Even the most outlandish legends and cryptids may be traced to real experiences that made a good story for someone somewhere. A good story tends to get larger with each telling, and details are added when different people try to translate them or pass those stories down to younger people who have less context. We are familiar with medieval artists who tried to draw exotic beasts from nothing but an oral description. That same transformation could happen to any strange sighting when the witness and the artist are different people. As we gain more knowledge about the ancient world, we find more analogues to our modern legends, like the drop bear. A string of unreliable narrators can easily transform a natural phenomena that no one understands into a fantastic fairy tale. Weird History take a look at a whole string of mythical creatures, from cyclops to vampires to unicorns, and ties them to plausible natural but misunderstood origins.

Orcas, also called killer whales, have sunk three sailboats off the Iberian coast since 2020, the latest on May 4th. They've also attacked numerous boats without sinking them. Such attacks involve several orcas, and the younger ones appear to be imitating the behavior of older orcas. In many of these attacks, the orcas approach the rudder of the boat, which they bite, bend, or break, and then lose interest when the boat stops moving forward. You could call these interactions rare, as the orcas only attack about 1% of boats in the area, but since 2020, that's 500 cases.

Scientists suspect the behavior started with a female known as White Gladis, who may have had a traumatic experience with a boat. Orcas are very social, and new behaviors can spread quickly among the population. And that population is rather small- the last census of Iberian orcas in 2011 found only 39 individuals. That subpopulation is listed as critically endangered. Five hundred boat attacks by such a small number of orcas is concerning. While the behavior was quickly spread among the orcas, experts don't know if it's just something fun they've learned to do, or if it may be a malicious and deliberate way for sea creatures to inflict harm on the human ocean interlopers. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NOAA)

A drop bear is a cryptid that Australians love to warn tourists about. They resemble koalas, but are super vicious. A drop bear will hide in a tree until an unsuspecting person walks underneath and then drop onto them and rip them apart. Or at least that's the story. I don't understand why they try to scare tourists like that, since people visiting Australia from elsewhere are all primed to believe every living creature there is trying to kill you already.  

But there were once real drop bears. Like koalas, they were not bears, but marsupials. The genus called Nimbadon roamed the rainforests of southern Australia 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene Epoch. Nimbadon looked somewhat like a wombat, but grew to be 70 kilograms (154 pounds)! While they were first considered something like a "marsupial sheep," scientists have determined that these creatures lived in the trees, slung underneath branches like sloths. Occasionally, a Nimbadon would fall out of a tree, just like a drop bear. They know this because some Nimbadons fell out of trees and into caves, where their remains were found 15 million years later.

That's wild enough, but the article about prehistoric drop bears also mentions crocodiles that climbed trees. Now that would make a great legend! -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Peter Schouten)

The Cut staged a speed dating game for older people. It's awkward in places because older people don't really like the pressure of meeting others just for the purpose of evaluating whether to start a romantic relationship. On the other hand, I can tell you from experience that they don't want to waste any time with someone they aren't compatible with in some way. I've found the best relationships start when two people just can't stop talking to each other about anything and everything, whether it's toward a romantic end or not. In this sequence, there's an awful lot of rejection, and they aren't averse to explaining it. Speed dating is all about snap decisions, after all. But we finally get to a meeting between two people and find the one fact that makes them perfect for each other. You may be surprised, but you'll understand when you hear it. -via Digg

MGM made several pairs of ruby red slippers for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. That wasn't widely known until 1970, when MGM sold one pair at auction and ordered the others destroyed. The pair that was auctioned off was later donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. But the other shoes weren't destroyed. MGM costumes worker Kent Warner took them home, and over the years they were sold and landed in private collections and museums.

One pair of the ruby slippers was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, (Garland's home town) in 2005. They were recovered by the FBI 13 years later in Minneapolis in 2018. The Smithsonian was consulted, and their conservators studied the stolen property and compared them with the cleaned and preserved shoes the museum owned, and determined they were original. But who stole them? Another five years went by as the FBI investigated the case. Now, 76-year-old Terry Jon Martin of Minnesota has been indicted in the theft.

Read what we know about the case so far at Smithsonian. One interesting part of the saga is the values involved. The shoes that MGM auctioned off in 1970 went for $15,000. The collector who owns the stolen shoes bought them from Warner the same year for just $2,000. A woman who won an original pair in a contest in 1940 sold them in 1988 for $165,000. The pair recovered from the FBI is now valued at $3.5 million. Not bad for a $2,000 investment.

