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TIL that 19th century commercial whaling was made possible by the Giant Tortoises. Stacked helplessly on their backs, they could be kept alive without food or water for 6 months and eaten whenever. Giant tortoises also contained gallons of perfectly drinkable water kept it in a special bladder.

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JQp1 TIL in 1966, two American teenagers found two child mummies in a cave in Mexico, smuggled them back to California, and ditched them in a friend’s garage until the friend’s mother discovered the mummies 14 years later.
jN1YE TIL Why the buttons for girls and guys’ clothes are on different sides: when button up clothes were invented, wealthy women were dressed by their servants, and men dressed themselves. Having buttons on different sides made it easier for servants to button.
xV9e5 TIL that Peter Billingsley, the actor who played Ralphie in A Christmas Story, was a young NASA ambassador who witnessed the Challenger explosion firsthand.
6E18W TIL New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine, published between 1935 and 1947, was the first American comic-book series to feature solely original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips and the first publication of the company that would become DC Comics
WXlA TIL that in the 1980s the Naval Investigative Service undertook a massive and futile search for a woman named “Dorothy” in the Chicago area, after hearing gay men refer to themselves as “friends of Dorothy”. They believed she was at the center of a ring of gay military personnel.