Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! That line from The Wizard of Oz has accompanied the viral images of a lion, tiger, and bear living together for more than 20 years. The story is true. While it may have started tragically, these animals were devoted to each other and well-cared for most of their lives. They were confiscated from the home of a drug dealer in Atlanta in 2001, and were sent to Noah's Ark Animal Sanctuary in rural Georgia. The creatures, all apex predators, saw each other as family and only thrived when they were together, so that's how they lived for 15 years at the shelter. They came to be known as BLT (bear, lion, tiger). Leo lived to be 15 years old, and Shere Khan died at the age of 17, both having lived quite long for their species. You can learn more about Leo, Shere Khan, and Baloo at Wikipiedia.

Ernest Hemingway, a notoriously manly man, for better or worse, was given a gift of a polydactyl kitten by a sea captain. Polydactyl cats, those which have more than the regulation number of toes, were said to be good luck on a ship because they had more ways to grip the deck. There is some disagreement over whether this kitten was named Snowball, or was Snowball's kitten named Snow White, but Hemingway fell in love with the cat and installed her at his Key West home. He doted on the white cat and her kittens and grandkittens. When Hemingway died in 1961, his will stated that all of the cat's descendants, many of which were polydactyl, would be housed there and protected in perpetuity.

The Hemingway estate has carried out those wishes, and more than 50 years later is home to nearly 60 cats, about half of which are polydactyl. In fact, cats with extra toes anywhere are often called Hemingway cats. Visitors to the estate report that the cats are very friendly. If you can't visit, you can see the cats by downloading a cat app from the estate's website. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Hans Malmberg)

Kawasaki is known for their motorcycles and ATVs, and now they've surprised the world with a robotic walking vehicle you can ride like a motorcycle. This is CORLEO, a quadruped robot vehicle that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. The independent movements of its four legs was inspired by a wolf. You ride it as if you would a horse, but its movements are smoother and more wide-ranging, more like a cat, making it more useful than a horse in rough terrain. But there's something rather human about those rear feet and hindquarters that strikes me as a little creepy. This robot responds to the rider's movements, such as a shift of weight. Sure, it has a dashboard, but we don't know much yet about the controls. CORLEO will be unveiled at Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025 later this month, but don't expect it at your local motorcycle dealership anytime soon. Kawasaki aims to have it ready for retail sale sometime in the next 25 years. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A company called Colossal Biosciences has been working on "de-extinction" with projects set up to bring back extinct species such as the dodo, woolly mammoths, and Tasmanian tigers. Their first announced success, however, has been the birth of three dire wolves, two males named Romulus and Remus, and a female named Khaleesi. Dire wolves have been extinct for ten thousand years.

These wolf pups were produced by a complex process that involved sequencing dire wolf DNA from fossils. This DNA is not viable, but it could be compared to modern canine DNA. Then they spliced modern wolf DNA in 20 places to make it resemble the dire wolf DNA. Once that was accomplished, the resulting cell was grown using the usual methods of cloning, including embryo implantation into domestic dogs who gave birth to these puppies.

Colossal Biosciences considers this a major breakthrough in bringing back extinct species, but scientists from elsewhere have their doubts. Sure, they look like dire wolves, but can they really be a different species, or are they just genetically-modified grey wolves? Read about how the dire wolves came about at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Colossal Biosciences)

This is short and sweet and might put a smile on your face or even make you laugh. Artist Rudy Willingham, who finds creative ways to make street art (previously at Neatorama), has taken a simple pun and made it work in the real world. He took 133 pieces of bread, toasted each one, and then burned onto each one an image of Post Malone in the process of singing. These 133 slices of toast were assembled in order to make the bread lip-sync Malone's song "Circles." The resulting animation, this magnificant work of art, is entitled "Toast Malone," of course.