(Image credit: National Museum of American History)

A couple of hedgehogs wake up from winter hibernation and find that a city has been built over their burrow! They aren't the only animals who were surprised by the change in their environment. How will they ever survive? But woodland creatures are keen to adapt, and soon learn the ways of the city. They actually learn better than the humans ever did, and manage to get by just fine, thank you. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but it has an unexpected happy ending.  

The cute stop-motion animation Ezi un lielpilseta is from Latvian filmmaker Evalds Lacis. -via Nag on the Lake

There are basically two kinds of kisses: the social kiss between friends and family that is just a pressing of lips against skin, and the open-mouth sexual kissing between lovers. This research involves the latter.

The oldest kisses documented in text has been pushed back to 4,500 years ago, found in Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. That's a thousand years earlier than previously known documentation. But human writing only goes back so far, and since kissing has been found in such ancient documents, it may well have been an established custom before writing existed at all. Evidence of kissing before that relies heavily on how we interpret the clues.

We know that humans interbred with Neanderthals, but did they kiss? A DNA study of Neanderthal  tooth plaque found a 48,000-year-old microorganism that was rare in Neanderthals but common in human remains. While that could be evidence of kissing, there are other ways it could have leapt from one species to the other.

However, bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, kiss as a precursor to sexual behavior, while chimpanzees only employ social kisses. That may lead us to believe both kinds of kisses were already present when homo sapiens emerged. But it's not conclusive evidence.

These questions come from an article about a study that looked for a correlation between ancient text references to kissing and the spread of disease. You can read about that study, and the history of kissing, at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Francisco Osorio)

I always had a problem with the message in Disney's version of The Little Mermaid. A young girl completely changes herself to please a guy she only knows from afar, and then has to seduce him with just her looks. Somehow, that leads to a happy ending. Yeah, there are plenty of other things wrong with the fairy tale, as in all the Disney Princess films, at least the classic ones I have seen. But the folks at How It Should Have Ended just target the most obvious flaw, so it's a short video. There's a post-credit scene that has nothing to do with the fixed ending, but it's funny. The new live-action version of The Little Mermaid opens nationwide next weekend, presumably with the same ending as the 1989 animated version. -via Geeks Are Sexy

An F-5 tornado passed through the village of Woldegk in Saxony (now Germany) on June 29, 1764. An F5 is the most powerful category on the Fujita scale. In fact, the Woldegk tornado, with winds speeds of 300 mph (480 km/h), is estimated to have been the most powerful recorded tornado in history! It flattened a path 30 kilometers long and was estimated to be 900 meters wide at its maximum. It pulled up mighty oaks, flattened houses, ripped up cobblestones, and even unearthed a skeleton from a grave.

But how do we know the power of that tornado? There were no modern meteorological devices in Woldegk, nor anywhere near. German scientist Gottlob Burchard Genzmer visited the area soon after the tornado and made an excruciatingly detailed survey of the damage, from the place where the tornado touched down to the point it fizzled out, including illustrations like the one above. Comparing the book Genzmer published to better-recorded tornados of later centuries allowed scientists to determine the twister's strength.

But the real kicker is that only one person died in that disaster. June 29 was Buß- und Bettag, a day of prayer and repentance, and almost everyone in town was inside the massive stone church, the only building that was safe from the storm. Read about the historic devastation of the Woldegk tornado at Amusing Planet.    

(Image credit: Gottlob Burchard Genzmer)

Every once in a great while, you learn about a person you've never heard of before just to find out they have more than one claim to fame. Jack Parsons had way more than that. Parsons developed an interest in rocketry in the 1920s. In the 1930s, he dropped out of college. In the 1940s, he became an explosives expert, co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory along with other institutions, dabbled in communism, joined a religious cult founded by Alistair Crowley named Thelema, lost his adulterous lover to his housemate L. Ron Hubbard, tried to conjure up a goddess to re-order the world, and lost his security clearance due to his advocacy of "sexual perversion." In the 1950s, Parsons managed to kill himself.

Jstor Daily has an overview of Jack Parsons and his short but incredibly eventful life. Then you'll want to read a more detailed account at Wikipedia.  -via Damn Interesting

In 2003, Walt Disney Pictures released Haunted Mansion, a movie based on their theme park ride, starring Eddie Murphy. It was released just a few months after the mega-hit Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, also based on a Disney theme park ride. While Haunted Mansion made some money, it did not live up to expectations, either financially or by the reaction from audiences and critics. So Disney just waited twenty years, and is doing it again. Well, to be honest, they didn't wait that long. This reboot has been in development for more than a decade. Let's hope they get it right this time.  

