National Geographic Kids February 2024

One comet is shaped like a rubber duck. Some squirrel species remember where they buried nuts, even under snow. PATO, THE NATIONAL SPORT OF ARGENTINA, IS A MIX OF POLO AND BASKETBALL. Some horned frogs can lift 3 times their own weight with their tongue. HONEYPOT WORKER ANTS, WHICH STORE NECTAR IN THEIR BODIES, CAN SWELL TO THE SIZE OF A GRAPE. LISTENING TO CLASSICAL MUSIC CAN HELP DOGS RELAX, A STUDY FOUND. CHECK OUT THE BOOK!…

MAN GOES SKYSURFING This guy definitely doesn’t have a fear of heights. Keith Edward Snyder holds the record for the most helicopter-style spins while skysurfing. First the daredevil dived headfirst out of an airplane above Giza, Egypt, with a surfboard strapped to his feet. Then he twirled upside down 190 times in midair before opening his parachute. POCKET POOCH This tiny pup set a big record. About the height of a toilet-paper-roll tube, Pearl the Chihuahua is the world’s shortest living dog. Her favorite foods are chicken and salmon, but her tiny belly can’t hold too much at once. So she gets four small meals a day. The four-inch-tall pooch weighs only about as much as a can of beans! SUPERSIZE SAVER You’d need a giant shelf to store this…

1 Ancient Egyptians believed that a person’s soul was located in the heart. 2 There’s a heart-shaped coral reef in Australia. 3 About 8 billion conversation heart candies are produced every year—enough to wrap around the moon more than 9 times. 4 Octopuses have 3 hearts. 5 A woman’s heart usually beats faster than a man’s heart. 6 Researchers created a 3D-printed heart using human cells. 7 An astronaut’s heartbeat slows down in outer space.…

Madison, New Jersey Love might have been in the air when these shelter pups asked, “Will you be my valentine?” Olga, Indy, and Aurora had been waiting a long time to be adopted from St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center. As Valentine’s Day approached, shelter volunteer and photographer Kelsey Dubinsky had an idea: a super-sweet photo shoot. She dressed the dogs in feather boas and pink bandannas, then photographed them in front of a pink backdrop. “At first the dogs were a little shy,” Dubinsky says. “But after I offered them some treats and they felt comfortable, their personalities really came out.” The shelter shared the photos on social media, where Cynthia and Jeff Forster saw Olga’s picture and fell in love. “It was a total glam shot,” Cynthia Forster says.…

Cape Crozier, Antarctica In a colony of an estimated 600,000 Adélie penguins, one waddler stands out. Instead of having black feathers on its back and face, this bird is blond. “The penguin looks like it was bleached,” says P. Dee Boersma, a penguin expert and National Geographic Explorer. This pale penguin has a condition called leucism (LOO-sism), in which the pigments that create color in skin, hair, and feathers can’t be distributed to all parts of the body. Adélies are one of the most common species of penguin to have the condition—about one in 114,000 animals. Scientists think this penguin and others with leucism live normal lives, and predators don’t hunt them more than other penguins. Photographer Jeff Mauritzen, who snapped the peculiar penguin pic, says that nature is just…

Mongolia and China A captive newborn foal wobbles to its mother. This Przewalski’s horse born in Texas is actually a cloned foal—and it might help the species survive in the wild. Przewalski’s horses became extinct in the wild by the 1980s, after competing with livestock for food and habitat. So zoos began breeding Przewalski’s horses that were already captive and releasing them back into Mongolia and China. Today, over a thousand wild horses roam their homeland, and another thousand live in zoos. But scientists are worried. Since all living Przewalski’s horses descended from a small group, they have similar genes. That means they’re vulnerable to the same diseases. In 2020, scientists in Texas used DNA taken from a Przewalski’s horse over 40 years ago to make a foal named Kurt…