Bonus points for links for me to explore
Plants have evolved to become carnivorous at least nine separate and unrelated times throughout history. Venus flytraps are only native to a tiny and shrinking part of the world, swampland around the Carolinas. They are at risk of going extinct in nature in the next few decades.
I have a ton of these. I’ll start with history:
The name of the woman depicted by the Statue of Liberty is “The Mother of Exiles”.
On Feb 2, 2014, former New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio killed NY’s official weather-forecasting groundhog by accidentally dropping it.
Dr. Ben Spock is most well-known for his groundbreaking 1946 book on child-rearing, but he’s less well-known for winning an Olympic gold medal in rowing (in 1924).
The Second Congo War, which ran from 1998 to 2003, still holds the dubious distinction of being the deadliest war since WWII (5.4 million casualties).
When it was founded, Oxford University did not teach any classes on the Aztec Empire or calculus, because neither existed.
The oldest continuously-honored international alliance that is still in force today is the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance between England and Portugal, which was signed in 1386. [Note that there are a lot of people who will claim that the Auld Alliance (between Scotland and France against England, signed in 1295) is the rightful holder of this distinction, but they’re wrong: it was formally ended with the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560, even though some groups continued to uphold it anyway, and it was made entirely obsolete by the Acts of Union in 1707, when Scotland was brought into the UK.]
And to mix it up a little, here’s a bit of sports trivia:
Kobe Bryant is one of only 5 players in NBA history to have won the All-Star MVP award more than twice. Of those 5 players, Kobe is the only one who’s dead (as far as I know right now). The rest are all still alive, because the NBA is much younger than most people think of it as being.
Pigeons are better at solving the Monty Hall Problem than humans are.
Contrary to popular belief, one could always know when to expect the Spanish inquisition. They gave 30 days notice.
