12 Mutated Bits of Trivia That Escaped From the Lab and Roam the Countryside Looking for Brains to Inhabit

The human nose just does its best to make sense of whatever stink happens to be wafting by. But the noses of rats (and a few other mammals) are much more specialized, allowing them to change their sniffing patterns depending on what they’re seeking or detecting.

The lepidodendron was a huge tree-like plant that had a very pineapple-esque pattern on its bark. Their fossilized trunks were often unearthed and put on display as the fossilized bodies of big scary snakes.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had long displayed a statue of Shreedhar Vishnu, until stolen art hunters noticed it was the exact shape of a hole in a Nepalese temple. The Met hasn’t shipped it back yet, but it has removed the listing from its inventory, which is either a good sign or a very bad sign.

Charles Sanson became the official Executioner of Paris in 1684, and that title stayed in his family for six generations. They did execute both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which was cool of them.

StachePassions was started as a way to match up mustache owners with mustache appreciators, but has since evolved to become a forum for connections of all kinds. Although they have features like “smooch,” “lick” and “nibble,” so it seems like dating is still a top priority.

When his house caught on fire in 1969, Nelson rushed home, sprinted inside and saved his pound of weed. He says he wasn’t being heroic: “I was trying to keep the firemen from finding it and turning me over to the police.”

Onions have been found stuffed inside various body parts of mummies. The Ancient Egyptians seemed to have noticed the antiseptic properties of onions (which would come in handy in Hell), or perhaps just thought the pungent odor could make the dead breath, the way smelling salts can jolt you awake.

The Navy’s official take on sharks going into World War II was that they were an “insignificant danger to personnel.” Of course, disasters like the sinking of the USS Indianapolis (and the subsequent brutal shark attack) proved them very, very wrong. They underestimated sharks so egregiously because they didn’t see much shark action in World War I — where they fought in significantly colder waters — and concluded that sharks simply don’t care for war.

On the way to meet up with him in Switzerland, Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, had her luggage stolen at a train station. She had packed up some of his work at his request, including a completed manuscript and, in a desperately unlucky twist, its only existing carbon copy.

Many ancient colonies — and reportedly, some modern parts of Wales — had a village sin-eater, who would eat a loaf of bread off the chest of the recently deceased, and wash it down with some ale. They would take on the sins of every dead person in their village that way, making them pariahs in their own homes. On the plus side, people mostly left them alone outside of work hours.

Google Maps exists for the sole purpose of creating an accurate map of the Earth, but border and sovereignty conflicts muddy those waters tremendously. For a while, it would show certain Pakistani territories — including Nanga Parbat and K2, the ninth- and second-highest peaks in the world — as part of India when accessed from the .co.in domain.

When European honeybees were imported to Brazil, they became far less productive in their new foreign climate. Scientists bred them with local bees, hoping to create an insect that felt more at home. Instead, they created a much angrier type of bee, and when 26 queens escaped in 1956, nature’s perfect stinging machine was unleashed upon the world.