The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Eating The Rich, Menopausal Chimps, Darwin's Taxidermy Teacher

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Divya Anantharaman joins the show to talk about the history of taxidermy dating back to Charles Darwin! Plus, Rachel talks menopausal chimps, and Sara Kiley explains how one Dutch town once literally ate the rich. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our sponsors!  Here's a special, (limited time) deal for our listeners to get you started RIGHT NOW, Get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Get 15% off OneSkin with the code WEIRDEST at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Divya Ananthraman. Divya, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you. Yay. Thank you so much for having me. As I said before, I'm a huge fan of the show. So I'm super excited to be on. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. That means a lot. I'm a big fan of your work. But for listeners who don't know, why don't you share a little bit about the weird and awesome stuff that you do?

happily so I work as a professional taxidermist here in New York City and I'm specialized in birds birds are you know some of my favorite like just some of my favorite like creatures on this planet and also in the scope of my work you know birds really like they really connect me to nature and that's sort of like my approach to taxidermy it's all about that connection to nature and our mortality and art and stuff like that awesome Awesome. And I'll ask you this again at the end of the show, but where can our listeners find you? Oh, yes. So listeners can find me on social media, like Instagram, at Gotham Taxidermy. And I have a website as well, which is Gothamtaxidermy.com. Amazing. Well, we'll get into the show in just a second. But first, I just want to let listeners know, since we're getting to the end of 2023, there have been some.

shifts at the parent company of Popsie and it's looking like hopefully weirdest thing is not going the way of the dodo but we're still figuring out the details of that arrangement. In the meantime, I would strongly urge all listeners to follow Jess on Twitch if you're on Twitch to subscribe to either my Patreon or my substack. You can find links to both on my website. which you can find in the show notes. It's all Googlable because that's where you'll see updates from us if, you know, weirdest thing has to hibernate a little bit, if we're not in your feeds for a while. And we do other stuff too.

So we'd love to have you there. I have free tiers on Patreon and Substack. So no buy in necessary. Just follow me there to get all the updates we can provide about the future of Weirdest Thing, which hopefully has a lot of life left. in her yet. But for now, we are here to do the thing. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making taxidermy, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely

have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, except not really. We're all winners here. Will I finally rewrite the intro if we go to a monthly schedule? Maybe. I don't know. Change doesn't have to be bad. Follow my substack and Patreon.

I don't want to lose you all anyway. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? All right. Amazing. My tease is that I'm here to tell you the story of the time when Dutch people ate their own prime minister. Well, we were just talking about how you don't have a traitor Joe's in the Netherlands. So that's what happens. No, I don't. Wow, they really go to people's seasonal snacks. This is what happens when you don't have the chocolate almonds, the salty chocolate almonds.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Literally. It's a slippery slope. It's like everyone got tired. Everyone got tired of stroop waffles for a minute there at the 1600s, but more fun stuff to come about that. Great. I can't wait to hear more about that. Diffy, what's your tease? My tease is that a taxidermist who is barely remembered by history and who also happens to be one of the few black taxidermists that we know of had a really big impact on a very famously remembered part of science history. And of course, I'm talking about John Edmondstone and Charles Darwin and The Theory of Evolution. I love that. Mine is also related to evolution. I want to talk about the fact that chimps go through menopause, which is a surprise to scientists and relates back to many things we've talked about on weirdest thing previously. I think I'm going to start because when we have two animal stories, I like to sandwich the cannibalism story, you know, between them. Cannibal, animal sandwich today.

So like having here on just the top of your head, as we've discussed, or engaging in capitalism, menopause is like one of those rare traits that's like actually very unique to humans. Most of the things we do, it's like we're animals, baby. But some of the stuff we do is genuinely very weird. Menopause is one of those things. Up until now, there were just four other species that had been shown to live much longer than they can reproduce. They're all mammals, but except for us, they all live in the ocean.

They were beluga whales, marwals, orcas, and short-finned pilot whales. So some nice toothy whale ladies also experience the change. But a new study finds evidence that a six species does this. And unsurprisingly, it's one very close to us on the evolutionary tree. Of course, I'm talking about chimps tied with bonobos for our closest relatives. Woo.

So menopause. Hooray for chimps. Yeah, yeah, chimps. Menopause, as we know it in humans, it has to follow a couple of rules. It's one of those things where it's like, what do we mean when we say that only these species experience menopause?

As we discussed on our episode with Rachel Gross, menstruation is really rare. So, like, if you tie menopause directly to the idea of, like, menstruation ceases, then obviously very few species are capable of it because humans are like very unusual in the fact that they have this shedding and expulsion of the uterine lining. But there are a couple of like other rules to keep in mind when you're talking about spotting menopause and other animals. So you have to see like female members of the species become actually incapable of reproduction, not just like less likely to successfully reproduce. at an age that comes like some meaningful percentage of their life before death.

