It's Camels All Round

On one particular occasion when my sister invited some friends over to our home, a particularly nerdy lab mate of hers (who was unsurprisingly going out with an equally nerdy fellow lab mate) started pontificating on the difference between one-humped and two-humped camels. This certainly stuck in my mother's mind as she commented about this afterward (citing this as rather strange behaviour). I would have thought that my predilection for strange facts would have inured her to that by now. 

Still, as if to prove that no knowledge is ever useless, this piece of information came up in a pub quiz I was taking part in a few months afterwards. How many humps does a Dromedary Camel have, it asked. I could not for the life of me remember. It seems that camel humps was one of the few random bits of information that I found difficult to digest and my team got that question wrong.

So when it was mentioned that Bactrian camels, native to China, have two humps unlike their Arabian one-humped cousins, in The Man Who Loved China,  a book by Simon Winchester about Joseph Needham and the inspiration behind his magnum opus Science and Civilisation in China, I decided once and for all to set the record straight. So, Bactrian - two humps, native to East and Central Asia (also highly endangered apparently). Dromedary, far more common, native to the Middle East (and also the ones you are likely to pose for a photo with in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt before getting asked by its handlers for a fee), and most definitely one humped.

So there, this hardly proved to be one hump too many!