The word dinosaur comes from two greek words. The first is deinos, which means terrible, powerful or wondrous. The second is sauros, which means lizard. We are always learning new things about dinosaurs from their fossils. There have been many facts over ...
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SMART NEWSSkulls Thought to Belong to Modern Murder Victims Actually Date to the Pre-Hispanic PeriodFound in a cave in Mexico in 2012, the 10th- through 13th-century bones may have been displayed in a ritual tower of craniums Researchers dated the skulls ...
This article contains affiliate links to products selected by our editors. Mental Floss may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.No one ever said life on the road was easy, and this is especially true for truck drivers. While some t...
Samurai were more complicated than modern societys image of a self-sacrificing warrior class. Though they were at times the honor-bound fighters of legend, they were also gold-hungry mercenaries, pirates, travelers, Christians, politicians, murders, and v...
The ringing of bells by the social outcast, the rotting flesh, the leper colonies where people were sent to die...the ancient disease leprosy has some very specific images associated with it. A lot of that is inaccurate, thoughlike so much from history, i...
Weve all been there, weve all made them, and weve all wondered where exactly we went wrong. It turns out that its possibly not our fault after allnot entirely, at least. Psychologists have isolated and explored a handful of phenomena that influence the wa...
Some things have their place way, way back in history, in the time when we were all still coming to grips with our places in the world and the finer points of human rights were still in their infancy. Slavery, state-sanctioned bigotry, and rote execution ...
Its the maxim of every creative writing class: Short is sweet. Apparently, historys been taking note. While most of us may envision the past as a series of long epochs and incremental changes, the truth is some of the most important events ended practical...
Self-driving cars, selfie sticks, drones, touchscreen devices, e-cigarettes, jetpacks, and many other things seem like fairly modern inventions. Indeed, most of their inventors list them as newly invented and even go as far as seeking patents. But the fac...
The ancient world gave mankind some of its most brilliant thinkers and philosophers. From Socrates and Aristotle to Master Kung-sun Lung, they forever changed the way we looked at the world. Some of them posed thought problems and paradoxical situations t...
As has been said time and time again, it is of the utmost importance that we look to the past to ensure that we learn from our mistakes, to ensure that our future is better than our history, and to ensure that the most horrific and evil elements of histor...
Many people are afraid of things like lightning striking them dead-on and frying them to a crisp, being a passenger on an airplane when it goes down, being eaten by a shark while swimming, having a tornado rip right through their home, and so on. The fort...
Are we alone in the universe? Ever since humankind discovered the existence of other planets and solar systems, we have been wondering if we might be contacted by another intelligent species one day. International SETI science projects and amateur backyar...
The Romans are often portrayed as a civilization given over to debauchery and decadence, a once-great empire gorging itself on food, alcohol, and sex while watching people fight to the death in the gladiator arena.In fact, Roman society was based on a str...
APJane Campion is apologizing for a controversial comment she made about Serena and Venus Williams while accepting the best director prize at the 2022 Critics Choice Awards. The filmmaker said in a statement, I made a thoughtless comment equating wha...
The woman took the cat in after thinking it was a stray (stock photo) (Image: Getty Images) A woman who accidentally stole someones cat has declared she wont return it to its original owner, because shes already spent a significant amount of money nu...
OMG! A mother from Louisiana, who was pregnant with her second child, got the surprise of a lifetime when she gave birth while on a business trip without even realizing she had gone into labor! According to NBC affiliate WXIA-TV, Victoya Venise was s...
A reconstruction of the Omo I skull discovered in 1967.(Image credit: The Natural History Museum via Alamy)Modern humans emerged in eastern Africa at least 38,000 years earlier than scientists previously thought. That conclusion was drawn from traces...
A reconstruction of the Omo I skull discovered in 1967.(Image credit: The Natural History Museum via Alamy)Modern humans emerged in eastern Africa at least 38,000 years earlier than scientists previously thought. That conclusion was drawn from traces...
A reconstruction of the Omo I skull discovered in 1967.(Image credit: The Natural History Museum via Alamy)Modern humans emerged in eastern Africa at least 38,000 years earlier than scientists previously thought. That conclusion was drawn from traces...