Because obviously time is relative. You know, if a Mayfly that lived two days was infertile for the last 36 hours of it, you'd be like, how strange? What a long metapause the Mayfly has. That's not a thing Mayflies do. But, you know, so it's like how much of their life do they spend not able to be. to make babies. Because like an animal's body breaking down to the point where it's like not very good at making babies, that's just not quite the thing. That's like reproductive senescence or

aging. Other animals have reproductive cycles that are like sort of built around their near immediate demise. Like for example, the Great Pacific octopus, females start to experience symptoms like cell deterioration, self-mutilation, loss of appetite, they're colored dolls, and they start to move in really uncoordinated ways. And that's like as soon as they lay their first and only brood of eggs. So like they don't make any more babies while they're sitting there purposefully starving to death, guarding their eggs, but they're still operating in a biological paradigm where like the point of their continued survival is finishing this one reproductive cycle. So again, not really the thing. And then there's this added complication now in talking about menopause,

because in captivity, a lot of animals live much longer than they do in the wild. They have tons of food. They don't have to worry about predators, you know, whatever. And so occasionally now, researchers will be like, well, you know, this animal we see in captivity living X percent of their life past reproductive age, does that count? Or is it just a weird one-off thing that only happened because we kept them in captivity and we like preserved what should have been, you know, a deteriorating animal? Things are obviously different for humans and for those whales I mentioned. Like, for example, male orcas generally only live to be 30 or so, but females can live to be 100. And they still tend to stop having calves in their 30s and 40s. So it's like very big chunk of life where making babies is simply not

on the table. And like so much of our like very simplistic like early model of evolution was based on this idea that it all comes down to what makes you more likely to have a lot of babies and have them survive and have your genes be passed on. So anything that doesn't involve making babies, scientists historically have been like, what's up with that? that, including being queer, which I talk about in my book, like, there doesn't need to be an evolutionary reason for being queer because, like, people have preferences that don't match, like, what they do reproductively all the time. However, there are a lot of hypotheses about, like, ways that having non-reproductive adult humans around in a community would be beneficial.

Like, there's one called the gay uncle hypothesis that I talk about in my book. where it's the idea that just like having relatives who can contribute to your upbringing back when people lived in very close-knit societies who weren't like at risk of accidentally having a kid of their own was really beneficial, which totally makes sense. Of course, these days we don't really live that way and, you know, your gay uncle probably doesn't like help feed you. Maybe he does. Maybe that's awesome if he does. But that's not the reason he just. to exist. That's a whole other thing. I also talked about that in my book. Been there, done that, a rousing history of sex. Anyway, it's long been assumed that female chimps die off like a few years after their reproductivity drops, as is the case for most mammals. But researchers found something different when they spent 21 years observing the Nagogo chimp community in Uganda.

And this is a big social group. It's like at any given time, there are like more than 100 chimps living in this community. So it's the biggest one that, like, scientists have ever reported and observed. People often say it's the biggest one humans have ever seen, but, like, I don't know what humans have seen. Maybe there was a giant chimp community somewhere that humans paled around with years ago. But anyway, scientists have written about this one. And their habitat is protected.

It's in, like, a national park situation. And they've become pretty used to human observers with. having to deal with, like, human encroachment. So it's pretty ideal in terms of study where, like, scientists are able to lurk and, like, pick up data about them, but no one's coming in and disrupting these chimps. So it's where most of what we know about chimp biology and behavior has come from over the last few decades. So after researchers, like, were anecdotally noticing some, like, pretty old female chimps hanging around, they were like, man.

Grandma love that. Yeah, yeah. This are some old ladies. They decided they were going to look into that. Yeah. And so they decided to like track mortality and fertility among 185 females for as long as they could. And they ended up getting like, you know, 21 years of worth of data, including some stuff that had previously been recorded. And they found that fertility declined when the animals turned 30.

and that then none of them gave birth after turning 50. So actually like a very similar timeline to human averages. But generally speaking, like female chimps tend to die around age 50, or at least that's like what scientists have often observed. But in this group, 16 of the females lived past the age of 50. And on average, they found that about 20% of a female chimps adulthood happened after fertility went away, which is about half as long as that percentage is in human hunter-gatherers, but still, like, robust for the mammal world. And what's really cool is that

then when they analyzed urine samples from a few dozen chimps of various ages, they found that the females experienced hormonal shifts that, like, perfectly mirror human menopause, which to my knowledge, I was looking for studies on orcas that mentioned hormones that I didn't find any. I know that some researchers are like studying hormones in orcas using their poop, but I couldn't find maybe they're working on that paper. If so, can't wait to read it. But yeah, I couldn't find anything connecting the dots saying like this is what happens in orcas hormonally when menopause occurs. So it's very cool that they found this in chimps.

