› added 12 years ago

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TIL that modern English surnames were given between the 12th and 14th centuries for taxation purposes in England, and were based on parentage (eg Donaldson), location (eg Wood, Lane), personal attributes (eg Short, Long) and occupation (Smith, Miller).

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D10Kp TIL Amur (Siberian) tigers regularly prey on young bears and sub-adult brown bears. Reports of preying on fully grown small female adult Ussuri brown bears by a big male tiger are common as well. Certain tigers have been reported to imitate the calls of Asian black bears to attract them.
1akX8 TIL The Ceratodontimorpha is a "living fossil" fish with a highly specialized respiratory system to switch from gills to real lung when it crawls on dry land. They are also capable of surviving seasonal drying by burrowing into mud, secrete a mucus which encloses them in a cocoon...for years.
97B6 TIL a man stole a Salvador Dali painting in full view of security cameras in broad daylight, mailed it back to the museum a week later, and was only caught because he had shoplifted a juice bottle a year prior, allowing police to match his fingerprints on the package to those on the bottle.
rRkwy TIL that Grapefruit are a hybrid of sweet orange and pomelo, and their pink hue was caused by deliberate radiation-induced mutations.
oR7AL TIL in the 80s a german ice hockey club was sponsored by Muammar Gaddafi and had his manifesto "The Green Book" on their shirt