lokidude99

I'm pretty sure this is a diorama somewhere, but you get the idea.

C. Moses

The orange on the front surface of the front teeth is a special enamel coating that helps that side wear slowly, giving each tooth a sharp edge. And sharp they are: a beaver can drop a tree two inches in diameter in just a few minutes.

Here are a bunch of cool things to know about beavers:

• The American beaver is the largest rodent in North America. And in all the world, only the South American capybara is bigger.
• Unlike other mammals, beavers grow throughout their lives. In the wild, a beaver might live ten to twelve years and weigh as much as 70 pounds. (The largest modern beaver on record weighed in at a whopping 110 pounds.)
• A beaver's brain is small relative to its body weight. A beaver-sized human would have a brain fifteen times larger than a beaver's.
• All rodents, including beavers, have front teeth (incisors) that just keep on growing. It's the constant chewing that beavers do that wears them down and keeps them even.
• A beaver couple cuts down some 400 trees to make a dam.
• The largest beaver dam on record is 2,790 ft in length—more than half a mile long—and was discovered via satellite imagery in 2007. (That's twice the width of the Hoover Dam, which spans "only" 1,244 feet.) It's located on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta.
• Beavers are vegetarians, eating bark, twigs, roots, and aquatic plants.
• They stay active all winter, living off a supply of branches that they stockpiled and anchored to the bottom of the pond earlier in the year.
• When beavers run out of trees near their ponds, they dig canals to nearby areas with more. (That way they don't have to leave the water. Which is good, because they're slow and awkward on land.)
• These guys are made to swim. They have thick, waterproof coats and a layer of fat to keep them warm in the water. Their webbed toes act like swim fins, and their broad tails help steer, like rudders. Valves in their noses and ears close up when swimming to keep water out. Clear membranes cover their eyes, like goggles, to protect them from things like wood chips in the water. And flaps of skin on both sides of a beaver's mouth close behind its front teeth to keep it from swallowing pond water.
• A beaver can swim five miles per hour and spend 15 minutes underwater without coming up for a breath.
• A small, land-dwelling beaver called Paleocastor lived here in North America some 20 million years ago. It built complex, spiralling burrows. Some filled with debris and fossilized, creating twisted stones called "devil's corkscrews."
• Animal Planet puts beavers at number two on their list of the top-ten animal troublemakers, because they cause some $100 million in property damage every year.