You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

Did you know that tuna are like pelagic sharks. They need to keep swimming - even when they are sleeping - or else they drown.

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

Were you taught in school that elephants have the longest gestation period of any animal - 22 months. It's a half truth. It's a record for mammals but not for all creatures. The record is held by the spiny dogfish - part of the shark family. It's gestation period is 24 months.

Want to see your wife faint? Just ask here how would she feel if her pregnancy lasted 24 months? I suspect the human race would have died out thousands of years ago if this was the case.

[Lee Stewart]

All clown fish are born as males. When they reach maturity they can change their gender to female to propagate and make sure their species lives on.

This gender change is not unique in the animal kingdom. Wrasses, Copperhead snakes, Sea bass, Moray eels and Humphead wrasse can also make the change as needed.

[Lee Stewart]

Echidna is the platypus's close relative, which looks like a cross between a porcupine and a hedgehog, is at least 110 million years old, making it the oldest surviving species of mammal in the world. Native to Oceania, they are the only mammal that lays eggs besides the platypus.

[Lee Stewart]

One of the most ancient inhabitants of Earth that is still with us is the chambered nautilus, a seafaring cephalopod that has been around for 500 million years. That's twice as old as the oldest species of dinosaurs!

[Lee Stewart]

The fascinatingly unique wobbegong shark got its start in the Upper Jurassic period, around 145 million years ago. This means that they, along with many other aquatic forms of life, survived the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The elusive nature of the wobbegong, and its expertly utilized camouflage, has helped it thrive well into the present without any threat of endangerment.

[Lee Stewart]

These tiny reptilians, today found only in New Zealand, may look like shrunken down dinosaurs. And they essentially are! Tuataras are the last surviving members of the family of reptiles that first appeared in the Triassic period around 250 million years ago. It's likely only due to their small size that tuataras survived the mass extinction event 65 million years ago that wiped out their dinosaur cousins.

[Lee Stewart]

Ghost sharks, or chimaeras, are some of the oldest species of fish in the world, diverging from true sharks around 400 million years ago. That makes them just as old, if not older, than trees and forests. Today, chimaeras stick to the darkest and murkiest depths of the ocean.

[Lee Stewart]

Sturgeon are another incomprehensibly ancient species of fish that have managed to stick around for more than 100 million years. Sturgeon, although far smaller in numbers now than they were in the Cretaceous period, can still be found in the Great Lakes of North America, and can grow up to 12 feet (3.5 meters) in length.