The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Taxidermy's Dark Secret, Woman "Births" Rabbits, The Parthenon's Optical Illusion

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a piece of taxidermy with a dark secret to a woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is part two of our live show, which we recorded back in September at Caviot in New York City. We're super psyched to share it with you, and if you miss the first part of the live show, you can find it earlier in our feed. It's called Illegal Cheese, The Worst Dairy Disaster, and Holes in People and Cows. So, enjoy the live show. Next week, we'll be back with a regular episode of Weirdest Thing. Thanks for listening.

At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are a lot of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learn this week, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Claire Maldarelli.

And I'm Eleanor Cummins. Great. Awesome. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each teasing a little fact that we picked up in the course of being interesting and wonderful people or like doing our jobs as reporters, whatever. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first or which one we put first in the PowerPoint presentation. And then once we've all had the chance to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and talk about what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. And then we vote and there's a winner because we're, otherwise what's the point. So, Eleanor, why don't you tease your fact first? Yeah, I want to talk about, in short, a taxidermy surprise. Great. The best kind.

Claire? The parthenon is a ginormous optical illusion. I'm going to talk about an 18th century lady scammer. The best kind of scammer. Who can teach us all a lesson. Yeah. That's compelling. It is, but a taxidermy surprise, I don't know what that means.

Thank you. If you listen to the show, you start to notice that everyone sort of has their quirks. Sarah talked about worm cheese tonight, but often she talks about, like, organ meat. My favorite topic is taxidermy. So I thought, you know, for this special live audience, why not talk about the greatest piece of taxidermy of all time? But it turned out that there's a horrifying twist. So this kind of started for me when I was reading this book about Teddy Roosevelt, who was a child taxidermist. And it's important to say that that means a child who does taxidermy.

Not a taxidermy child. Remember that later. That we know of. So as some of you may know, his dad was the founder of the American Museum of Natural History uptown. They signed the charter for the museum in the family home. So he grew up around like all of these really like weird and wonderful artifacts and was very passionate as a child. child about taxidermy, which he did himself. He had this whole collection, which he eventually even donated to the American Museum of Natural

History. And one of his favorite pieces was brought to town in the 1860s. So it's a piece by the Verro brothers, who you may have heard of. They were a very important... The real, who's who of Taxonomy. Absolutely. Nineteenth-century France would have been screaming for these guys, but it's all right. If you haven't heard them before, I'll introduce you to them.

So the background here is that their father had founded a taxidermy house, M Saint-Veurore in 1803, and they sort of took up his mantle. And so for the 1867 Paris Exposition, which is where Napoleon III is sort of showing off his revived Paris, like he's cleared the slums, there's all new buildings. They have 50,000 exhibitors and the Verro brothers are among them. And so they want to do this really special piece of taxidermy, to like celebrate like, you know, their work and the time. And 50 million people come just to see this work of taxidermy,

which is understandable. There were no podcasts. Yeah, what year was in. There was nothing else to do. Yeah, there was literally nothing else to do. So, yeah, so it's on display, I think, for like seven or eight months. And in that time, like literally millions of people come to look at it. So I'll put it up here.

So, you know, let's, I mean, let's take a moment to really appreciate this, all right? for its artistry. So, you know, what you're seeing here is really a work of portraiture but made three-dimensional. They're, you know, really kind of drawing on, you know, famous French artists that you might be familiar with, like, de la Croix, a little bit Jacques-Louise-David. And they're really trying to create this composition here. And so there's, like, I mean, some sort of problematic exoticism, but definitely just, like, a lot of intensity.

and people were just like thrown for a loop. Like they were just like, this is so incredible. No one has ever done anything like this before. We can't get enough of this taxidermy. And so after the Paris Exposition, you know, this has to go somewhere. And the museum here in New York, they decide to buy, you know, like a large collection of the Virobrother stuff and this piece comes with it. And so that's where like Teddy Roosevelt sees it as a kid. Like he goes and visits it.

