More about Moose

Everything in nature is beautiful when you look at it from the right angle. But with the moose, it's hard to tell what that angle might be. These poor creatures look like an evolutionary experiment gone horribly wrong: huge, bulbous snout, gangly legs, tiny eyes, dangling wattle. But there's more to the moose than meets the eye. While they look ungainly, they are, in fact, among the most gainly animals on Earth. For example, a moose can swim faster than a man can paddle a canoe. According to Grzimek's Mammal Encyclopedia, they can step over obstacles one-meter high without jumping, which means that they can trot through the most rubble-strewn forest, while wolves, their chief predator, must constantly leap. The wolves give up, exhausted, and the moose escapes without breaking a sweat. Over broken ground, a moose can outrun a horse. When pressed, they can fight off a grizzly bear.

They are the largest deer, reaching as much as 600 kilograms. Their antlers alone can weigh 25 kilograms, and their skin can be 20 millimeters thick. In Manchuria, though, there is a dwarf subspecies (Alces alces canuloides) that weighs only 200 kilograms. But even the biggest moose today would pale next to its ancestor, the broadheaded elk, which was twice the weight of the modern moose and had an antler spread three meters wide (over 10 feet).

Convert these measurements to find out how big a moose really is!

1. How many pounds is 600 kilograms? Take 600 and divide it by .454 to get the answer.
2. How many centimeters is 20 millimeters? One hint is that 10 millimeters (mm) = 1 centimeter