› added 8 years ago

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TIL that fans reacted badly to Arthur Conan Doyle killing off Sherlock Holmes. It was front-page news around the world; 20,000 people cancelled subscriptions to ‘Strand’ magazine and sent hate mail; thousands wrote to the author begging him to undo the death. Doyle resurrected Holmes a decade later.

BgB1r TIL the first mention of a double-nosed dog in the Amazon jungle was in 1913 by Percy Fawcet after an expedition there. But no one believed him & the dog remained a cryptozoological beast until the 2000s when John Blashford-Snell returned with photo evidence of the Double-Nosed Andean Tiger Hound.
0VXp TIL in the 1940s the Idaho Fish and Game Dept relocated beavers into the wilderness by dropping them out of airplanes with parachutes
kagd TIL Iceland has been so culturally isolated through history since the Vikings, that compared to other Scandinavian counties, people who speak Icelandic can still read the old Norsk sagas
691jX TIL 19-year-old Matilda Scheurer, a Victorian-era factory worker, died after regular exposure to Scheele's Green, a popular arsenic-based dye used in various common items at the time. She died after allegedly vomiting green, while the whites of her eyes and her fingernails turned green.
wNPE TIL During the French revolution, many aristocrats died/flew leaving their cooks behind. They had no job and invented restaurants. It is this hyper-competitive situation that caused French cuisine to evolve into something special.