They say that when you lose something it’s in the last place you look, which makes sense because you wouldn’t keep looking anywhere else. That’s just something you’ve lost, though. When it comes to discovering something new, the sky is truly the limit for where you can find it. Sometimes it makes sense, but sometimes new things are discovered in the most unexpected ways and places.
10. The World’s Deadliest Toxin was Discovered in Sausage
Botulism has become oddly ubiquitous these days thanks to botox. The full weight of just how dangerous it is as a toxin is lost because it sounds so every day. But the truth is, botulism is literally the most toxic substance in the world. One nanogram per kilogram is enough to kill a human. One pint could kill every single human in the world. The fact that improperly canning or bottling foods can breed botulism should probably terrify more people than it does, but luckily we live in an age when it’s relatively rare. Only about 110 people are affected per year in America.
For something so deadly, it’s surprising to learn that it wasn’t discovered in a lab, or even in any scientific way at all, actually. It was first discovered in Europe in 1735 in some sausages. The name comes from the Latin word “botulus” which actually means sausage.
9. The Marbled Crayfish Came From a German Pet Store
The danger of invasive species can be quite dramatic. Just look at what rabbits managed to do in Australia. Florida towns will go into lockdown when someone even gets word of a Giant African Land Snail being in the area. And there’s a species of cloned crayfish that are now rampant across Europe and Africa.
The marbled crayfish are all female, which would normally be a problem for most animals but not these crustaceans. They are able to reproduce asexually and clone themselves, and they do it extremely prolifically. They’ve literally been compared to Tribbles from Star Trek with their ability to breed. In realistic terms, one crayfish can become three hundred in three months. It’s not hard to see why they have spread all across the continent and into Africa as a result. So where do they come from?
Amazingly, the entire species can be traced to a German pet store. The store had several Texas crayfish but one was a mutation; a complete fluke. And it bred. People bought them as pets and began releasing them in the wild and they spread like wildfire. It’s the only known crustacean species able to breed asexually. It took them 25 years to blanket Europe and reach another continent.
Worth noting is that they are already being sold in North America as well. They can be found in Japan and Madagascar and Canada, and who knows how far they’ll spread or if anywhere in the world will be spared.
8. The World’s Oldest Rock Was Found On the Moon
Most of us aren’t super interested in rocks, but there is some curiosity value, if nothing else, in hearing about the oldest rock ever. And a rock that’s four billion years old sounds like something pretty remarkable since the Earth itself is just 4.5 billion years old.
A rock of such a great age could literally come from anywhere in the world, because isn’t the whole world made of rock? Despite that, there actually is a surprising origin story since the oldest rock in the world was not actually found in or even on the world. It came from the moon.
The Apollo 14 mission took some rock samples from the moon, and among them was a tiny two centimeter long chip stuck in a larger rock. Studies date the piece to four billion years in the past, and it originated here on Earth and not on the moon. Its makeup contained quartz and zircon and other minerals that chemically identify it as coming from here rather than there. An asteroid impact on the Earth would have blasted it into space and sent it crashing into the moon. Its presence means it’s possible that a number of the craters and pockmarks on the moon’s surface were caused by rocks that came from the Earth, and there could be many more Earth rocks up there as well.
7. Mount Mabu was Discovered on Google Earth
One of the great small pleasures in life is discovering a new place. A great new restaurant, a cool club, even a little waterfall secluded away in the woods. But when we say “new” we typically mean a place that we’ve never personally been before, not a place no one has ever been. Every place in the world has already been discovered, right? Well, maybe not. For instance, the entirely rainforest-covered Mount Mabu in Mozambique was only discovered by outsiders in 2005. And it was only found thanks to Google Earth.
The rainforest covered a massive 27 square miles, making it something of a significant plot of land to have been overlooked for so long. Obviously the locals were well aware of the mountain and the rainforest, but scientists and geographers simply had no idea at all. The area is almost completely inaccessible, and a history of war in the area meant outsiders had rarely approached it.
Biologist Julian Bayliss only discovered it because he was specifically using Google Earth to find unexplored places. There were no maps or information anywhere on the forest and the mountain, making it kind of like a geographical unicorn.
6. A New Sea Urchin Species was Discovered on eBay
It’s a pretty well-known fact that eBay was started as a way for the founder’s wife to better collect Beanie Babies, but those are far from the only rare things to have made their way to the online auction site. One of the more remarkable samples to turn up was a species of sea urchin that had never been discovered anywhere else before.