And of course, like, you know, maybe the chimps in this, you know, very lush habitat, like live freakishly long. And they're the only chimps to ever do this. But there's also like a dark side to that hypothesis because the researchers also pointed out that like maybe menopause was common in chimps before humans started doing things like logging and spreading disease and poaching and otherwise disrupting their lifespans. because it wouldn't be surprising if this came from a common ancestor because we know how closely we're related to chimps. It's possible it evolved separately because among the whale species I mentioned, it does seem to have evolved separately a few times. But again, like our branch off from Chibbs is so recent that it seems like a much simpler hypothesis that it came from a common ancestor. So then it's like maybe chimps used to generally live longer. And it's just that in the time since we've been studying them, we've also been messing up all their shit. So that's a bummer.

What's interesting about this particular study is that the researchers are saying that it is a point against the grandmother hypothesis, which is a lot of people know about from ORCA research, which is the idea that. that the reason that menopause exists, that these female animals like live beyond their productive, their reproductive years is that it's beneficial to their contribution to the gene pool for them to contribute resources to raising their grandchildren and great grandchildren. So it's like your genetic code is more likely to persist if not, if you're not just having kids, but you're also making sure that those kids have kids, et cetera. so that like there is a benefit to not having more of your own babies but sticking around to help raise future generations. And the reason this doesn't really work for chimps is because daughters don't stick around. Adult female chimps tend to move to a different family when they reach sexual maturity. And the kids are also raised very communally. so there also really isn't a genetic incentive for primates to like favor their grandchildren with more food.

But there's another related idea that's like not mutually exclusive to the grandmother hypothesis, which is that menopause is beneficial because females stop reproducing so that they aren't competing with young females who are just starting to breed. So it's kind of, it's interesting because, like, as someone who doesn't study, like, chimp behavior or, like, animal behavior or evolutionary biology, those two things don't sound very different to me. But I think it kind of comes down to, like, the intentionality, I guess. It's like, it's not like you're literally, okay, it doesn't come down to the intentionality. I feel like a bunch of evolutionary biologists just, like, keeled over because I said that. But it's a subtle difference, right? It still comes down to like saving resources for the next generation.

It's just kind of about what the dynamic of that being evolutionary beneficial for the person who has decided to not have more babies. So it's a little, it's complicated. I love it. I love that the chimp grandma stick around for the babies no matter who they are. Yeah, it's true. It's like so hardwomening to me. It's like so tender. Yeah.

Well, and like chimps, you know, I feel like there's just now starting to be like a lot of backlash to the idea that chimps are like so like violent and aggressive. And it's like, no, actually they can be very tender to. It's not just bonobos who are really nice. But yeah, there's this idea that once a female travels to a new group to start reproducing there, as time goes on, they become increasingly related to the group because. their babies are having babies. And so it might make sense for the oldest females to stop reproducing because as they get older, there's more of a chance that their genes are like already in play in this pool and they should like back off and not compete. So yeah, the like the grandmother hypothesis and this like resource allocation hypothesis are like very closely related and definitely it's possible that both were in play for humans because like researchers have pointed out that in, you know, most of our distant human ancestors, it probably would be common for daughters to move out and join new families. And initially, she wouldn't be related to anyone in the group, but then she would have children. And as she got older, more and more of the people in the group would be genetically related to her.

So again, there would be the longer you lived, the more you would be putting your own offspring in direct competition with other relatives if you had more kids. And yeah, researchers have pointed out that, like, they might not be mutually exclusive. And that might be why, like, all human societies have this higher rate of, like, life post-reproduction because both of these are in play. But yeah, research and orcas have shown that when two generations of killer whales in the same group are breeding at the same time, calves from the older generation are almost twice as likely to die. So there's definitely evidence that like everything goes better if reproduction is generally happening one generation at a time. And yeah, this is just so interesting to me because it's so fascinating that like we can. can understand that mental positives is happening in other species and still like not really be able to come up with a great obvious answer for how it came about or why it persisted, which is true

for so many human traits. And, you know, I think like talking about evolution is such a study in like shedding misconceptions about like what it means for a species to evolve or what kind of of variables tend to like drive selection. It's all a lot messier than just like have a lot of babies. Ergo. Jeans. Sorry, Richard Dawkins. But yeah, that's my story about chimps.

They have grandmas too. See, I picture it now as like chimp grandmas are kind of like overbearing mother-in-laws. Like they're like, okay, my daughters are going to be fine. They can go live with their husbands and have babies, but like I don't trust my sons to have babies, so I'm going to stay, which I feel like, I don't know, I'm no evolutionary biologists, but so much to look into that. That's definitely the vibe with Orcas. Yeah, because Orca moms raise their sons forever.

They never stop raising their sons. They don't have more babies because they're still raising their grown-up male babies and then just all of their children. I also just love, like, the power of, like, that matriarchy, you know, of just being like, we all know this is going to work out. Like, if you've got the, like, whenever grandmas are in charge, listen, no matter what it is, if it's a function, if it's a home, whatever it is, whenever grandmas are in charge, things go very smoothly. So very true.