This wordless project could be considered a video version of a shaggy dog story of sorts, as it goes to great lengths to eventually lead us to a simple pun as a punch line. You have to admire the ridiculous amount of effort that went into this. -via Laughing Squid

Barry Enderwick makes a sandwich every day on video for his YouTube and other social media platforms under the name Sandwiches of History. We've featured him here before. Since he started his daily sandwich project, Enderwick has made more than 700 videos of more than 700 sandwiches, and hasn't had to make one up yet. These sandwiches are all from published or otherwise documented recipes dating back as far as 2,000 years ago. They can be pretty strange, like a 1909 sandwich recipe with popcorn, cayenne pepper, sardines, ketchup and parmesan. In an article at The Guardian, Enderwick explains how his channel got started and makes us hungry with his picks for the five best sandwiches featured so far. That will make you crave a sandwich, but then you can read his list of the five worst sandwiches and lose your appetite. Or you can skip that one. -via Metafilter

Probably no tomb has been studied more than King Tutankhamen's, and studies show he was a young king who was fabulously wealthy but suffered from disabilities and early death due to royal inbreeding. However, the many royal possessions he was buried with still amaze us. The most mysterious and surprising among them is a "space dagger." It's a finely crafted dagger made of iron from a meteorite, made using technology that the Egyptians didn't have at the time. That doesn't mean that aliens gifted him the knife, but it's pretty impressive anyway. How do we know the iron in the dagger came from outer space? That requires some really modern science tech, like X-ray fluorescence that reveals nickel content and Widmanstätten patterns. And if you don't know what Widmanstätten patterns are, well, I didn't either until now. They're from outer space! SciShow is glad to explain them to us.

You'd know an elephant when you see one, wouldn't you? Today we have African elephants and Asian elephants, and we are all familiar with the extinct mammoths and mastodons. But there were once many more species of the order Proboscidea, from which elephants and other long-nosed species came. The strange-looking elephant shown above is Stegotetrabelodon, which really did have super-long and fairly straight tusks on both the upper and lower jaw. These tusks could be up to nine feet long! Can you imagine what and how they ate with those teeth in the way?

Stegotetrabelodon is just one example of the many Proboscidea, or what we would recognize as elephants today, that roamed the world over the past 60 million years or so. Meet some of the most notable and unusual elephant species, including the earliest short-trunked ancestor, the ones whose tusks curved backwards, and ones who used their bottom jaw as a shovel, at Smithsonian.

Last December we showed you the teaser for James Gunn's Superman, which will open in theaters on July 11. We were quite delighted to see that this Superman film shows the heroics of Krypto the Superdog as he saves an injured Superman, played by David Corenswet. Now we have a sneak preview that makes clear the teaser scene was heavily edited. In this expanded version, we find that the rescue scene was not quite as simple as we might have thought. Krypto is certainly Superman's best friend, has super powers, and loves his human very much. But he's a dog after all, and acts the way you might expect your loving dog to act. Which doesn't help a bit until Superman comes up with specific orders.

Notice this sneak preview doesn't mention the name of the movie at all. It doesn't have to, since everyone knows Superman. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Does your country have more immigrants or emigrants? Immigrants are people who move in from another nation, while emigrants are people born in a country and then move out. Brilliant Maps crunched the numbers for all the nations of the world to see who has the most of each, and who has the biggest ratios of people arriving and leaving. You might be surprised to learn that North Korea has a better ratio of arrivals to departures than South Korea. Then you think, well, that's because no one is allowed to leave North Korea. However, records show that 46,379 people moved out of North Korea in 2024, while 50,439 moved into North Korea. There's a story there, I'm sure. While the ratio is puzzling, South Korea records both immigrants and emigrants in the millions.  