And I got to see it myself. my mom took this picture. Shout out to her photo credit. Because at the 4th of July, I went to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and I was particularly hangary that day, and I just wanted to sort of get out of there, but we rounded the staircase, and there it was, like, at the bottom of the staircase, and it is to use a very technical art history term, arresting. So we all sort of paused there, and we're staring at it, and I'm like, wow, let me tell you about this, you guys. Like, I read the book about this. Like, I know everything. And so I tell them all

about it, and then I'm ready to go, you know, get lunch. And my mom is like, you have to come look over at the side panel. And so I walk around, you know, and like there's, you know, information about how like the Carnegie bought it for only $50. How cute. But it costs $45 to ship it and, you know, like all of this stuff around. And then on the very far edge of this amazing diorama, it says the lion bones are real. The camel bones are real. And also

some of those human bones are super real. Oh God. What? So how did this happen? No one is really sure when the rumor started. That was a real dude, but there's been a rumor for a while. It could go back years. But the

Verro brothers, they actually had a sort of pattern of behavior, believe it or not. They famously attended a man's funeral in Botswana, then came back under the cover of darkness to dig him up, shipped him back to Paris, and turned him into a human taxidermy skin and all. So why people are surprised that this work also

has a little bit of human being inside it? I don't know. But for a while, you know, there was some speculation. And by the 1990s, a curator at the Carnegie a long time ago did a restoration because, like, works of taxidermy will sort of like fall to goop if you don't keep them up. And so, you know, they were just taking care of it. And she made this like offhand note.

And this I find like really like suspicious. She was like basically like teeth seem kind of real. And left it at that. Kind of real. She was like this seems like humid teeth. And then did nothing with that information or inclination. So for, you know, like 25 years, there were just like these kind of rumors bubbling in the either. And no one really looked any deeper.

But in 2016, apparently the Carnegie kind of got like new leadership and they were like, we have to figure out like what the deal is with this piece. Like they were like, we're going to look this taxidermy camel in the mouth. And so after 150 years, you know, this piece starts to kind of get put in new context and analyze. So for example, for a long time it had been like kept in the hall of African mammals. And it was sort of presented as like a scientific piece. And so like the first thing they did was they were like, we have to re-contextualize it. Like we have to move it out of here.

Like this is a work of art, not really of science. And like putting it in the proper context is important. You know, like I just have to point out like, look at how they literally made it look like the camel is bleeding. Like they like painted blood so that it looks like it's being attacked. Like they were like, this is like an artwork. And it needs to be properly contextualized. But then the other thing they did was they called the Allegheny Medical Examiner. And they put this thing in a CT.

scan. And that's where things get a little bit upsetting. So the CT scan revealed that that curator's like deep-seated spooky spider sense was right and that the teeth were 100% real because they were attached to a real human skull. So while this is not like a taxidermied man per se, this is a taxidermied head that then they, you know, sort of like wrapped in, you know, plaster and things like that. So there's a, yeah, there's a man's head in there. Um, and And because it is of unknown provenance, they can't really do anything with it. Like I mentioned that the Vero brothers had, you know, like, taxidermied a human and sort of documented it because they were, like, not embarrassed to write that down in their diary. And so they were able to, like, return that body eventually after, you know, like 150 years of exploitation.

And so with this, though, because they don't know where it came from, because the Vero brothers did not document everything they did, just some of the highlights, the Carnegie basically has to keep it so it'll be there for all of time and if you know any like aspiring Teddy Roosevelt children who really like killing birds for sport and turning them into beautiful taxidermy like I would super recommend visiting this like it's waiting for you

wow thanks wow well that's that's disturbing I have no further comment okay just Just to confirm, this is the only case where there's a real head. Oh, no.

So this is a great question. Thank you. Yeah. So a lot of people of that era were like, it's totally reasonable to use, you know, real skulls because, like, it makes the face look. Right. So, you know, like, if you have to dig up someone to get the face of your art, right, like, that's acceptable. So it was sort of, like, common in, like, the 1860s, like, when the Verro brothers were really, like, doing their worst.

But it's definitely pretty rare. Like a lot of taxidermine now is like you take the skin of an animal and not a human. And then you can like put it around like plaster and wire. But yeah, this they did. And the thing that I think like stands out to me is that the Paris Natural History Museum was like offered the the taxidermied man, the other specimen. And they were like, no thanks. And that was like back then. Yeah.

So even at the time people were like, this seems iffy. Okay. don't you think the Viro Brothers kind of felt bad about this or they're like, we're taking this to the grave? Like we're never telling anyone about this. Like if I did this, I'd be like, that is a real person in there. Yeah, I mean, I think they were totally fine with it. I think that they saw it as like their contribution to science, which is why the Karnaghi wanted to like re-contextextualize it because they're like, this is not like cool. Yeah, this is not a contribution to science. This is a bad art that was done well. Yes, definitely. Well said. Yeah, but the Veroa brothers continue to be really famous. Like Jules Vero has. like 10 different animals named after him

if you are into Latin names you're going to find him everywhere Here's a question Which probably has no satisfying answer But has anyone been like Wow here are a couple famous Taxidermiest who did tons of work And who apparently liked picking up

random bodies Were they serial killers? Oh on that note I guess that's all we have to say about taxidermin We'll leave you with that question Thank you, Elin. Yeah, for sure. It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet.

