69 Wild, Weird Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

1. There is actually such thing as white crows. They’re born with no melanin in there bodies, making them white. But you never see white crows, because due to their color they are most likely killed and eaten by their mothers when they are still in the nest. If they do somehow live to be an adult, they are shunned by other crows and live a lonely life.

2. The Phantom of the Opera has his iconic half-mask so the audience could see more of the actor’s performance. It was changed so late in the production that they’d already made the posters. That’s why it shows a full mask on the posters.

3. I remember reading this on a similar thread some years ago, taser is an acronym of Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.

4. Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire at the exact middle of his life, to the day.

5. The original definition of a factoid is “an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.”

But the word has been used so much as “a small piece of trivia” that it has now been accepted as such.

So the definition of a factoid is, in itself, a factoid.

6. The sea bird, Boobie, is named such after the Spanish word “bobo”, referring to an idiot. Boobie’s would be the only seabird to land on sailing ships, thus sailors took advantage of this and started setting traps for the birds to catch and eat them. Want to know what the traps were called?

7. The color orange was named after the fruit (not the other way around).

8. Short list of words that contain the word ‘meow’ in them:

Meows Meowed Meowing Homeowner.

9. There’s a town in Alaska named Chicken. It was supposed to be named Ptarmigan, but the townspeople couldn’t figure out how to spell it so they went with Chicken instead.

10. The grumbling sound your stomach makes particularly when you’re hungry is called borbyrygmus. Its actually gas moving through the bowels.

11. “Arkansas” and “Kansas” are spelled the same because they both derive from the same etymological root (a Sioux word meaning “downriver”).

They are pronounced differently because Arkansans took the French pronunciation of the word and the Kansans took the Spanish pronunciation.

12. Braille was made because Napoleon wanted a way for his soldiers to communicate quietly without the use of vision or light so one of his people made a version of Braille as a solution but was scrapped and later simplified for blind people.

13. A word which changes meaning based on its capitalization is called a capitonym.

14. There are the same amount of bones in your neck as there are in a giraffe neck.

15. Clefairy was going to be the mascot for Pokemon before they decided on Pikachu.

16. A German submarine was sunk because of an overcomplicated toilet.

17. Due to the shape of the North American elk’s esophagus, even if it could speak, it could not pronounce the word lasagna.

18. Mealworms eat styrofoam!

19. We lose between 50-100 strands of hair a day

20. UVA rays age your skin. UVB rays burn your skin.

21. Most American car horns honk to the note of F.

22. Ithyphallophobia’ is a morbid fear of seeing, thinking about or having an erect penis.

23. Ted Bundy and Jack Nicholson had very similar childhoods. Yet, one became a serial killer and the other became a famous actor. A good nature VS nurture argument, I suppose!

24. The guy that started the anti-vaccine trend is no longer a medic, his diploma was revoked.

25. Every time your DNA is replicated part of the end is lost but the end of a DNA strand has a nonsense part called its telomere. An enzyme replaces this end but not efficiently enough for it to not start affecting it. This is what is believed to cause aging and part of the reason why cancer cells cannot die since the enzyme is overactive in cancer cells.

26. Nearly 3% of ice in Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine.

27. You can rearrange the letters in “Clint Eastwood” to be “Old West Action” with no spares.

28. Lego used to make their bricks out of plastic pellets that had already been dyed.

Now they use clear plastic pellets and inject dye into the mold for the part.

They claim the bricks looks the same, but I disagree.

The older bricks have a slightly darker color and their “skin” is very shallow.

The new bricks appear more translucent and look cheaper.

29. Ducks have a corkscrew-shaped penis.

30. On average, two newborns are given to the wrong parent every day.

31. Cows have 11 different blood types.

32. Barcode scanners scan the white not the black.

33. Ohio is the only U.S. state that doesn’t share any letters with the word “mackerel.” Now you know.

34. The shelf life of human blood is 42 days.

35. Tarantulas can swim. They can swim fast.

36. Every flight you have been on and will go on, there is always something not working. Whether it be an arm rest or a minor electrical system.