The tiny, colorful urchin was named Coelopleurus exquisitus by Simon Coppard of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature at the Natural History Museum. He regularly gets emailed pictures by people who have discovered a sea urchin and want to know what it is. The eBay find was the first time he ever discovered a brand new species and got to name it himself, however. But given that 15,000 new organisms are identified every year, there are plenty of chances for him, or anyone, to run across something new… even if it’s not on eBay.
5. Phosphorus Was Discovered by Trying to Get Gold From Urine
Imagine you’re an old-timey alchemist and you sort of have no idea how anything in the universe works. But man, do you love gold. Turning lead into gold has so far not worked and you need a new plan of attack. What looks like gold that might have gold in it? If you guessed urine, you would have fit right into the late 1600s.
Hennig Brand was trying to distill gold out of urine, as one does, and had collected an alleged 1,500 gallons of the stuff. According to his own process, he would evaporate it down to the “consistency of honey,” which must have created just a remarkable odor in his home, where he was working. The process of boiling pee in massive quantities did not net him any gold, but he did find a waxy substance that inexplicably glowed in the dark. Brand had discovered phosphorus.
4. Male Blanket Octopuses Weren’t Discovered Until 2002
There are around 300 species of octopus in the world and some of them are more obscure than others. The unusual blanket octopus was discovered sometime in the 1800s, or at least the females were, but it wasn’t until 2002 that we finally found the males. How could it be possible to not discover males of a known species for so long? Where did we finally discover them? Turns out they were never hidden. They were found right in front of our faces.
A female blanket octopus can get pretty big. They get their name because they can look like a living blanket floating through the water, and can reach lengths of two meters, or about six feet. But a male? They are around 2.4 centimeters long. A female can outweigh a male by as much as 40,000 times. So the reason we never saw a male before is that they were just too damn small and scientists had never seen such a dramatic example of a size discrepancy between sexes before. And yes, our minds went directly to wondering what reproduction looks like, too, but we’re not sure that’s an image we want to dwell on.
3. Graphene Was Discovered with Sticky Tape
Graphene has been called the “wonder material of the future” and people suggest it could literally change the world. It’s a single layer of carbon atoms and its strength and electrical properties really do have incredible potential to change many kinds of industry. And to think this miracle substance was discovered entirely by accident because a guy was playing with tape.
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering graphene and they isolated it from graphite, otherwise known as pencil lead, by yanking off a layer with some tape. They repeated it a few times, getting a thinner and thinner layer of carbon, until they were down to a very thin layer that allowed them to isolate that single atom layer of graphene.
2. The Tomb of St Monica was Discovered by Kids Playing Soccer
The search for relics of religious significance has gone on for ages and is even a big part of pop culture. After all, where would Indiana Jones be without the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail? Less adventurous, but no less remarkable, was the discovery of the Tomb of St. Monica, and Harrison Ford was nowhere to be seen.
Outside of the town of Ostia Antica, a pair of boys interested in playing a game of football, or soccer to our American readers, decided to dig a hole for a goal post (although some reports say one of the boys tripped on a stone first before digging).
In either case, they did find a stone, and on it was written Monica’s funerary epitaph. The boys had discovered the saint’s long lost tomb in an empty field.
1. A 66-Million-Years Extinct Fish was Found on a South African Fishing Boat
Have you ever heard the story of someone who was presumed dead who then reappeared some years later? It’s rare, but it does happen. Sometimes a person fakes their own death or just runs away and drops off the grid. Sometimes it’s even a result of amnesia. Whatever the reason, it’s very dramatic when the person resurfaces. Now imagine that times 66 million. That’s the story of the coelacanth, a fish that supposedly died off 66 million years ago until it was discovered on a fishing boat, very much not extinct.
Coelacanth fossils date back over 410 million years. It was 66 million years back that they seemed to have come to their natural end and, let’s be honest, 344 million years is a great run for any fish. But that was not the end of this ancient species.
It was 1938 when the curator of a natural history museum in South Africa got a call that a fishing trawler came into port with a load of fish that she might be interested in picking through for interesting specimens. She took a look and found an unusual blue-finned creature that was five-feet long and unlike anything either her or the fishermen had ever seen.
The curator tried to get a fish expert to inspect the specimen, but the timing was poor and it took nearly two weeks for him to get her message. When he did, he was so excited he actually offered to search the dump for the guts of the fish which, by that time, had been thrown away.
The fish, of course, turned out to be the coelacanth. Since that first discovery more specimens have been retrieved but by no means in great abundance. By 1975 only 84 had been caught. But that’s still quite a lot for a fish that was supposed to have died out before the T. Rex.