Post * XmbR — Curious Curator

› added 11 years ago

94

TIL that Teddy Roosevelt once backed a bill to import Hippopotamuses into the U.S to produce meat to solve the American meat crisis in 1910. The American Hippo bill nearly passed, but fell one vote short.

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dDEoj TIL: The EU plans to connect the rivers Seine and Scheldt with a 107 km long canal in a project more ambitious than the Panama Canal, creating one continuous inland water transport system from the English Canal to the Black Sea

1aNg7 TIL it's illegal to let your donkey sleep in your bathtub in Arizona. In 1924, a merchant near the town of Kingman let his donkey sleep in an old bathtub when a local dam broke. The donkey was swept away in the tub and the locals spent a lot of manpower rescuing the animal. The donkey survived.

nWo0B TIL: The Artic Circle and Antarctica are named for Arktos (Greek for Bear) Antarctic = No Bears. While there are no polar bears in Antarctica, the "Bears" in question are Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (which contains the North Star) - Neither constellation is visible from Antarctica (i.e. NoBears land)

nWDZB TIL the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on an island in Arctic Norway is the ultimate backup for the earth's food supply, storing several hundred million seeds from thousands of species of agricultural plants from 80 nations, tucked away in metal pouches at -18°C

KOPbG TIL about Ivan Ivanovich, a mannequin that orbited Earth in 1961 just weeks before Yuri Gagarin's milestone spaceflight. Ivan's features were so lifelike that technicians wrote "model" on the forehead, so anyone finding the mannequin upon landing would not be confused.