When I saw this article, I thought, “Only on Ebay.” I don’t know if anything can top the infamous Virgin Mary Toast auction, but this one is right up there on the weirdness scale. This skeleton won’t fit in any closet. Instead it takes up most of the garage of California resident Nancy Fiddler. One of her ranch hands discovered a large tooth on her property back in 1997. An excavation unearthed a rare, nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon. The only thing missing was the tusks.

Fiddler donated the mastodon to the Oakland Museum of Natural History, where it was on display for several years until they made a replica. Whether they gave the original skeleton back or she took it, I’m not sure. But now she wants to use her sauna, and her son wants to use the garage to build hot rods. So the mastodon must go.

The minimum bid is $115,000, payable with PayPal. So far, there are no takers.

Sources: Ebay
Yahoo!

Last year, I found a story about a man who had the fetus of his twin brother removed after 36 years. Today, I found a similar story about a 1 year-old girl who underwent a five-hour operation to remove the fetuses of her twin sisters.

“They are believed to have been two triplets that did not develop,” she told AFP, adding that the girl had initially been diagnosed as having abdominal tumours.

The similarity of these stories makes me wonder just how common this condition is.

Source: Brisbane Times

The only surviving copy of the 500 year-old map that first used the name America is scheduled to go on permanent display at the Library of Congress on December 13. As the 1507 Waldseemuller map is being prepared for its debut, researchers are puzzled by questions that they have yet to solve.

Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later?
How was he able to draw South America so accurately?
Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

The second and third questions intrigued me. Martin Waldseemuller, the map’s creator, had never set foot in either place. Yet he was able to draw the continent of South America within 70 miles of accuracy.

Source: Yahoo!

Six year-old Baby has been dubbed “bionic” after surviving a 21-foot fall from a balcony window in September. Much to the veterinarian’s surprise, they found that Baby had metal plates in her front legs after she experienced a similar fall when she was a kitten.

“A cat falling from this height will commonly sustain severe injuries,” said Blue Cross chief veterinary surgeon, Jess Gower, “so we were stunned to find it was the second time she had done it.”

Evidently Baby has an extraordinary lucky streak.