1-A giant squid washed up in Canada in 1878 had a body that was 6 metres (20 feet) long with tentacles that measured up to 10.7 metres (35 feet) long. 2-The expression ‘once in a blue moon’ means that something hardly ever happens.A blue moon does happen occasionally, though – It happened in 1950 when a large wildfire in Canada sent soot high up into the sky making the moon look blue. 3-A field of fescue grass, which grows in Canada, looks like lots of little plants, but is really a single plant that’s hundreds of years old. 4-Tornado Alley is an area in the USA from central Texas to the border of Canada that has the perfect weather conditions for tornadoes.
Yes, they cough them to death. Marmots are benign, pot-bellied members of the squirrel family. They are about the size of a cat and squeak loudly when alarmed. Less appealingly, the bobac variety, found on the Mongolian steppe, is particularly susceptible to a lung infection caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, commonly known as bubonic plague. They spread it around by coughing on their neighbours, infecting fleas, rats and, ultimately, humans. All the great plagues that swept through Eastern Asia to Europe came from marmots in Mongolia. The estimated death-toll is over a billion, making the marmot second only to the malarial mosquito as a killer of humans. When marmots and humans succumb to plague, the lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin become black and swollen (these sores are called ‘buboes’, from Greek boubon, ‘groin’, hence ‘bubonic’). Mongolians will never eat a marmot’s armpits because ‘they contain the soul of a dead hunter’. The other parts of the marmot are a
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