The monera kingdom is the smallest kingdom in terms fo number of species. 40.The Miocene ape (Proconsul africanus) was discovered by Kenyan anthropologist Louis Leakey in 1948, a possible ancestor of both monkeys and apes. 41.Scottish botanist Robert Brown discovered the nucleus in plant cells, in 1831. 42.The first textbook on botany was written by U.S. botanist Asa Gray "Elements of Botany" in 1836. 43.All mushrooms are classified under the phylum Basidiomycota (kingdom Fungi). 44.There are around 65,000 different species of protists. 45.All protists are eukaryotes. 46.There are 4,765 different species of frogs. 47.The species with the most known pair of chromosomes is the Ophioglossum reticulatum, a species of fern, with more than 630 pairs (1,260 total). 48.An old, still healthy, mature oak tree is estimated to have approximately 250,000 leaves (one fourth of a million). 49.The birds appeared on the Earth a little more than 60 million years ago. 50.The rate at which glycolysis occurs in a cell is stimulated by the concentration of adenosine diphosphate (ADP). (The control of the rate of glycolysis depends upon the activity of the allosteric enzyme, phosphofructokinase. The enzyme is activated by adenosine diphosphate and inhibited by adenosine triphosphate (ATP)). 51.Carotenoids that do not contain oxygen are called carotenes and are deep orange in color. Carotenoids that do contain oxygen are called xanthophylls, and are yellow in color. 52.Phytochromes are the pigments in plants that allows the plant to discern whether or not it's at day or night (more specifically light or dark). 53.Ferredoxin is an iron containing protein that functions in capturing energy rich electrons from excited chlorophyll molecules. 54.The three different kinds of kidneys found in vertebrates are the pronephros, mesonephros, and metanephros. 55.A 14-leafed red clover (the clover with the most leaves known to date) (Trifolium pratense) was reported by Paul Haizlip, located in Bellevue, Washington, U.S.A., on June 22,1987. There is also a 14-leafed white clover (Trifolium repens), found by Randy Farland near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, U.S.A., on June 16, 1975. 56.The highest chlorophyll content found in a plant is in the Kirin Chlorella M-207A7 (Chlorella vulgaris), a type of algae. It has been measured on a dry weight basis to be 6.7%. This percentage rate was discovered by Dr. Kouichi Nakanishi of Kirin Brewery Company Ltd., Japan. 57.The world's heaviest cabbage was grown by Bernard Lavery of Llanharry, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Wales, in 1989. It weighed 124 pounds (56.24 kilograms). 58.There are two types of cells, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Prokaryotes are more simpler than eukaryotes, but they both posses a plasma membrane and cytoplasm. 59.The world's oldest vine, the Old Vine, in Maribor, Slovenia, is around 400 years old. A scientific measurement of the vine carried out in 1972 established that it was between 350 and 400 years old. Now it is rougly 380 to 480 years old, and produces about 100 bottles of wine, or 35 to 55 kilograms of grapes, yearly. 60.The world's tallest sunflower, grown in 1986 by Martien Heijms in Oirschot, The Netherlands, grew to be 25 foot 5 inches (7.76 meters). 61.The four stomachs of a cow are the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. 62.The neck of a giraffe has 7 vertebras. 63.There are around less than 10,000 different species of monera. 64.There are around 500,000 different species of plants. 65.There are around 100,000 different species of fungi. 66.There are around less than 795,000 different species of animals. 67.The producer of penicillin is Penicillium, an organism in the class Ascomycetes of the phylum Eumocyta, of the Fungi kingdom. 68.The zylem of a plant conducts water and transports minerals upwards from the roots. 69.The phloem transports sugars and other nutrients from the leaves to the other parts of the plant. 70.The plant hormone abscisic acid (C15H20O4) inhibits the growth of leaves and germinating seeds. 71.Red blood cells are the only cells in the human body that do not have a nucelus. 72.The first animal to be successfully cloned was a frog, done by British molecular biologist John B. Gurdon in 1933. 73.The first mammal to be successfully cloned was an ewe named Dolly, born in July of 1996, led by Ian Wilmut. 74.If the deoxyribonucleic acid in a single human cell were stretched out and laid end to end, it would measure approximately 6.5 feet (2 meters). 75.The amino acid asparagine was discovered by French chemist Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin in 1806. 76.The bacteria Epulopiscium fishelsoni, which lives in the gut of surgeonfish, was first identified in 1985 and mistakenly classified as a protozoan, but was measured to be overly huge, at 0.015 inches (0.38 millimeters) in diameter. 77.The study of fungi is called mycology. 78.The upper shell (back) of a turtle is the dorsal carapace. The lower shell (front) of a turtle is the ventral plastron. 79.The cell walls of archaebacteria lack peptidoglycans. 80.Red algae contain red accessory pigments called phycobilins. 81.The largest group of living seedless vascular plants are the ferns, at about 12,000 different species, in which around 2/3rd are tropical. 82.The first plant patent was issued to Henry F. Bosenberg, a landscape gardener, who received U.S. Plant Patent 1 on August 18, 1931 for a climbing or trailing rose. 83.The earliest vertebrate, Anatolepsis, was a jawless fish from China that lived at least 500 million years ago. 84.The earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, was a pigeon sized bird with a long tail, toothed beak, and real feathers, that appeared about 160 million years ago. 85.Mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest number of genes of any organism yet known on Earth. Sequenced in 1995, it has 480 genes. 86.Two molecules of glucose bonded together makes one molecule of maltose. 87.The four nitrogen bases in deoxyribonucleic acid nuleotides are adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. 88.Ribosomes assemble amino acids into proteins in the cytoplasm. 89.The source of electrons used in making a molecule of glucose is photolysis, which splits H2O to provide the electrons for photophosphorylation, which are incorporated in nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate hydrogen. 90.The world's oldest known tree is a bristlecone pine named Methuselah, located in Californoa's White Mountains at just over 4,760 years old. 91.The first trees that lived were the scale trees, that grew during the Devonian period. 92.The smallest flowering plant in the world belong to the genus Wolffia of the Duckweed family, at between .3 to .5 millimeters in diameter. 93.Sharks have to keep swimming in order to survive. The great white shark must swim constantly at 2.2 miles per hour (3.5 kilometers per hour) to ensure oxygen reaches its bloodstream. 94.The sensors on the feet of a red admiral butterfly are 200 times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. 95.Common frogs can live for about six years but only 1 in 10,000 will successfully evade predators and disease to live to 6. 96.The deep-sea fish Malecosteus niger has chlorophyll in the retina of its eye. This is the only known instance of chlorophyll being found in an organism that is not a plant or bacteria. 97.The tallest tree ever measured was an Australian eucalyptus (Eucalyptus regnans), reported in 1872 at 435 feet (132 meters) high. 98.The world's smallest winged insect is smaller than the eye of a house fly. It is the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, which has a wingspan of 0.008 inch (0.2 millimeter). 99.The bark tree of the cork tree (Quercus suber, a type of oak tree) is made up of many unique cells. Each cell has 14 sides, and, in a cubic centimeter of cork tree bark, there are about 40 million of them. Cork cells are separated from each other by a layer of air. All the air in this intercellular space is what makes cork float. |
| Biology Facts |
Biology ---------------- |
| Biology facts here are including plant biology (botany) and animal biology (zoology) and some various other stuff about life sciences, such as cytology, the study of cells. |