12 Trivia Tidbits for Thursday, March 14, 2024

A 99-million-year-old daddy longlegs discovered in 2016 was hailed as “the first amber specimen visibly preserving the structure of the penis.” Harvestmen have among the most mammal-like penises of any arachnid.

The lady’s slipper orchid was thought to be extinct, until one was found growing in Yorkshire. Orchid enthusiasts would flock to its location when it bloomed, but after repeated theft attempts, it’s been moved to a secret location and is guarded by police.

The griffin myth most likely comes from the Protoceratops, the fossilized skeletons of which were all over the Gobi Desert and often unearthed via mining, or even just a stiff wind. Ancient people intuited the bird-like essence of dinosaurs better than more modern scientists, who described them as big-ass lizards.

Roger Sherman, Connecticut’s delegate to the Constitutional Convention, was the only person to sign the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the 1774 Continental Association. He’s also the guy who came up with the Connecticut Compromise, which said we should have one body of equal representation and one based on a state’s economic impact, which is working out great so far.

In Ovid’s 16 B.C. book of poetry, Amores, he placed particular emphasis on the word emodulanda. Scholars know it’s a gerundive, or the future passive participle verb form, but they have no idea what it actually means, and it’s never been seen in any other work of Latin literature.

Dr. Charles Leale was the first person to treat Lincoln after he was shot. He first tried the “Silvester maneuver,” which involved kind of flapping the victim’s arms up and down, but eventually settled on mouth-to-mouth, which helped keep Lincoln alive for a few more hours. Leale began giving speeches on the maneuver, which likely prompted medical journals to begin tepidly endorsing it.

Oncolytic viruses are natural or genetically modified microbes that both destroy cancer cells, and help the body’s immune system recognize and attack them.

In the 19th century, billiard balls were made of ivory, and the popularity of the sport was causing a scarcity of elephant tusks. A New York firm offered up $10,000 to anyone who could come up with a solid substitute, and inventor John Wesley Hyatt nailed it with his cellulose and camphor concoction. Nice going, man.

Between 1769 and 1772, an anonymous writer who went by the pen name “Junius” published a bunch of scathing op-eds in London’s Public Advertiser, punching up as high as possible. He took shots at the King, whose mother was dying, a duke whose wife cheated on him and a princess who had terminal cancer.

Discovered in 1741, Steller’s sea cow was so slow, trusting and apparently delicious, humans hunted it to extinction by 1768.

Swindon, England’s Radnor Street Cemetery is home to a clan of badgers who love to burrow deep underground, periodically unearthing human remains in the process. In 1992, it became illegal to mess with badger habitats, so volunteers tasked with re-interring the body parts often have to dig brand new graves.

California man Craig Stevens convinced 10 investors that he represented In-N-Out, and that they were expanding operations to the Middle East, scamming them out of $4.3 million before being nabbed for wire fraud. Interestingly, In-N-Out doesn’t even do franchises, which is pretty public information.