On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories affect your daily life. New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then. I'm up next with a lady scammer. In September of 1726, Mary Toft had a baby, which shouldn't have been a huge deal because it was her fourth baby, except this one was a jumble of rabbit parts. Here's Mary Toft. I'm pretty sure that someone is vomiting behind her in this illustration in shock at the rabbits being born. So Mary Taft, what happened on this day in September of 1726

is that she called a neighbor to help her labor. And the neighbor was shocked when she gave birth not to a human baby, but to a bunch of pieces of dead rabbit. The assisting neighbor spread the news because this was sensational. Local midwife, John Howard, had his suspicions. but decided he would check it out for himself as a man of science. He described her, Mary, as of a very stupid and sullen temper. But boy, did she keep on giving birth to rabbits.

So, yeah, Howard watched it happen, and he was like, wow, there are rabbits coming out of her vagina. Can't explain that any other way. And he realized that he was going to hitch his cart to this rabbit lady and that they were going to be famous. So he started writing this up for medical journals and sending letters to all of his friends in the medical community. Obviously, that's what I would do. Yeah. And the 24-year-old became something of a celebrity. He supposedly, I just want to be clear, Howard supposedly had 30 years experience delivering human babies.

And he was like, yes, she's having rabbits. He wrote that he delivered her of three more rabbits. all three half grown and he described how they would leap in the uterus before they died and that they just kept coming. He said after the 11th rabbit was taken away

up leaped the 12th rabbit which is now leaping if you have any curious person that is pleased to come post may see another leap in her uterus and shall take it from her if he pleases. Does that mean that he like took a break in the middle of this to write

which is now leaping. Yep. She was just having rabbits all the time. I do not know how many rabbits may be behind. So get it while it's good. Wait, and these rabbits just came out, like, ready to run? Like, it wasn't like... Oh, they were all dead.

This is... They did not look like this. Yeah. That's deceptive. This was a... There was, like, apparently, like, a lot of tabloids in this era, and she was a tabloid, darling. So there were a lot of illustrations of Mary Taft giving birth to... rabbits, some of which kind of, you know, rosied the picture up by pretending the rabbits

rabbits were alive. So, and the thing is that people did not find this so crazy because maternal impression was a big theory of the time, which was the idea that if a mother was exposed to something kind of like overly stimulating for her lady mine while she was pregnant, it would influence the baby. The last time I was here a caveat, I talked about preformationism, which is the idea that sperm or eggs are just little tiny people, and that if you're not just literally a copy of your dad, it's because your mom's uterus, like, malformed you into a bitter lady. And this was still that time. So part of that was believing that women, with their, like,

mysterious, womanly powers could inadvertently turn their children into rabbits. magic of the uterus. Right. And Mary had a story that she was telling people that she had been pregnant and had tried to chase down a rabbit for dinner and it had gotten away and it was like her white whale. She just craved rabbit for the rest of her pregnancy. That's what Moby Dick is about. Right. Yeah, exactly. So people were like, yes, it was sensational, but it also considering what they believed about where babies came from, it wasn't that crazy. King George the first took notice. He wanted to know what this was all about.

And so he sent his court anatomist, Nathaniel Saint-Andre, to check it out. St. Andre, for the record, does not have a historical reputation for having been a good doctor at all. He kind of just fell into it. And true to form, he basically walked in already believing that Mary Toft was giving birth to rabbits. And lo and behold, lucky him. He happened to walk in while she was about to have her 15th bunny.

And using his excellent anatomy skills, he deduced that based on the quivering of her abdomen, the rabbits were leaping out of her right fallopian tube. And he decided that the reason they came out dead and in pieces was because of her uterus crushing them, because that is how childbirth works. So they knew just enough to be dangerous. Yeah. You know, like a polobean tube got it. Right.