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And Sarah Carly, tell me about this prime minister. Yeah, okay. This prime cut of minister. Oh, no. Oh, no. Funds are coming already. Yeah, I'm really excited about this. one. So a little background before I dive in. So I live in the Netherlands by some like really

random tricks of fate. Like I'm not Dutch. I'm like a foot too short to be Dutch. I grew up in America. And before I moved here, I'd spent like a couple of weeks here. So I don't know more or less anything about Dutch history, which makes it really fun to like accidentally bump into Dutch history all the time and hear all about it. And so this is one of those examples. I think this is easily one of the weirdest stories from European history, let alone Dutch history. So today's tale is the tragedy of Johann DeWitt. So we're going to zoom back in time to the 1600s. And so this is when Europe was mostly run by royal people.

Surprise, surprise. But the Netherlands, shockingly wasn't. This is when the Netherlands was the Dutch Republic. And so Johann, so he was born. and I think like 15, no, maybe like, no, 1625-ish. Yeah, I think 1625-ish. And so he was from a family that was like a bunch of wealthy merchants. They were living in DoorDirect, which was like one of the big to-do cities in Holland

of the time. Now it's kind of this cute little like town outside of Rotterdam. It's very cute. But it was a big deal back in the 1600s. And so he, he was 25, he came to take office as like the pensionary of Dorrit, which was basically like, you know, the leader of this to-do town. And he's just, yeah, a young guy. And Holland is like the big province in the Netherlands. So, you know, that's where Amsterdam and Rotterdam and the Hague are.

So it's all he's like, he's kind of one of the big guys in town. And there you go. So, and he didn't come up from nothing. He came from a powerful family. he studied math and law at Leiden University, which is still there. He got his doctorate in France. So he was like a really fancy person for the 1600s. And by 1653, when he was 28, he was elected grand pensionary of the states of Holland,

which is kind of like the prime minister. So prime minister isn't the perfect, like, but it's pretty close. And Holland was the most powerful province in the Dutch Republic. So he had a ton of power. So like kind of to compare who else was like you know hopping around. King Charles was in charge in England. Louis the Great was in charge in France. So these are the people that this dude, this 28-year-old dude from DoorDirect, is up against.

And so let's fast forward two decades. It's 1672. And it's called the disaster year. And the Netherlands was warring with England. They were warring with France. They were in a fight with two different German cities. So it was kind of a mess. But yeah, so we've got this guy.

He's not royal. He's just kind of in charge. And his goals were more or less, like, get peaceful, first off. Because obviously, wars are expensive. And also, like, yeah, there's a lot going on. Actually, a miniature fun fact in here. So I was going through a big pile of just stuff. And so one of his like contemporaries, one of Johan's like, I don't know if they were like buddies or just like, you know, like political similar minds. But he like argued to replace the lion on the Dutch coat of arms with just a regular cat to just be like, hey, we're cool with everybody. We aren't going to like, I don't know. But yeah. So there's just, it's a weird time in history. And his second goal was kind of like get wealthy Holland as autonomous as possible.

from the other provinces. Again, like, so Holland is on the coast. It's got the major cities in there. I mean, there's not major cities other places, but, you know, we got Amsterdam, we got door direct. We got all these places. So separating it off to what the other provinces were like up to with one of his goals. And then finally, he wanted to disempower the royal princes of Orange. So this is the royal house that is the Netherlands, basically. So they were in power right before he came into office and you'll find out when they come back. But basically, like, they have all of these like kind of dynastic, ambitious goals. You know, royal people are like, yeah, I want to be royal everywhere. So at least they were in the 1600s.

I don't know any royal people now. But back in the day, you know, this is the time where people are like putting their paws. out there trying to get you know different pieces of the puzzle and that wasn't like really spread and hemophilia the huge you know it's just banana stuff like we're just coming out of the medieval era we are doing crazy stuff and but like this isn't necessarily in line with like what other rich people wanted so you've kind of got these royal people who are like I want to rule everything and then we've got rich people that are like I kind of just want to like mine my business and make money so johan was kind of with the mind my business

and make money side as a merchant. But yeah, so we basically, yeah, we have a break in the House of Orange with Johan, this random guy. And so back to the regular schedule of programming. We're in the disaster year again called Rompiar. And it was really a messy time because of all the wars and soon the overthrow. But it had its own slogan. I'm not even going to try to say it in Dutch because that will be so embarrassing.

But translated in English, it goes something like, the people were irrational, the government helpless, and the country was beyond salvation. So, shit has hit the fan, basically, in so many words. So besides the fact that the Netherlands were at war with everybody, DeWitt was really, really unpopular, largely because he wasn't royal. The oranges only stopped being the rulers of the Netherlands like six years before he took office or something. And that's just in part because the orange in power, he died all of a sudden.

