The oldest known animal in history has been discovered thanks to some well-preserved animal fat that’s been sitting in northwest Russia for the past 558 million years. The find expands the confirmed existence of animals by three million years.The ancient animal is a Dickinsonia, ...read more

Freddie Oversteegen was only 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, and only a couple of years older when she became one of its armed assassins. Together with her sister—and later, a young woman named Hannie Schaft—the trio lured, ambushed and killed German ...read more

Germany has identified four drawings that Nazis stole from a Jewish home during the Third Reich. The art belonged to the Deutsch de la Meurthe family, who lived in Paris when Germany invaded and occupied France. Nazis seized their house—all but Georgette, the youngest daughter, ...read more

While Allied troops were fighting World War II in the Pacific, the U.S. homefront was defending Washington, D.C. from the worst flood it’d ever seen.“Spare no effort or expense to protect the Capital,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told officials during the flood of October ...read more

What cigarette do doctors says causes less throat irritation? In the 1930s and 40s, tobacco companies would happily tell you it was theirs. Doctors hadn’t yet discovered a clear link between smoking and lung cancer, and a majority of them actually smoked cigarettes. So in ...read more

A Category 4 storm that barreled into the Carolinas during the hurricane season of 1954 left a path of destruction that would eventually pave the way for the development of Myrtle Beach into a major tourist destination. As the first (and so far) only recorded Category 4 storm to ...read more

As far as U.S. presidential elections go, the 1824 one was unusually crazy. There were four major candidates, none of whom won enough electoral votes, which meant the House of Representatives had to pick someone for president. Then, less than two weeks before the House decided, a ...read more

President Richard Nixon might have gotten away with it if it weren't for John Dean. In June 1973, Dean testified before Congress that Nixon knew about the Watergate cover-up. Not only that, Dean said he suspected there was taped evidence—and he was he right.“There are few times ...read more

By September 9, 1971, inmates at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility had seized control of the prison and taken guards hostage. Their extreme actions followed months of protests over inhumane conditions, including overcrowding, minimal food, harassment, lack of medical care ...read more

In August 1518, King Charles I authorized Spain to ship enslaved people directly from Africa to the Americas. The edict marked a new phase in the transatlantic slave trade in which the numbers of enslaved people brought directly to the Americas—without going through a European ...read more

We’ve never had a paternity case like this before. Scientists have discovered the first known ancient human relative whose parents came from two different parts of the human family tree. The mother, a Neanderthal. The father, a Denisovan—a mysterious hominin we still don’t know ...read more

Women (and men) began surfing in Hawaii and other Polynesian islands at least as far back as the 17th century. And while Christian missionaries tried to suppress surfing in the 1800s, a Hawaiian princess helped bring it back long before Gidget and Moondoggie hit the beach.Prior ...read more

Hiram Rhodes Revels arrived on Capitol Hill to take his seat as the first black member of the U.S. Congress in 1870. But first, the Mississippi Republican faced Democrats determined to block him.The Constitution requires senators to hold citizenship for at least nine years, and ...read more

The most famous kitty in spy history is probably the white Persian of James Bond flicks. The image of a faceless villain stroking the cat in the early 1960s films is now a meme (see: Inspector Gadget, Austin Powers). Lesser known is the cat whom, during the same decade, the CIA ...read more

Archaeologists have identified Germany’s oldest public library, which may also be the oldest library in the Roman Empire’s northwest provinces. Niches in the walls appear to have stored up to 20,000 scrolls.The library’s remains were unearthed in the middle of Cologne. The Romans ...read more

A wildfire that scorched the coast of Ireland has revealed a World War II-era sign carved into the ground. Irish police officers spotted it while flying over Bray Head to assess the fire’s damage.The partially-eroded sign originally said “ÉIRE,” which means “Ireland” in the Irish ...read more

As record-high temperatures have sent water levels plunging in Germany this summer, World War II munitions have surfaced. So far, 22 grenades, mines or other explosives have been recovered from the Elbe River in the German states of Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. Authorities warn that ...read more

“ENGLAND OR DROWN!” proclaimed the New York Daily News on its frontpages. It was August 6, 1926, the day that an American, Gertrude Ederle, was poised to become the first woman to swim the English Channel.Only five men had ever swum the waterway before. The challenges included ...read more

Journalist Ida B. Wells was already out of town when she realized that an editorial she’d written had caused a riot. In 1892, Wells had left Memphis to attend a conference in Philadelphia, when the office of the newspaper she co-owned was destroyed and her co-editor was run out ...read more

In 1958, journalist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times highlighted a fun, if dubious, letter from a reader about loggers in northern California who’d discovered mysteriously large footprints. “Maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas,” Genzoli ...read more

Richard Milhous Nixon was a paranoid man. Between February 1971 and July 1973, he secretly recorded 3,700 hours of conversations—far more than any president before him.Initially, government investigators focused on the tapes concerning the Watergate scandal. Over the next four ...read more

Archaeologists in Jamestown, Virginia, have discovered a skeleton that may belong to the man who helped establish two major institutions—representative government and slavery—in the English colonies nearly 400 years ago.That man was Sir George Yeardley, the three-time governor of ...read more

Duck boats are a U.S. tourist attraction that have unfortunately seen several high-profile accidents (the most recent killed 17 people on Table Rock Lake in Branson, Missouri). Yet before they were a controversial tour vehicle, the Allied troops during World War II used them to ...read more

