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To prevent drowning, a baby dolphin is born with its tail first, and the mother swiftly breaks the umbilical cord by swimming away fast before doing a U-turn and rapidly escorting her newborn to the surface so it can take a breath. In other words, the new mom does not get a lot of time to rest after giving birth. (Incidentally, when a baby dolphin nurses, it has to hold its breath.)

We usually think of dolphins as being dwellers of the salty ocean, but there are seven species of dolphin that prefer the fresh water of the river—including the Amazon river dolphin, the South American tucuxi, and the Irrawaddy dolphin (which can live in both salt and fresh water). Sadly, a number of these species are listed as endangered or vulnerable, such as the Ganges river dolphin, of which there are fewer than 2,000 left

Ancient thinkers such as Pliny, Herodotus, Aelian, and Aristotle commented on the moral nature of dolphins and their human-like traits. For example, Pliny told the story of a boy who, swimming across a lake, encountered a dolphin that took him on his back and "carried the poor frightened fellow out into the deepest part; when immediately he turns back again to the shore, and lands him among his companions." And Aristotle reflected on, "The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human in that they can pronounce vowels and combinations of vowels."

The ancient Greeks were big fans of dolphins, calling them "hieros ichthys," which translates to "sacred fish." The animals played a role in some Greek myths (usually portrayed as benevolent creatures assisting the characters). They were believed to be especially friendly to mankind, and killing a dolphin was considered sacrilegious.

Dolphins can get some serious air. Researchers at the Wild Dolphin Foundation, for example, have reported seeing dolphins jump in the wild as high as 15 feet—with the spinner, spotted, and Commerson's dolphins tending to be the highest jumpers. The reason for this behavior? It requires less energy to jump than swim, since the air is less dense than the water.

Scientists believe that sound is carried from the water to the dolphins' inner ear by way of its lower jawbone. The jaw is hollow (unlike land-dwelling mammals) and contains a fatty substance that connects up to the ear. When a dolphin's lower jaw is covered, it has trouble distinguishing sounds, while covering its ears has no impact on its ability to hear.

Usually, when an animal looks into the mirror they either ignore what they see, or think the reflection is another animal and act aggressively. Not so with dolphins—who can recognize that it is not another animal looking at them, but rather their own reflection. For a definitive 2001 study at the New York Aquarium, researchers installed mirrors in the tank of a pair of bottlenose dolphins, marking each dolphin with temporary ink—which the dolphin then stared at in the mirror. "Our findings show that self-recognition may be based on a different neurological substrate in dolphins

Forget elephants—dolphins are the animals with the longest-lasting memories. Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2013 proved that bottlenose dolphins can remember the whistles of other dolphins that they lived with for two decades, even when they were separated from one another. While elephants and chimpanzees have both been found to have impressive recall, neither comes close to a 20-year period of memory.

Scientists have found that dolphins have a "highly developed spoken language" much like that of humans, making a combination of pulses, clicks, and whistles that allow them to communicate. One 2016 study, published in Physics and Mathematics, describes how the language "exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, [which] indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins… [T]heir language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language."

The dolphin's skin, which is smooth and rubbery, plays an important part in their movement under water. In order to swim as efficiently as possible, a bottlenose dolphin's skin flakes and peels to have new skin cells replace old cells almost every two hours—which is nine times faster than humans. This helps ensure a smooth body surface to increase the ease of their swimming under the sea.

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