CONTENTS

A wild and wonderful world awaits you inside!

4 FACTOPIA! Follow the trail of hilarious illustrations and crazily connected facts. All the way from a house shaped like a toilet to… a type of cabbage that smells like skunk spray!

6 SNAP IT!

Eye-popping photos to amuse and amaze. Including a daring tightrope walker balancing above a Brazilian city, a bizarrely bendy house in Poland and an aerodynamic dog caught in mid-flight.

1O EUREKA!

Fascinating inventions and discoveries. Meet an enormous toad, shouting dolphins and a shape-shifting robot that is able to melt and then reform. Plus, NASA announces that a bear has been discovered on Mars! (Well, sort of.)

12 LISTIFIED! Find out about five ingenious ways that different animals team up for their mutual benefit.

Plus, nine bizarre inventions that were actually made!

14 COVER FEATURE: BRILLIANT BUGS! Explore the strange and fascinating world of insects and find out why they really rule the world. Did you know that there are around 1.4 billion insects on Earth for every human?

2O NOBODY KNOWS One of the universe’s great unsolved mysteries.

21 ASK THE EXPERTS Your chance to test Britannica’s brilliant experts. This month: what wisdom teeth are for and where you can find them.

22 COLOUR IT IN! How many sports and games can you spot as you colour in our spectacular two-page illustration?

24 THE BIG BRITANNICA FAMILY QUIZ

Stretch your brain power with a special bumper edition of our brilliantly tricky quiz. This month’s bonus picture round is: flags!

28

ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!

Our epic serialisation of the true history of the universe continues as we follow the extraordinary exploits of Alexander the Great and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

32 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT MARCH

Celebrate 1O historic anniversaries and events, including an enormous dinosaur footprint, the world’s largest painting and how an army of 8,OOO life-size statues was unearthed in China.

34 JUMBO PUZZLES & GAMES

A four-page special featuring a multicoloured Word Search, Spot the Difference, Number Triangles, Sudoku, Word Wheel and Connect the Planets. Plus, try out our tricky new number puzzle Futoshiki!

38 INFOGRAPHIC: ALL AROUND THE WORLD! How planet Earth compares to a range of other round objects both big and small.

4O SEND IT IN!

Read the winning entry in our poetry competition about world-changing inventions. Draw your own lunar rover on a rocky moonscape. Plus, this month’s illustrated fact features a feather and a ticklish rat!

43 JOKES & RIDDLES

Hand-picked by our jokes editor May!

There’s a museum in Texas that features more than 1,4OO artworks – all created on toilet seats

Follow the trail of crazily connected facts all the way from a house shaped like a toilet to… a type of cabbage that smells like skunk spray!

By Kate Hale, Paige Towler and Julie Beer

As late as the 16th century, traders brought narwhal tusks from North America and Russia to Europe and claimed they were u n i c o r n h o r n s

The world’s only toilet-shaped house is in South Korea. Today it’s a museum and features toilet-themed art on the grounds, including a golden pile of poo

Some museums keep collections of flesh-eating beetles to help clean skeletons for display

About 15,OOO to 18,OOO new animal and plant species are discovered every year. Sometimes they’re found in the wild but at other times they’re in stranger places. Palaeontologists identified a new type of sauropod dinosaur from fossils that had spent 113 years in the basement of a museum

In some Aboriginal mythologies of Australia, the Yara-ma-yha-who is a bloodsucking, vampire-like creature that is part man and part frog or leech loose-fittingskin covered in warts haswebbedfeet, a piglike nose and USA,themythical squonk supposedly Saidtoroamthe marshes of Pennsylvania,

A 66-million-year-old fossil was nicknamed ‘crazy beast’ by scientists because of its strange features: it had front teeth like a rodent, back legs that splayed out like a crocodile and a hole on top of its snout

According to folklore in South Africa, the impundulu is a bird that sets its own fat on fire to cause lightning

Scientists believe fossils of extinct animals like dinosaurs inspired ancient people around the world to believe in mythical creatures, such as dragons

The hodag of Wisconsin, USA, is said to have the face of a frog, the horns of a bull and the back of a dinosaur – and to smell like a skunk and rotting meat

The skunk cabbage attracts insects with its scent; it really does smell like skunk spray and rotting meat!

Astonishing photos from around the world

DON’T LOOK DOWN! Do you have a head for heights? Erika Sedlacek clearly does! This headspinning photo shows Erika walking along a 5OOm-long wire strung between buildings in the city of São Paulo in Brazil. She is balancing more than 1OO metres up in the air!

ROUND THE BEND!

It looks like an optical illusion but this bizarrely bendy house, which is part of a shopping centre in the city of Sopot in Poland, is 1OO% real. Known as Krzywy Domek, which means ‘crooked house’ in Polish, and built in 2OO4, its design was inspired by illustrations of fairy tales drawn by Jan Marcin Szancer and Per Dahlberg.