› added 7 years ago

128

TIL that in 1914, four empires claimed to be successors to the Roman Empire; the German Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire and Italian Empire. All of them collapsed because of WW1 except for the Italian Empire, leaving them as the only empire to claim succession from the Roman Empire.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

VMKKk TIL Cats rarely meow at each other, it was rather developed exclusively to communicate with people
7EpO TIL a researcher accidently killed one of the oldest tree ever (nicknamed “Prometheus”) in 1964. He got a tree corer stuck. A park ranger helped him to cut the tree down and remove the tool. Eventually, when he counted the tree rings, he realized that the felled tree was almost 5,000 years old.
jNmZa TIL that half of all panda births result in twins, however, it is very rare for both cubs to survive as giant pandas almost always abandon a cub if they give birth to more than one
16vWO TIL that in 250 million years all continents on our planet will converge and form a new supercontinent, Pangea Ultima. This may also lead to a climate tipping point and Earth becoming uninhabitable for mammals.
XElRE TIL the dollar bill has been the same since 1929. The reason is that the government thinks no one would take the trouble of counterfeiting such a low denomination currency and hence it does not need the fancy updates or security features seen in the higher value currencies.