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How many bears are in the United States? Do we have any prehistoric animals? Are mountain lions the same as bobcats?

Haley Gooch, age 8, Columbia

We have four species of bears in the United States. They are brown bears, black bears, grizzly bears and polar bears. Most bears live in wild country and never come into contact with humans, so we can't count them. Bears require a large range, so there will never be as many as there are people. A good guess would be that we have somewhere between 150 and 300 bears in Missouri. They are scattered across 20 counties, all of them south of Interstate 44.

Almost all of the animals we have in Missouri were around before people started writing down history. Some of our animals could be considered ancient. Turtles, for example, haven't changed much in 200 million years.

Mountain lions are bigger than bobcats. They weigh between 80 and 225 pounds, while bobcats weigh between 15 and 70 pounds. Both are classified as "small cats," partly because they have special cartilage in their mouths that lets them purr. They cannot roar like the big cats of Africa, which cannot purr. Don't let the purring fool you, though, both bobcats and mountain lions are wild and dangerous animals.

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Does a bat's blood drain to its head when it is hanging upside down?

Trina Cooper, Grade 2, Boonville

A bat's circulatory system is adapted to keep the blood from pooling in its head. The heart keeps pumping, even during hibernation, so that the blood is distributed throughout the body and not pulled by gravitation to the lowest point.

Bats have a very large heart, compared to other mammals of the same size, and they have a huge range of heart rates, from as low as 20 beats per minute in hibernation, to 40 to 80 beats while resting during the day, to 900 to 1,000 beats when flying. Visit www.batcon.org on the Web for lots of great information about bats.