And his son was just a baby. I think his son might have been like born after his death. So we've got like a royal baby. And like that's kind of it. And the people in power in Amsterdam were like, hey, let's like keep this open. And let's like keep things fresh. Let's see what happens. And we just like don't have a stateholder.

Yeah. So six years later, 28 year old Johan is wearing the big hat. So yeah, we're in a bad. of the rich guys. We've got the Republican from a wealthy merchant family versus like the royal house of orange, which is a big old deal. So we've got two different editions of rich people fighting. So we're in the middle of the disaster year. It's June 21st and DeWitt gets stabbed. So he's already not doing good. And he sticks it out as grand pensionary until August 4th. And then he resigns. And so he's like, okay, I'm done.

And he had an older brother, I think. Older or younger, they're like two years apart. So they're tight. They're really good friends. And the people that are loyal to the oranges called the oranges, they really hated the brother. So this guy was taken, his name's Cornelius. He was taken around the same time that the stabbing happened to a prison in the Hague on arrest for treason. And they basically tortured the heck out of him. This was the law at the time. Like, we just tortured everybody to try to get a confession. Yeah, 1600s, wild times. It only gets more wild. And so Cornelius didn't confess, but they exiled him anyway, which I guess I mean, that's not like the worst option. So he gets exiled. And to prepare his brother, Johan is like, okay, we're going to go over there. I'm going to prepare him for this exile journey that he's about to take. So Johann went to the prison, which was like really close to where he was living in the Hague. So Hague is where I live, which is so random. obviously but um it's most people know it about like the international um crime courts and stuff but it was a it was popping back of the day too um so there's this right downtown in the center of the hague there's kind of like a big castle and then there's a the little prison and so he's at this little prison downtown um and his brother boop boop boops over there and he was really close to he was living in the hague anyway so it's like super easy just pops over um um and he's like super easy just pops over um But alas, there's a civic militia of people from the Hague that are mad and ready to get him.

So both brothers get shot and then they just get left kind of to a mob of orange supporters. And basically the said mob then hangs up their naked mutilated bodies on like a more or less like a gallows in a square in the Hague right by the prison. And then the freaky spit, the mob roasted and ate their livers in a quote-unquote cannibalistic frenzy. So, yep, not very popular guys. But yeah, within a few days, a 22-year-old William III or William Orange, the baby from before, he becomes a statholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelder's, and Overezal. And he actually goes on to being quite famous himself. 17 years later, he becomes the King of England, Scotland,

Ireland ruling along his cousin wife, Mary. So they are William and Mary, like the school. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So that's the baby. That's the baby. They're the only co-rulers of, you know, gray Britain. And ironically, they signed this bill of rights, which quote unquote, according to, like,

I was on a page about like the palaces in the UK. I went on a long journey through Google today. but basically it gave power to parliament and began the process of creating a democracy that we know today in Britain and quote unquote never would a monarch be able to rule with power unchecked so I just think that's a little bit ironic that he took down acts well I guess I don't know how much of a rule he had and the liver eating of all of it but I mean they took down a Republican he was a baby at the time right he's just a baby he's 22 so he was I mean if he was an orca he would be a baby you know what I mean like so but but yeah so that's the Dutch tale of eat the rich and for what it's worth the current king of the Netherlands there still is a king of the Netherlands he's another orange guy his name's Willem Alexander so we've got another orange William he is the king right now sometimes he lives in the Hague sometimes he lives other places and if you're ever curious about where this like cannibalistic frenzy took place it's like

right downtown and there's like a beautiful little square that I've been going to eat ice cream probably like I probably walked by this like a hundred times I lived here for a year and I walked by this a hundred times but yeah it's a beautiful little square and they have little like marketplaces sometimes there um yeah and it's a 20 minute walk from where I'm sitting right now but that is where the Dutch ate their prime minister because they would rather have a king and they got a king again and it's still happening. So that's that's my story. That's incredible. They literally ate the rich. They did it. It's just yeah. They really did. But but also they ate the rich to put a king back on the throne. That's a crazy bit. I'm like, when some you'll lose them. Yeah. I guess it was just a

confusing time. It was a confusing time to be dead. I think it was just a confusing time to be my gosh yeah there's not a lot of information probably being shared you're just like living your Dutch life and you're like you know what cheese is more expensive than it used to be

it must be this guy's fault you know what I mean I don't know yeah well it reminds me of the story I did for a live show years ago about historical balloon riots which remains one of my like favorite stories that I've ever researched for weirdest things. So go back and listen if you haven't heard it before, folks. Because I started out talking about one balloon riot and I uncovered.

I think if I remember correctly, two more, including one that like I had like never heard anyone else talk about. Anyway, but it's like there were these riots that happened because there was so such a big wealth disparity and rich people started just fucking going up in hot air balloon. And so anytime they were unfortunate enough to have to land in a working class area, people were like furious. They like tore the balloons apart. They went wild.

