About 3,000 veterinarians are also certified as specialists. • If you see information on pet health pop up automatically on the Web site of your veterinary hospital, favorite pet-related blog or other pet-care site, what you’ve likely noticed is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s new “widget.” The widget is a small graphic that’s easily added to any Web site by following instructions on the FDA site (www.fda.gov/pethealthwidge t). Once loaded onto the host site, the graphic updates automatically with news and information from the federal agency, including recall notifications and information on how to report problems with food or medications.

• An animal resulting from the physical mingling of very early embryos of two species, thus having four parents, is known as a “chimera.” One such chimera is the “geep,” a mix of a sheep and goat. Six geeps were born at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, England, in 1984, but only one had blood proteins from both sheep and goats and patches of goat hair and sheep wool. With a true hybrid, the embryo would need genetic material from both species mixed at conception, half coming from one parent, and half from the other. A hybrid goat/sheep would be sterile, because the animals have mismatched numbers of chromosomes — goats have 60 and sheep, 54.

• Veterinary specialists working in the pet-care field — as opposed to academia, industry or large-animal medicine — number at about 3,000, based at approximately 746 practices of all types and sizes. So says the American Animal Hospital Association (aahanet.org) in a 2005 benchmarking study that looked at the growth of specialists in veterinary medicine. Veterinary system specialties include cardiology, radiology, dermatology, ophthalmology, emergency and critical care, and surgery, along with species specialists certified in avian or feline medicine.

• The heaviest land mammal and the second tallest animal is the African elephant, with the tallest males measuring 12 feet tall. The elephant’s height doesn’t compete with the giraffe’s, the tallest of which can be 19 feet tall. — Dr. Marty Becker and Mikkel Becker Shannon