Unique Facts

Not by mass suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. The suicide idea seems to have originated in the work of nineteenth-century naturalists who had witnessed (but not understood) the four-year boom-and-bust population cycle of the Norwegian lemming (Lemmus lemmus). Lemmings have a phenomenal reproductive capacity. A single female can produce up to eighty offspring a year. Sudden surges in their numbers once led Scandinavians to think they were spontaneously generated by the weather. What actually happens is that mild winters lead to overpopulation that in turn leads to over-grazing. The lemmings set off into unfamiliar territory in search of food until they pile up against natural obstacles like cliffs, lakes and seas. The lemmings keep coming. Panic and violence ensue. Accidents happen. But it isn’t suicide. A secondary myth has evolved which is that the whole idea of mass suicide was invented by the 1958 Walt Disney film White Wilderness. It’s true that the film was a complete fake....

It’s a mushroom. And it’s not even a particularly rare one. You’ve probably got the honey fungus ( Armillaria ostoyae) in your garden, growing on a dead tree-stump. For your sake, let’s hope it doesn’t reach the size of the largest recorded specimen, in Malheur National Forest in Oregon. It covers 890 hectares (2,200 acres) and is between 2,000 and 8,000 years old. Most of it is underground in the form of a massive mat of tentacle-like white mycelia (the mushroom’s equivalent of roots). These spread along tree roots, killing the trees and peeping up through the soil occasionally as innocent-looking clumps of honey mushrooms. The giant honey fungus of Oregon was initially thought to grow in separate clusters throughout the forest, but researchers have now confirmed it is the world’s single biggest organism, connected under the soil. STEPHEN What, or which, is the largest living thing on earth? BILL France.

Four. Two you can see; two you can’t. This discovery came from observing how fish breathe. Fish get their oxygen from water. Most of them have two pairs of nostrils, a forward-facing set for letting water in and a pair of ‘exhaust pipes’ for letting it out again. The question is, if humans evolved from fishes, where did the other pair of nostrils go? The answer is that they migrated back inside the head to become internal nostrils called choannae – Greek for ‘funnels’. These connect to the throat and are what allow us to breathe through our noses. To do this they somehow had to work their way back through the teeth. This sounds unlikely but scientists in China and Sweden have recently found a fish called Kenichthys campbelli – a 395- million-year-old fossil – that shows this process at its half-way stage. The fish has two nostril-like holes between its front teeth. Kenichthys campbelli is a direct ancestor of land animals, able to breathe in both air and water. One set of nostrils allo...

We make it two. Or four if you’re a Catholic. Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled. This is very different from divorce. Legally, it means the marriage never took place. There were two grounds for the annulment. Anne and Henry never consummated the marriage; that is, they never had intercourse. Refusal or inability to consummate a marriage is still grounds for annulment today. In addition, Anne was already betrothed to Francis, Duke of Lorraine when she married Henry. At that time, the formal act of betrothal was a legal bar to marrying someone else. All parties agreed no legal marriage had taken place. So that leaves five. The Pope declared Henry’s second marriage to Anne Boleyn illegal, because the King was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry, as head of the new Church of England, declared in turn that his first marriage was invalid on the legal ground that a man could not sleep with his brother’s widow. The King cited the Old Testament, whic...