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There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of Onthophagus Sagittarius, each female con­structs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours' underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?

Take leafcutter ants. They have four distinct castes, each with their own life tasks. They practise agriculture with a species of fungus that they have domesticated to the point that it can no longer survive without the ants' care. Their agricultural ways resemble an assembly line, with different ants doing different jobs. The ants have huge colonies with millions of citizens all co­operating. One found in Brazil covered 500 square feet and ex­tended 26 feet below the surface.

If you poke a bear you had better show up with the right sort of stick.

In a competition to find the world's least-loved animal, the mos­quito would be hard to beat.

The dinosaurs, as every schoolchild knows, died out 66m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. But there is an argument about wheth­er they went with a bang or a whimper.

A Go board's size means that the number of games that can be played on it is enormous: a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10¹⁷⁰. Analogies fail when trying to describe such a number. It is nearly a hundred of orders of magnitude more than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is somewhere in the region of 10⁸⁰.

"First, get the cow out of the ditch. Second, find out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, make sure you do whatever it takes so the cow doesn't go into the ditch again." This is the homely advice that Anne Mulcahy, the former boss of Xerox, says became her mantra as she fought (suc­cessfully) to revive the fortunes of the copying and printing.

Interestingly, the genetically modified mice still showed the clas­sic male-mating repertoire — mounting, penetration and ejacu­lation. But the researchers noted that they mounted less often, were less apt to penetrate and did not stick at it for as long as the normal mice.

Trees can fall as well as rise.

An average elephant living in and around Samburu National Re­serve, in northern Kenya, ranges over 1,500 square kilometres during the course of a year, and may travel as much as 60km a day.

Despite its ambitious title, Charles Darwin's master work did not really explain "the origin of species". Rather, it explained how species change, which is not quite the same thing.

Shave a chimpanzee and you will find that beneath its hairy coat its skin is white. Human skin, though, was almost always black.

Perhaps it was also because she was a woman, expected to keep her house spotless, that she so lamented the despoiling of Everest by climb­ers. She became a director of campaigns to get their rubbish and, es­pecially, their deep-frozen sewage moved off the mountain. The urine left behind by climbers, she pointed out, could fill 3,300 bathtubs, and 11,800kg of faeces were dug out of the snow every season.

The empires were like tigers, which even when threatened with extinction will not co-operate.

If a big wave is coming, running from it is not enough. You also have to know how far to run before it is safe to stop.

People and bees are more or less the only animals a full-grown elephant is scared of.

By 1881, the monster was winning. Jumbo came into season, a "tsuna­mi of testosterone" known as musth, when the penis emerges, tinged with green, in four-foot, S-shaped erections. Hardly family entertain­ment.

Overpriced homes are like the extravagant plumage of a peacock, an eye-catching encumbrance that only the most resourceful males can put on display.

What's a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an indi­vidual, which are found in a person's gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body's sur­face.