› added 6 years ago

150

TIL there are 13 secret green shelters built in 1875 dotted around London that only cab drivers can enter.

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b9Lj7 TIL Cat mummies were so plentiful in Egypt that, in the 1800s, an English company bought a load of 180,000, pulverized them and spread them on farm fields as fertilizer. Also so many baboons and ibises were mummified for the trade it likely drove them to extinction in Egypt.
JyGV TIL every year, Finland increases in surface area by about 7 square kilometers per year because it is rebounding from the weight of ice age glaciers and rising out of the sea.
5YQVP TIL mosquitoes fill no significant ecological niche, and if they went extinct there would be few, if any ill effects.
mxWyE TIL In order to bolster the English navy with rope, sails, and netting, Henry VIII ordered that farmers grow 1/4 acre of hemp for every 60 acres of farmland, otherwise they’d be fined three shillings and four pence. Elizabeth I raised the fine to £5.
oRVA TIL that there is evidence of an underground river 4 km beneath the Amazon, that may be as long as the Amazon (6,000 km) and hundreds of times wider