And actually, probably my favorite thing about this story is that it was a really bad time for people who sold rabbits for food. Because the public was disgusted. It's not clear to me whether they were disgusted because they were like, that rabbit could have been my child. Or if they were just like, ew, now I'm thinking about the lady giving birth to rabbits. I don't want to eat rabbits do. But apparently nobody ate rabbit. while this was going on. And then enter physician Richard Manningham,

the third opinion. And he was like, have we tried kind of like isolating her and seeing if there are any shenanigans afoot? And sure death, when they put her in like an inn with no one coming in or out, the births stopped. And then a porter came to light saying, that she had bribed him to bring a rabbit into her, where they were keeping her.

And then eventually, when Manningham suggested that she might need invasive surgery to deal with the rabbit problem, suddenly. Mary finally broke down and admitted her lie. And then there was this whole, again, tabloid sensation. People did not have a lot to do. It was really hard to go on like an apology tour

because a tabloid would come. out and like people would read that and just never read anything again for the rest of their lives and what were you supposed to do about that so they never issued a correction right yeah exactly um actually it was the timing was really awkward for saint andre who had just four days earlier published a 40 page pamphlet called a short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbits um so he had a lot of work to do uh in saving his reputation spoil alert he did not um And so what happened is that apparently Mary had at some point miscarried and had decided that she could use that opportunity to mimic a real birth of these animal parts. And she thought it was a great way to make a better life for herself, make a bunch of money.

And that's how she fooled her neighbor by like actually making these things come out of her. cervix. For the doctors who did this professionally, she just had to sew a special pocket into her skirt and wait for them to not be watching her. And then she would like pull out a piece of rabbit. Again, they were like, came out of her vagina. Can't explain that. So wow, it's really amazing how little we knew about childbirth for so long. And Mary went to prison briefly. And part of her sentence was actually that she was paraded in front of the public every day for a small fee. But, you know, I like to remember Mary like this. A triumphant scammer, not at all of a stupid temper, sir, but a 24-year-old who saw her ticket out and managed to fool two doctors, including

the royal physician, into thinking that she was just having rabbit babies. all the time. Yep, yep. She deserves it. An icon. Hey pals, looking for super cool popular science merch, we've got you covered

at popsai.threadless.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, and mugs with iconic vintage covers and illustrations ripped from the magazine. Plus, check out our podcast store

and rep your favorite shows like last week in tech and the weirdest thing I learned this week. That's popsi.threadless.com. P-O-P-S-C-I-thudlis.com. In addition to this lovely podcast that we have. We also have a print magazine. Whoa. It's really good. You should read it.

I would think that even if I didn't work here. And in the print magazine, there is a section called Head Trip, which I run, which is basically all optical illusions and these weird brain quirks that we have. And so if you think of optical illusions, you obviously think of, like, the dress and Yenny and Laurel, but, God, I am just so sick of the dress and sick of Yenny and Laurel. And so when I'm kind of Coming up with these ideas, I usually just like Google search optical illusion plus the theme of our magazine. It yields good results. But I was stuck one day, and so I was like, what if I just Google optical illusions and then just search every single page? And if you do that and you get to the 28th page of optical illusions, you reach this building here, which is the Parthenon.

Now, if you look at this building, it looks perfect, right? I mean, those columns look perfectly straight, and that pedestal above it and below it, just they look beautiful. Like this purse, the architects that created it would have gotten an A plus. Now, what if I told you that there are no straight lines or right angles at all in this entire building? Lies, impossible. Not true. All right, so here's a little back story about the Parthenon first. It was built in the 5th century BC, and it was during the height of the ancient Greek

empire, and it was, and still is, a symbol of the power that was the ancient Greek Athenian culture. And it was constructed as a temple to worship the goddess Athena, who the ancient Greeks, revered as their patron saint. So it was meant to be this amazing building that could be viewed from miles and miles away. And so obviously they hired like really important architects to do this and they wanted the temple to be perfect. So as it turns out, the way they did that was to make it the literal opposite of perfect. And they had been hinting at this for a while that actually there probably aren't straight lines here that this building is a little off.

And a lot of architects had talked about this in papers and different books throughout history. But when it really came to head was when they went through the restoration process in 1983. And a lot of people were standing near it and on it and kind of taking all these measurements. And so first we'll start with the pedestal. And so people were standing on one end of the pedestal and a bunch of people were standing on the other. And they were like, huh, I can only see you from the knees up. And the other side was like, yeah, me too. And they took measurements, and it turns out that the entire building on each end slopes inward.

