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Guinea Pig — printable fact sheet
Free to print or save as PDF. Great for classrooms, homeschooling, and young explorers.
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Animal Fact Sheet
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Guinea Pig
Cavia porcellus
Cavia porcellus is a fully domesticated animal with no wild population anywhere - it was bred from wild cavies in the Andes at least 3,000 years ago, primarily as food, and cuy remains an everyday meat in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, where an estimated tens of millions are eaten e…
Did you know?
- Despite their name, guinea pigs are neither pigs nor from Guinea—they are rodents originally from the Andes mountains of South America.
- Guinea pigs popcorn - they jump straight up and twist in mid-air when excited, a behaviour with no obvious purpose beyond apparent exuberance. Their gestation is long for a rodent at around 68 days, which is what buys the fully developed newborns. Because their vitamin C requirement mirrors ours, guinea pigs were central to the research that identified vitamin C and defined scurvy as a deficiency disease.
What I learned
Draw the guinea pig
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