And of course, you know, the papers were all like, what could have incited this range? Like people were starving. And you're like, I'm hungry. I'm just like floated down out of the sky like with a picnic in their. in their hot air balloon. So, yeah. It's really mysterious. And I mean, now they're going up to space.

Like, you know, now it's like they're going up to space. So they're like, there's no way we can float back down to any angry, like, regular people. That's true. They've really cracked it. I think, yeah. All right. We're going to take one more break. And then we'll be back with one more fact.

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They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. To help him see if he can afford it. Co-Pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza.

Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back. And let's talk about some. Some taxidermied birds, please. Yes, so my story also starts in the past. It starts in 1790 with a man named John Edmonstone, who was born on a timber plantation in Demerara, which is in Guyana, which is in South America.

And at this time, it was a British colony. And this plantation was owned by a Scotsman named Charles Edmundstone. And as John was an enslaved person, we don't really have a ton of records of his birth name or a lot of information about his early life. Very little is known. And the earliest documentation we have is when he met another guy named Charles, Charles Waterton. So it gets a bit confusing. There's many Charles. There's two Charleses in this story.

I love the 1700. So it's going to be some, you've got to track the Charleses, everybody. So Charles Waterton was friends with Charles Edmundstone and later became his son-in-law. And Charles Waterton was this eccentric naturalist who was known for making some really lifelike taxidermy and also some really weird bizarre taxidermy. Some of my favorite pieces that Charles Waterton did, he had this technique where he just used a couple of wires and had an otherwise hollow structure inside of animals. So if you put these like taxidermy amounts in an x-ray, they're just like, oh my gosh, it's hollow.

There's a couple wires in there, but somehow the animal skin has kept its shape. He was also known for developing this new method of preserving bird skins using mercuric chloride, which was a very fast-acting, fast-acting fixative, and it stopped the animal's tissues from decay. And his really weird taxidermy, he made this, like, strange hybrid creatures in these, like, intricate situations. and by hybrid I mean like he would get parts of different animals like you know birds reptiles mammals and just like put them all together to make some some weird little thing and um he made a bunch of these like weird little guys as I'll just call them they're just like these weird little guys and these like strange poses and they had they were in these like tabloos and one of them was called

John Bull and the national debt so it's like social commentary um you know that that is hilarious Yeah, so he also made, you know, this is Charles Waterton again. He also made these like uncanny, like humanoid things from like various animal butts. So his work really spanned a lot of styles. And so I'm mentioning that to just kind of mention Charles Waterton's kind of, I guess, his accomplishments in taxidermy from the very scientific to the very bizarre. And it's just an interesting example of someone just on a side note whose mind was just as deep. into science as it was in like art and humor and just like the twisted things that the mind can do

I guess. But anyhow, around 1812, Charles Waterton began gathering and studying specimens from the Guyanese jungle. So this is an era where studying animals meant going into their habitat, making observations, and then collecting specimens to preserve and study inside and out. And so our attitudes and practices have changed really dramatically. So this is not. like, you know, modern taxidermists are not going into the wild and just like grabbing every animal they can. That's very, very, very much not what we do now. But this is, again, the early 1800s. A lot of stuff is messed up back then. So Waterton needed to preserve as many examples of birds as possible and other animals too, but I really care about birds. So I'm going to be

talking about words. So there are over or around like 700, 780, 785. like around that number. There are a lot of birds in Guyana. So one person can't do this all themselves. So he taught John Edmonstone how to prepare these birds. Now, Waterton described John Edmonstone as someone who did really good work, but also described him as being very difficult and saying it required a lot of time and patience to teach him anything.

But later on, Darwin and Edmund Stone. Darwin and John Edmund Stone had an encounter, and Darwin's accounts of John Edmund Stone are very much the opposite. So I will let you see who you want to, who you want to believe whose account you're going to take into consideration. And I'll also say, as someone who has taught taxidermy to, like, lots and lots of people, it's not going to be easy for anyone to learn. And of course, like, teaching something that complex, like, yes, it's going to require some patience. And we have to remember the conditions John Edmundstone was learning under were definitely not anywhere near comfortable or even basically humane. I mean, he was contending with the harsh conditions and the dehumanization that comes with being an enslaved person on top of just the harsh conditions of being in the field and like doing this work in the jungles and the various, you know, in nature in Guyani. He wasn't in like an air-conditioned, climate-controlled studio or something.

He was, you know, doing this work outside and under these like just numerous, like numerous, numerous, like difficult conditions. So going on with John Edmondstone story, accounts vary for when John officially got his freedom. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 made slavery illegal in the British Empire and abolishment took place officially in 1834. So in 1817, Charles Edmundstone returned to Scotland and John came with him. So we don't know if John was already emancipated when he arrived, but he would have automatically been so upon just entering Scotland. So at first, John Edmonstone lived in Glasgow, but by 1824, he settled in Edinburgh, making a living for himself, doing taxidermy, which he had learned from Charles Waterton. who is Charles Edmundstone's friend, his weird friend. That's like the connection here.

