Top 10 Untrue Myths About Animals

There is probably a lot you don't know about this spider. For one thing, you might not even be talking about it in the first place. There IS a Daddy Long-Legs spider, but in England the thing with this name isn't a spider at all. The long-legged Cellar Spider is an example of a Daddy Long-Legs and it is probably what is referred to in this myth... the myth being that its the most poisonous spider in the world, but lacks the bite to deliver this amazing poison.

The thing is, there is no record of a pholcid spider ever biting a human and causing any kind of reaction at all. If they were really poisonous, the only way we WOULD know is if we had milked them and injected the venom into humans. And this has not been done. And there are no toxiological studies of any kind showing the effects of pholocid venom on ANY mammal. So, no scientific basis.

Where this myth came from is anyone's guess, but if you are jonesing for a spider to be afraid of, stick with the Brown Recluse and the Funnel Web.

So. No.

And I really don't have to explain this one, do I? Can one breathe with one's head in the dirt? Would any animal actually commit suicide in this manner?

I'm pretty sure, no.

This one probably came from the fact that ostriches, like many other kinds of birds, eat pebbles and sand to help them digest their food. They also turn their eggs with their beaks... another thing that makes them put their heads near the ground.

Sometimes I have to wonder... not so much about that first idiot who made up the story, but about aaaalll the subsequent people after that person who went along with it.

This one is tragic.

During the filming of a 1958 Disney "Documentary" film White Wilderness, which (!!) won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into sure death after faked scenes of mass migration. A later Canadian documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but in fact were launched off the cliff using a turntable.

This myth is bulls**t. Lemmings do no such thing. They do not hurl themselves off cliffs. They DO migrate, and sometimes during these migrations they will fall into rivers or off cliffs accidentally. Like many other migratory species.

So... when your nose is cold from being outside on a cold day... or running because you just ate a hot pepper... a lot can be determined about your health at that time?

The coldness or dampness of a dog’s nose is an indication of his activity level and it’s not about his health condition.

Opossums do have partially prehensile tails, true. And young ones CAN hang upside down for short times, but why would they? There's no point. Why don't you curl your legs over a bar and hang upside down all the time? Or sleep that way?

You wouldn't. The blood would rush to your head... and unless you were a complete nutjob who thought they were a vampire... it would be uncomfortable and insane.