The 2023 movie Haunted Mansion seems to be straight up scary in its supernatural scenes, while putting all the comedy into the normal humans' interactions with each other. As far as we can tell, it's more in line with the theme park ride than the 2003 film. It will star LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jared Leto, Hasan Minhaj , Dan Levy, and Winona Ryder.

If Haunted Mansion is a hit this time, it might make up for the so-so performance of Jungle Cruise in 2021. The Space Mountain movie is still in production with no release date set. We can't think of any other Disney theme park rides that aren't already based on a movie. Haunted Mansion will hit theaters July 28.  -via Boing Boing

An ocean cruise is a dream for some and a nightmare for others. The benefits are that you stay in your "floating hotel" while traveling at the same time, and you don't have to drive or select a restaurant. The drawbacks are crowding and possible seasickness. But how did that idea ever take off? German shipping magnate Albert Ballin wanted to take advantage of his ships' downtime. Boats cost money whether they are working or not. So in 1891 he offered an excursion on his largest ocean liner, the SS Augusta Victoria, for folks who wanted an adventure but weren't traveling to anywhere in specific. A 58-day trip through the Mediterranean in winter was a huge hit, and Ballin arranged for other ships to be used in this way.

But the first ocean liner specifically built as a cruise ship was the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise, built in 1900. It was huge, and had 120 roomy and luxurious staterooms for its passengers. The entire ship was designed with passengers in mind, as if it were a fancy hotel. Read about the first cruise ship, see plenty of pictures, and learn about its tragic demise at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

The Social Security administration has released the list of the most popular baby names for 2022, and they have hardly changed at all from 2021. Or 2020. In fact, Liam has remained the top name for boys for six years now, and Olivia still leads for the fourth year.

The visualization above by redditor chartr shows that the top names just aren't what they used to be. While the most popular names appear to stick around longer, the diversity of names is exploding. A hundred years ago, the most popular name was given to 3% of all boys and girls, while today the top name is only given to 1% of babies. If you were a boy born in the 1940s, there was a 74% chance you were given a top 100 name, but only a 36% chance if you are a boy born in the last few years.  

That doesn't mean much on the ground, though. Thirty years ago, it seemed like half the high school was named either Mike or Jennifer, but now that schools are ten times as big, even a less-common name is heard a lot. The internet makes your name seem even more common when you try to register an email or a social media account. Just ask any early adopter who got an email address like mikesmith@gmail.com and constantly gets messages meant for someone else. Now that's a problem even for people with what you may think of as a unique name.

If you want to find out how the popularity of your name has changed over time, enter it into the Baby Name Explorer and get your own chart. -via Digg

The award-winning short film Higher Grounds has the earth welcoming our first alien contact. The aliens have announced their presence by flooding the earth's atmosphere with oxygen. Authorities here on earth take that as a gift, since we are choking ourselves with carbon dioxide. But is that really the aliens' intention? The ambassadors from the cosmos are two lower ranking aliens, Ralff and Rozzorokk, who both suffer from a lack of self-esteem. They can't even properly parallel park. One falls for an earthling, and the other is in a desperate search for a bathroom. Meanwhile, earthlings have their own problems. Chloe wants to go to the beach, despite the momentous happenings right there in the neighborhood, yet events conspire against her. It's a comedy, so don't get hung up on plausibility.

Higher Grounds is from Joe Kramer (previously at Neatorama), who plays the alien Ralff, and Christian Sarkis Graham, who plays the convenience store clerk. -Thanks, Joe Kramer!

When I became a mother, my husband and I had our first meeting with a pediatrician. The doctor had a lot of safety questions for us, and the very first was "Do you have a trampoline?" Pediatricians hate trampolines, even more than they hate swimming pools. Backyard trampolines are the reason we have around 100,000 trampoline related injuries every year. But people still buy them. Other dangerous toys are remnants of the past. Lawn darts were banned, then were completely redesigned for safety. The infamous Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab went the way of the dodo. Some other hazardous toys may surprise you. A Slip ‘N Slide doesn't appear all that dangerous, but there's a reason that adults are warned not to use them. Find out about that and other dangerous toys in a list at Mental Floss. You can also listen to the article in video form.  

(Image credit: Rob Swystun)