› added 6 months ago

26

TIL Carl Linnaeus's remains constitute the type specimen for Homo sapiens. A type is an example that serves to anchor or centralizes the defining features of that particular taxon.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

OG4DY TIL: Panther is a general word, it does not refer to a species of wild cat. Panther is most commonly used to describe three different types of cat in the wild: leopards and jaguars in their black form, and pumas in Florida and the eastern US
xVXMg TIL the record fastest voyage from Hong Kong to New York by sailing ship was set at 74 days in 1849, and remained unbroken for 154 years. The record was beaten in 2003 by two days.
bWQQ TIL: Thomas Nast, the guy who created the modern-day images of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, also popularized the mascots of today’s Democratic and Republican parties.
nW9vP TIL: The first message ever sent on the Internet was “LO”
4XvEo TIL that Dexter Holland, lead singer of Offspring, was valedictorian of his school and had a masters in molecular biology before the band became famous. He since earned his PhD and published a paper on the use of computational molecular biological approaches to identify microRNA sequences in HIV