There's so many, like all of these people are so, there's like all of that connection. Yeah, so he was making a living for himself, working for the University of Edinburgh's Zoological Museum, and he also taught taxidermy classes to students at the nearby Edinburgh University. And so at that time, taxidermy was a really lucrative business, especially with museums collecting, with schools, and it was just seen as such an important part of scientific research and education, and it was also just fashionable in life. Like personally fashionable, people would collect taxidermy as very much in vogue at the time.

So John found his skills were very, very much in demand. So one of the students that signed up for John Edmund Stone's classes was a 16-year-old Charles Darwin. So, yeah. It's weird to think about Charles Darwin being 16. I don't know why. Like, obviously, I know he had a childhood, but it's just never occurred to me that he was once an awkward teenage kid. Like, bopping around Scotland, like, ew, with a pimple. Yeah. That's crazy. I think he just always looked the same. Like, that's just what I, like, there's just some people I can't, like you said, I cannot picture Darwin, like being little. Like, you know, I just am like, oh, he came out like that.

Like, I don't know. He came out with the beard and like the glasses. It's cool. But yeah. So anyhow, so he came to the university to study medicine in 1825. But he wasn't really feeling it. He didn't really have a passion for medicine. Darwin's lodgings were at 11 Lothian Street.

And John Edmund Stone's studio was at 37 Lothian Street. So they were just even in proximity really, really close. So Darwin went to Edmondstone for private lessons, and in a letter to his sister, it seems like Price was the initial motivator. Like, I just want to do this hobby, and it's not too much. So I'm just going to do it. And this letter, he says, I'm going to learn to stuff birds. It has the recommendation of cheapness, if nothing else. So from that, I...

All right. So from that... I love that for him. Yeah, right? Yeah, it's like, from that, I'm kind of inferring, like, all right, let me just try. try this on a whim. It's like, like, why the heck not? So Darwin later mentioned in his autobiography, a man lived in Edinburgh who had traveled with Waterton and gained his livelihood stuffing birds, which he did excellently. He gave me lessons for payment, and I used often to sit with him for he

was a very pleasant and intelligent man. So he got along really well with John Edmondstone. And, you know, even a single taxidermy class is a long commitment of time. You end up learning a lot, about obviously the process of taxidermy, but since it's such a long process, you're also going to be learning a lot about the people you are around because, you know, as humans, we're all, we're all going to talk to each other. So it makes sense that in their many sessions together, John spoke about the beauty of Guyana's rainforest, the amazing birds, all the lush floor and fauna. And this is what sparked Darwin's interest in the natural world and especially to explore the tropics. And five years later, Darwin secured a spot on the HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalists. And thanks to

Edmund Stone's teachings, you know, and these classes were, I think it was documented that he took like over 40 classes with Edmonstone. They were one guinea each. So 40 guineas for this life-changing course of classes. So on the beagle, thanks to Edmund Stone's teaching, he was really well equipped with the skills to preserve all of these specimens. And those taxidermy skills would be really invaluable because they gave us the literal in the flesh evidence to help Darwin prove his theory of evolution by natural selection as laid out in that very, very famous book, The Origin of Species. And there are almost 500 of these specimens that were collected, that were birdskins, and nearly 200 of them are still at the Natural History Museum in the UK. And although the finches are the most like

popular and charismatic and like the they're like the uh they're the cool girls like that's like the one that we all know of um a lot of scientists say that it was the mockingbirds that he collected on that trip that were the ones that really sparked him to formulate the thoughts on evolution um but we love the fidges so but we'll also have to show love to those to those mocking birds too and um we can't be sure that darwin prepared all the bird skins himself because specimen preparation was like a shared and collective thing but you know we definitely know that he learned specimen prep from Edmund Stone and passed that down and all around. Another part of Edmund Stone and Darwin's interactions and story that is pretty cool,

is like aside from their talks of nature, we can also kind of speculate that Evan Stone probably spoke to Darwin about his horrifying experiences of being an enslaved person. And that may have influenced Darwin. He was less racist than other scientists of his time because he held abolition. espues and we also know from his journals from the beagle that darwin didn't condone the cruel acts that some of his his colleagues engaged in and um he also has this note on a visit with charles like after a visit with charles waterton um in 1845 he described waterton who was the waterton is the guy who taught edmund stone again all these people all these connections i want

to make sure they're kind of clear um so he described waterton as the strangest mixture of extreme kindness, harshness, and bigotry that I ever saw. So, wow, darling, just what a way with... What a man, clearly. Yeah, so this is sort of like the web between all of these people is just, it just contains so much. And after 1843, most traces of John Debenstone and any of his possible family, a lot of that disappears and there are again very few details of his later life too and a lot of what we even know about john edmonstone's life comes from anecdotes in darwin's journals and in darwin's biography

we know he was still living in enberg up to 1833 but it's also not known like where he was laid to rest or anything after his death in 2009 there was a plaque unveiled to commemorate john edmund stone on Lothian Street, Lothian Street, I hope I'm saying that right. There was a plaque that was unveiled not too far from a plaque that honors Darwin, although that plaque has disappeared. No one knows where it is. All I was able to find were a couple of tweets of people searching for the plaque. So if there are any listeners out there, you can help find this plaque.

