Q: Why can’t you hear a Pterodactyl going to the bathroom?
A: Because the P is silent
This one is just too good to pass up. Patricia Yang is a doctoral student at Georgia Tech who studies “how animals urinate, defecate, and digest.” According to a 2014 paper called, “Duration of Urination Does Not Change with Body Size,” Yang and her colleagues used high-speed cameras on animals at the Atlanta Zoo to measure the time it takes them to urinate. They found remarkable consistency in the time it takes mammals greater than about two pounds to empty their bladders. Virtually all mammals take about 20 seconds to pee.
In and of itself, this does not seem remarkable, but leave it to National Geographic to put it into context for us. Look at this chart (copied here) on their Voices blog! A Great Dane puts out about 0.4 gallons of urine in the same time that an African Elephant gushes out 42 gallons.
And on that note, I’ve gotta go!