The United States, as of 2024, is still the most common destination for people moving to a new country, while India is the country the most people are leaving. That still doesn't tell the whole story, because smaller countries may have more extreme percentages and ratios. Check out the stats for nations around the globe at Brilliant Maps. -via Nag on the Lake

Churches are built as an act of faith and worship, but some builders also know the value of novelty. If you can get people to come and visit out of curiosity, they may stay for worship. That's not the only reason some churches end up being extreme, but it works to draw people in. Several churches built high on top of barely accessible rock pillars in different parts of the world make the statement that just getting there is an act of sacrifice. Some people think that way, while others just take it as a challenge. Some churches are unusual because of events in their history, like the cathedral in St. Petersburg that the Soviets spent a half century pretending its not a church- yet they couldn't bring themselves to tear it down. Great Big Story looks at seven of the most unusual churches in the world, any of which would make a great vacation destination or an adventurous pilgrimage for the faithful.  

It shouldn't surprise us that records of money and court cases are so often prioritized over records of human lives, which is the case of Eulalie Mandeville. No documented records of her life exist outside of the three-year court fight over her money, but those records tell a gripping tale. Eulalie Mandeville was a free woman of color in New Orleans who became one of the richest Black women in America. Born enslaved, she was manumitted by her white father and raised in his white family. In 1793, she was already a successful young businesswoman when she met Eugene Macarty, who was white and would become her life partner. They were prohibited by law from marrying, and their children were therefore considered illegitimate. Neither Mandeville nor their children could inherit anything when Macarty died in 1846. He was found to have an estate of only $12,000, when his brother and other relatives thought he was rich. The couple had prepared for this situation for many years, transferring wealth and property to Mandeville in different ways, resulting in her fortune of $155,000 (worth around five million today). Macarty's relatives cried fraud, and took Mandeville to court. Read the not-too-long story of that long court case that tells us what we know about the life of Eulalie Mandeville at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company

(Image source: New York Public Library)

You've heard the phrase "don't think about an elephant." It is impossible to achieve, because the word elephant implants that concept in our heads, despite the word "don't" that we understand. Understanding that negative word in context and obeying the sentence is two very different things, and artificial intelligence has not mastered the idea of negation. It's a good thing that humans can separate uncontrolled thoughts from controlled actions, because we can draw a room without putting an elephant in it -and even when it's there, we can ignore it. But maybe that's taking the elephant analogy too far.

Dr. Erica Brozovski (previously at Neatorama) explains negation and the words we use for it in English. We don't always use these words correctly, but we understand them and we can usually parse what someone is saying to us even when the words are misused, as in double and triple negatives. However, there are rare cases when language is so confusing that we really have to stop and ask, "What are you really trying to say?" Even so, we are better than AI.

Many British castles earn their maintenance costs by flaunting their ancient history. If a king once lived there, or a famous battle took place there, the more tourists that a castle will draw, even if it is in ruins. However, there is one castle that doesn't rely all that much on its ancient origins to draw tourists. Doune Castle in Scotland was built in the 13th and 14th centuries, but what keeps it attracting tourists is the fact that Monty Python and the Holy Grail was filmed there.

You see, when the movie was filmed in 1974 (it is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week), many different castles were scouted, but they were governed by agencies, and the National Trust for Scotland withdrew permission for any castle to be used as a film set, especially since it was Monty Python asking. But Doune Castle was in private hands and said yes. In fact, Doune Castle was the actual setting for several of the castles in the story, filmed from different angles. That decision paid off well, since people are still visiting just because their favorite Monty Python movie was filmed there. Read more about the ancient history of Doune Castle at Wikipedia and its pop culture legacy at Cracked.

(Image credit: Wikifan75)

Passover, or Pesach, is April 12 through the 20th this year. The Jewish a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) has released their annual Passover pop parody song, and this one is set to the tune of "Apt." by Rosé and Bruno Mars. They call it "PSVR." This video tells of the exodus from Egypt that was the origin of Passover and describes the seder meal, and actually makes a lot more sense than the Rosé song (which has a sort of an explanation in the first comment here). At any rate, this song fits nicely with Six13's extensive collection of pop songs converted to Jewish holiday anthems.