This summer, construction workers discovered an enormous, 2,000-year-old sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt. The sheer size of the black granite tomb—it’s over six feet tall and nearly nine feet long—sparked speculation that it contained someone of great importance, perhaps even ...read more

Over the past several centuries, many people have claimed to have found Jesus’ original burial cloth. One of the most famous candidates is the Shroud of Turin, so named because it has been housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, since 1578. However, new ...read more

The ability to create fire is one of the biggest developments in our history as a species. Now, archaeologists have recovered artifacts suggesting that our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, knew how to do it, too.Neanderthals living in France roughly 50,000 years ago regularly ...read more

Welcome to the new age—you’ve been living in it this whole time. Geologists have decided to classify the past 4,200 years as the Meghalayan Age, the latest distinct geologic stage in the 4.6 billion-year history of the Earth.There are about 100 different “ages” or “stages” that ...read more

Archaeologists recently unearthed an ancient mummy workshop, complete with statues, jars, a gilded silver and onyx mask and five mummies with sarcophagi, at the Saqqara necropolis, which sits beneath the Nile Delta to the west of Memphis. Mummy workshops, as the term implies, ...read more

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake that shook central Mexico in September 2017 caused extensive damage and killed 369 people. This week, archaeologists announced that the earthquake has also led to the discovery of an ancient, hidden temple.The temple sits inside a double pyramid at the ...read more

Just six weeks after John F. Kennedy’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion, the U.S. president hurtled head-first into another disaster: his first and only summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.“Worst thing in my life,” Kennedy told a New York Times reporter. “He savaged ...read more

Scientists at the Australian National University have discovered the world’s oldest-known colors, and they’re pigments of bright pink.How exactly can colors be “old,” let alone the “oldest”? Well, the bright pink molecules represent the earliest colored molecules in the ...read more

Desperate to escape Nazi persecution during World War II, Anne Frank’s family tried repeatedly to flee to the United States before going into hiding in 1942, according to new researchpublished this week. However, the combination of Nazi rule, World War II bombing and American ...read more

This Fourth of July, the immigrant activist Therese Patricia Okoumou climbed up to the Statue of Liberty’s feet to protest the treatment of immigrants and asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexican border. In particular, her protest spotlighted the thousands of children whom the U.S. ...read more

Before the Civil War, running a newspaper could be pretty dangerous if an editor ran pieces against slavery. Basically, you had to accept that violence was part of the job: There were more than 100 mob attacks against abolitionist newspapers, including one 1837 riot that killed ...read more

Archaeologists have discovered a bronze, child-sized hand at Vindolanda, an ancient Roman auxiliary fort in Northumberland, England. Excavators unearthed the unsettlingly lifelike hand near a temple dedicated to the god Jupiter Dolichenus, suggesting it may have had religious ...read more

A small church in northern Spain hired a local workshop to clean its wooden figure of St. George, but ended up with something that looks more like a cartoon character—specifically, the globetrotting reporter known asTintinSt. Michael’s Church, located in the small town of ...read more

In the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government forced over 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II—and one of those Japanese-Americans, Fred Korematsu, would later contend the act had violated his constitutional rights.In 1944, the ...read more

Trash-talking your political opponent is an American tradition that began long before the age of Twitter. So is talking trash about your vice president, the president who appointed you, or the president you pardoned.With that in mind, here’s a look at some of the most memorable ...read more

There are fewer than 20 surviving paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, and also many fake paintings that people claim are his “lost” work. This year, an Italian art historian says that a profile of the Archangel Gabriel painted on a glazed tile is a self-portrait by Leonardo at age ...read more

Severed limbs and two almost-complete skeletons have been unearthed in a shallow burial pit in Manassas, the Virginia city where about 15,000 Union soldiers died at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862. The bones, which belonged to Northern fighters, illuminate the grim, ...read more

The school board in Richmond, Virginia, announced this week that the city’s only school named after a Confederate general will change its name to Barack Obama Elementary. The decision to honor the first black president over J.E.B. Stuart—whom the school was named after when it ...read more

In 1879, U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt opened a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t the kind of boarding school that rich parents send their children to. Rather, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a government-backed institution that ...read more

At the recent summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, Donald Trump screened a faux movie trailer so bizarrely flattering of the dictator that many U.S. reporters at first mistook it for North Korean propaganda. The country is famous for heavy-handed state films praising Dear ...read more

When Abraham Lincoln said “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he wasn’t talking about the kind of political divisions we see today. Americans may differ sharply on issues like immigration and abortion, but there is no single issue in 2018 that geographically and ...read more

In January 1913, one Ohio couple took advantage of the U.S. Postal Service’s new parcel service to make a very special delivery: their infant son. The Beagues paid 15 cents for his stamps and an unknown amount to insure him for $50, then handed him over to the mailman, who ...read more

When it comes to the office of the president, all official documents belong to history. That’s due to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which Congress passed to avert another Watergate.Lately, staffers of President Donald Trump have struggled to ensure the law is upheld, ...read more

When people say “I need that like a hole in the head,” it means they don’t want whatever’s up for discussion. Even with the advances of modern medicine, cranial surgery is still extremely invasive—which makes it all the more surprising that people who had this surgery during the ...read more

This week, the Miss America Organization announced that it’s eliminating the swimsuit competition in an effort to focus less on women’s appearances. It’s not clear what, exactly, the beauty pageant will be about now that it’s trying to deemphasize the “beauty” part. In any case, ...read more