You thought that house cats sleep a lot. Well, they do, at a little over 12 hours a day, or more than half their time. But a koala spends 21 hours out of every day asleep! Giulia De Amicis created a large graphic that details how different animals (mostly mammals) sleep, from the koala to the elephant, which only sleeps a couple of hours a day. The data is from the Sleep Foundation. What is amazing is that there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for some species needing so much more sleep than others.
Outside of mammals, sleep gets even weirder. Birds can sleep with half their brain while the other half is awake, so some of them can even sleep while flying. Snakes sleep with their eyes open, because they don't have eyelids. No wonder this data is limited to mammals, since sleep in other types of animals is really hard to study. You can see the graphic in a larger size at Moss and Fog. -via Nag on the Lake
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