• Turkeys can drown if they look upward when it is raining.

• A spooked turkey can run at speeds up to 20 miles per hour. They can also burst into flight approaching speeds between 50-55 mph in a matter of seconds.

• Benjamin Franklin wanted the national bird to be a turkey.

• Turkeys have heart attacks. When the Air Force was conducting test runs and breaking the sound barrier, fields of turkeys would drop dead.

• Thomas Jefferson thought the concept of Thanksgiving was "the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard."

• Contrary to popular belief, Native Americans did not eat cranberries. They did, however, find them extremely useful for dying fabric and decorating pottery.

• 91% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.

• The first meal eaten on the moon by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was roasted turkey and all the trimmings!

• Fossil evidence shows that turkeys roamed the Americas 10 million years ago.

• The Guinness Book of Records...states that the greatest dressed weight recorded for a turkey is 39.09 kg (86 lbs), at the last annual "heaviest turkey" competition held in London, England on December 12, 1989.

• Columbus thought that the land he discovered was connected to India, where peacocks are found in considerable number. And he believed turkeys were a type of peacock (they’re actually a type of pheasant). So he named them tuka, which is "peacock" in the Tamil language of India.

• In the last twenty years, Americans’ love of turkey has soared, with per capita consumption up from 8.3 pounds in 1975 to 18.5 pounds in 1995.