Check out these exotic animals images:
Colorful Bird
Image by rebeccaselah
Brown Bear
Image by Princess Stand in the Rain
A bear by any other name
Brown bears are brown, right? Well, maybe! They come in all sizes and shades, from a light cream color to almost black. It was once thought that there were 86 different kinds of grizzlies and brown bears in North America alone. Today, scientists agree that there is only one species of brown bear with a lot of variations! Bears in northwestern North America are called Kodiak, or Alaskan brown bears Ursus arctos middendorffi, and tend to be the largest of the species. This is from eating salmon that are rich in fat every summer. The Alaskan Peninsular brown bear Ursus arctos gyas has a much smaller range, just the western tip of the Alaskan peninsula. Brown bears in interior North America are known as grizzly bears Ursus arctos horribilis because their brown fur is tipped with white or tan; the word "grizzly means "sprinkled or streaked with gray." There are several brown bear subspecies found in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and possibly Northwest Africa, but they are all smaller than their North American relatives.
3 Girls: Two Asian on One African Elephants
Image by Princess Stand in the Rain
Tusks are an elephant's incisor teeth. They are used for defense, digging for water, and lifting things. Elephants also have four molars, one on the top and one on the bottom on both sides of the mouth. One molar can weigh about five pounds (2.27 kilograms) and is the size of a brick! Each elephant can go through six sets of molars in a lifetime. When elephants get old, their teeth are sensitive, so they prefer to eat softer food. Marshes are the perfect place for soft plant food, so old elephants are often found there. Many times they stay there until they die. This practice led some people to think that elephants went to special burial grounds to die.
A unique nose
An elephant's trunk is both an upper lip and a nose. A trunk has more than 40,000 muscles in it. That's more than a person has in his or her whole body! An elephant's trunk is so strong and agile, it can push down trees, or pick up a single piece of straw.