The crew will know about it but it’s usually something minor so there’s no danger what so ever.

It’s called the ‘Minimum Equipment List’. It varies depending on aircraft type.

37. The fax machine was invented before the telephone.

38. When you mimic a rooster crowing, they will consider you their mortal enemy for life and always attack you on sight. They will also try to show off their might by tapping their feet on the ground in quick succession, and do a little sideways dance with one wing almost touching the ground, with the back of the rooster in full display. Also, chickens only know very few words, which you can learn easily and use to talk with them.

39. The Washington Monument is capped with aluminum because at the time it was the most precious metal in the market.

40. Whales ejaculate 70 gallons into the ocean.

41. There is a town called “Peepee creek” in Ohio.

42. Otters sleep holding hands so they don’t drift apart.

They also rape baby seals to death.

43. Bird poop is green because it contains the bird’s urine which is also green.

44. A second is called a second because it is the 2nd division of the hour by 60, the 1st division being a minute.

45. Pigeons, outside of their usual “cooing”, have two long-range calls:

A three-note “wu-wooo wu”, that is a bar of 5/4 (five beats per measure), and

A five-note “wooo wooo wu-wooo wu-“, that is a bar of 17/8 (eight and a half beats per measure).

46. A group of turkeys is called a gang.

47. There are these creatures called cyclostomata that just die right after they lose their virginity, I mean it’s just sad.

48. Apparently, it is explicitly illegal in the UK to use a machine gun to kill a hedgehog. Which means someone did it.

49. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

50. Vikings fused crushed animal bones with iron to “fuse the spirit of the animal in the weapon,” but this actually just made a predecessor to steel.

51. Water tastes different at different temperatures.

52. Graham crackers were invented to be bland. The maker believe that food with flavor was responsible for lust. This, he made the cracker with the idea that it would help people by reducing the amount of sex they wanted.

Kellogg’s originally made corn flakes with the idea that it would be a substitute for food much for the same reason as Graham created his cracker.

53. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday are Latin day names. Day of Saturn, Day of the Sun, Day of the Moon.

But for some reason, the weekdays are from Norse mythology. Tyr’s Day (Tuesday), Woden’s (Odin) Day (Wednesday), Thor’s Day (Thursday) and Frigga’s Day (Friday).

54. The sandwich was invented because the Earl of Sandwich wanted a dish he could eat in one hand while holding poker cards in the other.

55. This guy in China once held off an entire army just by playing music. This poor village has no army, so they just put a guy and his harp on top of their city wall. Seeing how calmly he was playing, the invaders thought a huge army was waiting for them

56. Peanut butter was invented by a doctor as a protein substitute for people who could not chew meat.

57. Pigeons can fly up to 62 miles per hour for up to ten hours.

58. If you add up all the numbers on the spinning wheel of a roulette table, you’ll get 666.

59. Spiders leave their penises on the female they wanna mate with.

60. Spaghetti is actually plural. Its two spaghetti and one spaghetto. Same goes for espresso, cappuccino etc.

61. The sun has existed 4.6 billion years.

It takes 230 million years to orbit the Milky Way.

That makes our sun in its own time about 20 years old.

The sun is currently projected to die in 5 billion years.

Meaning it’s life span is 41.7 years old (in its own time).

62. Those plastic bags of ramen. A serving size is half of the bag.

I want to know who opens it, breaks it in half and puts the other half away for another time (and how do you split the seasoning pack in half?)

63. Hippo milk is actually pink.

64. Gary Oldman is 13 days younger than Gary Numan. So they’re BOTH LIARS.

65. If you crack and egg and bits of the egg fall in, use the egg shell to retrieve it. It attracts it.

66. Most printer paper is ~25% limestone by weight.

67. Penguins have sex with other dead penguins, even if it’s just a severed head.

68. The water that they drink on the ISS is reclaimed from all other water sources on the ship. They’re drinking their own filtered piss (among other things).

69. Gold is more rare (and higher in value) than Platinum but games use platinum trophy as higher achievement than gold.