useless natural history trivia III [View all]

Last edited Sat Mar 28, 2026, 01:29 PM - Edit history (1)

1.Birds have two sets of vocal cords – not one. There’s a set in each bronchus, and the structure is known as the syrinx. A bird can literally make two different sounds at once. A bird is a duet.

2. Uniquely among modern primates, male humans don’t have a baculum.

The baculum is a bone that forms in a male’s unmentionable. You can remember the groups where it occurs with a simple acronym – Primates (except humans), Rodents, certain “Insectivorans” (shrews, etc.), Carnivorans, and Chiroperans (bats). PRICC. And they sometimes show up in whales (Cetacea).

The baculum of a gorilla is surprisingly small, given the size of the animal.

I have a replica of a walrus baculum I use in my classes. They're used as clubs by people indigenous to the walrus' range, and the Inuit word for this is "oosik." You can buy one from Bone Clones. When I first point out what it is, about half of the class suddenly feels inadequate. This is because it’s about 2 feet long.

And when I point to the healed fracture, those same students begin to draw their knees together in a defensive position.

No matter how bad things get, I say while pointing this out, they can always get worse.

3.Speaking of unmentionables and making men feel inadequate, snakes and lizards don’t just have one such structure. They have two.

(They only use one at a time.)

4. If you’re going to dress like a vampire for Halloween, please – do it properly!

A vampire’s fangs are nearly always depicted as the canines or second (lateral) incisors. They’re the canines in Hammer Film’s Dracula moves with Christopher Lee, the Blade franchise, Queen of the Damned (2002), and the animated Hotel Transylvania movies. They’re the second incisors in The Lost Boys (1986), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and the HBO True Blood series. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) does it both ways – they’re the canines for Dracula, but the second incisors for his brides.

But in an actual vampire bat, the fangs are the central (first) incisors. If you want to do a proper vampire costume, the fangs should be at the center of your mouth – not the sides.

This has been depicted accurately only twice – Count Orlock in the 1922 version of Nosferatu and a character appearing on a brand of cereal made by General Mills.

In fact, fangs weren’t a part of vampire lore until they showed up in moves. Bram Stoker wrote that all of Dracula’s teeth were sharp, which is sort of consistent with depictions in both versions of Salem’s Lot and the 2024 version of Nosferatu, though the teeth weren’t really emphasized in the novel, indicating that what’s shown in these movies exaggerates what Stoker had in mind. And in all of Bela Lugosi’s portrayals of a vampire beginning with 1930’s Dracula, he was never shown with fangs.

Stoker was also the first person to associate vampires with bats. But that’s got nothing to do with anything.