And so it's like, why would you do this? Why would you have architects who are supposed to build this amazing building that's supposed to worship the freaking goddess Athena? And then you make it sloped. It turns out that our brains need it to be sloped. Take a look at these two lines here and the lines here. They are both the exact same thing. One is just copied and pasted onto the other side. But if you look at this, do those look straight?

No. Not at all. And a lot of people think that the Greeks knew that this optical illusion existed, and it's called the hearing illusion. And neuroscientists today still don't completely understand why it exists. And this is like the cool and nerdy part that I get to. tell you because you all have to listen to me. So because these black lines happen so quickly,

it makes our brain think that they're actually moving. So if those black lines are moving, then so is the red lines. And so the only way for the red lines to be moving is if they're curved. So then if you just take those black lines away and you put it here, then they're perfectly straight again. So knowing that we are gonna have all these columns

on the Parthenon and we were gonna view it from so far away, they knew that they had to slope down the pedestal in order to make it look straight when viewed from around miles and miles away. And they knew this? Okay, so there's like these two camps of architects and some of them are like, oh, they definitely didn't know this. They just wanted to like create this building

that was just like sort of like its own like body sort of. These are some of the theories. Like lumpy almost. And then there's these other architects where they're like, no, the Greeks were brilliant. This is exactly what they wanted to do. And I don't know, I'm sort of in the camp that they knew what the brain was doing and they knew that if you viewed it from this way and you had these columns that this is what it would look like. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I mean they were like pretty into math like a little. Yeah. I feel like it's reasonable to think they would have worked this out.

Yeah, and they would have thought about it, you know, done some trial and error. I mean, there was a lot of, like, there were a lot of stakes at hand here. It's the goddess Athena. If you're not completely convinced, then we can look at the columns. So those columns also look completely straight, and they're actually known as Doric columns, and they've been replicated many times since. But if you actually look close at them, they sort of like bulge out. They have like a lump in the center, like almost if you ate like a huge meal and you're sort of like bloated of it.

And so this is actually a type of architecture that is now done over and over again and it's called entasis. And it's done to counteract the fact that when columns of this size are viewed from a distance, they tend to look slender in the middle. So if you did have a one that was completely straight, it would actually look like it would actually look like, It had like a really skinny waist. And so obviously they couldn't have that. It had to look perfect. So they created these like bulged columns. And if you stand really close up at the Parthenon, you can see them.

They're like, they're like very bulged out. And again, there's these two camps of architects that are like, no, they didn't know. They just constructed it the way they could. And it came out like that. And there's this other camp that are like, no, obviously they knew if you stood away from it, it was going to look like it was skinny. And so it's really interesting to think that people at this time knew how weird our brain worked. Obviously, I looked, you know, of all the history books and things like that.

And there's these bunch of architects and mathematicians that were like, okay, let's try to come up with a sort of equation that can determine how far away, you know, have to stand and then how much of the bulge you can have. And what they found out was the Greeks didn't actually come up with any equations for it. They perhaps maybe just did it over and over again that they knew exactly the right bulge that you can have. So from this book called Brain Landscape, the coexistence of neuroscience and architecture, the authors write, in the many attempts that we have made to find a mathematical basis for the intasis, it has been reduced to all kinds of elliptical, hyperbolic, parabolic, and even cycloidol, sorry, curves. Math. A lot of people here. The immense variety of forms indicate, however, that the curve was

probably laid out freehand and is purely empirical. It's really interesting. I feel like an argument against it being an accident is that, or like if what they want, wanted was to make it all bulgy and slopey. They would have stepped back when it was done and been like, well, she'd be like, whoa, you could to do it again. This looks weird. It looks really straight. So the big problem that we'll never really probably find out and solve this issue is that the Greeks never really wrote down the reasons for why they did anything that they did.

They just sort of did it. It's not like they had ancient blueprints or they didn't, they just never passed on their knowledge. But regardless, the Parthenon has been replicated over and over again, and even the Supreme Court has a lot of the Doric columns that we see here. And I think my hot take from this is that if we are going to constantly try to create something that is perfect, and the only way to do that is to make it imperfect, maybe perhaps it would be far wiser to embrace life's weird quirks and imperfections instead of fighting them.

Wow. Was the weirdest thing we learned this week that there was a man in the side of that taxidermy? Was it about Mary Toff's big scam? Thank you. I appreciate that. I live for your applause. Thank you. Or was it that the Parthenon is bulgy. It's a hot mess.

Rabbits, man. Take it. I'll take it. it. Yes. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing T-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.com.

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