› added 2 years ago

100

TIL an American in the early 1900s dredged the Sacred Cenote in Chichén Itzá and illegally smuggled to the US nearly 30,000 Mayan artifacts found at the bottom of the cenote. The bulk of the find is in a storage room in the Peabody Museum at Harvard.

Read more theharvardadvocate.com

via reddit.com

OGLKg TIL for decades, Marian Breland Bailey and her husband(s) trained animals to do tricks for fun and profit—piano-playing ducks, tic-tac-toe-playing chickens, dolphins for the Navy, cats for the CIA—and ended up pioneering a more humane approach to animal training.
9Rpr TIL in 1933, a University of Alabama professor voluntarily allowed a black widow spider to bite him as scientists recorded him suffering in agony for three days. Before this there were skeptics who believed black widows were not dangerous to humans.
loG0K TIL Chen Si a Chinese man who has stopped more than 300 people from committing suicide off the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China.
woyn6 TIL the Canadian Government once approved a plan to extract oil from the Alberta oilsands using nukes, and the project only died because public opinion on nuclear devices soured after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
GYA7G TIL the first koalas to live outside of Australia were named Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, and arrived at the San Diego Zoo in 1925