Even fledgling navigators know that moss grows on the North sides of trees, but now you can just look at a bunch of cows in a field. A recent article in PNAS describes how cows align to face magnetic north or south while grazing or resting.

From the NPR article:

"Eventually, his team used Google Earth to look at more than 8,500 cows, over 300 pastures all around the world, according to a report in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By analyzing the images, the team found that cows tend to face either magnetic north or south when grazing or resting.

'Most of them actually align in a north-south direction,' says Burda, and this held true regardless of where the sun was, or how the wind blew."

Read the full article at NPR here.

Read the research article in PNAS here.