It's been a while, but maybe we can uncover this plaque. It was made by the Wedgwood Company and the style of their anti-sleeful. ivory porcelain brooches. So, you know, it's a shame that plaque is missing. The Darwin plaque is still there. The Edmundstone plaque. Let's find it. And yeah, I mean, Edmundstone's story is like just really remarkable to me for a lot of reasons, you know, just the connections that passed the skill of taxidermy to him and how he passed it to Charles Darwin. There's also the fact that everyone knows who Darwin is and no one knows who John Edmondstone is. Hopefully this changes that. And there's also just, I mean, you were saying this before, Rachel, that science is just messy sometimes. Like,

it doesn't exist in this sanitized bubble. And, you know, we can always say yes, data is objective, blah, blah, blah, but the world is not. Like our world is so, you know, it's so messy. There's all these connections to social, political, cultural, artistic, just all of these influences. So, you know, it's so connected to humanity. And then the other reason Edmund Stone story really resonates with me is, you know, as a woman of color in this field, although a lot has changed since the 1800s, it, you know, it could just be a struggle to be a minorized or racialized person in this field. And so any kind of representation that's there, any historical figure that's there, I just want to share their story.

As they've, you know, people like Edmund Stone have paid the way for folks like me and his work has had such a huge impact and influence. And hopefully his story isn't forgotten for long. That was amazing. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. What? Okay.

Where is the series coming out? You got Team Darwin. Yeah, y'all should produce it. Y'all should make this. You got Scotland. Yeah. We got people of color and science. It's got everything, right?

Yeah. Somebody somebody get on this. I know. We should. Like maybe Popside can like message like Jordan Piel or someone to get in here and like, you know, produce the heck out of this thing. I am here for it. Oh, man. I wish I could message Jordan Piel. Like, hi.

Just generally. Yeah, just true. Right. Yeah. Just hello. I love your movies. You scare me a little. That mean.

But yes. No. I agree. Like, where is the mini-series on this? I'm ready for it. I love it. And yeah, I love. It's so great, you know, because for so many people who were doing really interesting things, you know, in science and in art and just in their lives, who weren't the people writing the history books and the people being written down in history books, like often there are these, these like holes in what we know about them. And I love that, like, it. could have been and probably in a lot of cases of people who do have awesome stories that we don't know about like the one remaining anecdote we have of them is this this person who treated them as chattel being like they were really obstinate what was up with that so I love that you know while Charles Darwin was not a perfect man I love that he's in here with let with letters being like this dude was awesome I love how good he wasn't stuff and bird

It was a great conversationalist. So it's just like such a, it's so like serendipitous that we have that on the record. That's really cool. Well, we don't have to pick what the weirdest thing we learn the sequence because I don't do that anymore. But I loved all the stories today. Sarah Kylie, I realized that I forgot to ask you about the cool new. publication you're working on. I would love for you to tell listeners about that before we sign off. Yeah. Hello again. So I am no longer the news editor at Popular Science, Frowny Face,

but I am in a new endeavor. I'm now the associate editor at 15C, which is this very cool climate publication that's led by two other like pop-sci legends. We've got Joe and Karen, who have both done their time. And so basically, Basically, we are right now a newsletter. We're working a couple of other things. So stay posted, but sign up for the newsletter. So it's basically talking about how we can actually turn our behavior into impact and, you know, finding some of the silver linings and what can be like a really, really tough, constant

new cycle of what we're doing wrong about climate change. And, you know, finding ways that we can actually, you know, do something and power this energy that we all have into doing something that. matters. So y'all sign up. You'll see me talking about not Dutch history, but other cool stuff occasionally. So yeah. Amazing. That's so awesome. Yeah, we will we'll throw a link to that into the show notes along with Jess's Twitch, my substack by Patreon, all the ways you can find us. And Divya, thank you so much for coming on the show. And would you please remind listeners where they can see your awesome taxidermy work and maybe link up with you for classes since you did mention that you teach the art

of bird stuffing as it were. I do. So, well, thank you all for having me on first. This is such an amazing opportunity to share the story with you all. And yeah, folks can find me on Instagram as Gotham Taxidermy. My website is gothamtaxidermy.com. G-O-T-H-A-M. And that's. And that's and then tax it or me. And yeah, that's where you'll find all the information about my classes and my work and, and yeah, and anything else. Amazing. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel

Fultman, along with Jess Bodey, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we

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