12 Facts That Sound Made Up but Are True, and Cleopatra’s Link to the Moon Landing

The earliest fossil evidence of sharks or their ancestors is a few scales about 450 million years old, from the Late Ordovician Period, London’s Natural History Museum says. Sharks show up in the fossil record before trees even existed.

The oldest known forest, found at Gilboa in upstate New York, dates back about 385 million years. That gives sharks a head start of roughly 65 million years, and since then they have come through five mass extinctions.

The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago. A 2024 study of 21 mammoth genomes found that the island’s herd started with at most eight animals and grew to about 200 to 300.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 B.C., roughly 4,500 years ago. So while it was going up in Egypt, mammoths were still walking around an Arctic island.

Geoscience Australia says the country is almost 4,000 kilometers wide, about 2,500 miles from east to west. NASA gives the Moon a radius of about 1,740 kilometers, which makes it roughly 3,480 kilometers, or 2,160 miles, across.

So Australia is about 500 kilometers wider. This is a comparison of width only: the Moon’s total surface area is still much bigger than Australia’s.

The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 B.C. Cleopatra was born in 69 B.C. and died in 30 B.C., so when she was born, the pyramid was already about 2,490 years old.

The first Moon landing came on July 20, 1969, about 2,040 years after her birth. The ancient dates carry a few decades of uncertainty, but not nearly enough to change the answer. To Cleopatra, the pyramids were already ancient history.

Bare-nosed wombats can produce up to 100 cube-shaped droppings a day, each about 2 centimeters across, Smithsonian reports, and they place them around their territory, possibly to communicate with other wombats.

Researchers found that the end of a wombat’s intestine has stiffer and stretchier sections that squeeze unevenly and shape the corners. The work won an Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, the award for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think.

Pluto was discovered in 1930, and NASA says its oval orbit takes 248 years, carrying it between 30 and 49.3 times Earth’s distance from the Sun.

So since the day it was found, Pluto has made it less than halfway around the Sun. It won’t finish its first full orbit since its discovery until around 2178.

Venus takes 243 Earth days to spin once on its axis, NASA says, but only 225 Earth days to go around the Sun. So a single Venus day is longer than a whole Venus year.

It also spins backward compared with Earth, so on Venus the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east. And because the planet turns so slowly, sunrise to sunset would take 117 Earth days.

On May 27, 1843, Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented an apparatus that could scan drawings and documents and send them over a wire, now recognized as the ancestor of the fax machine.

Alexander Graham Bell received his telephone patent on March 7, 1876. Three days later, he spoke the famous first words to his assistant over the line: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!”

Yes, a mythical animal. Scotland.org says the unicorn is Scotland’s national animal and has been a symbol of its culture and history for centuries. Unicorns first appeared on the royal coat of arms of Scotland around the 12th century.

You can still find them carved in stone across the country, like this one on top of the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.

In a 1950 paper, mathematician Claude Shannon estimated that a typical 40-move game of chess allows about 10 to the power of 120 possible variations, a 1 followed by 120 zeros. A machine checking one variation per microsecond, he wrote, would need more than 10 to the power of 90 years to choose its first move.

Live Science puts the number of atoms in the observable universe at about 10 to the power of 82. That count is for possible games, not for board positions.

According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, the world had about 101.7 million honeybee colonies in 2024, 47% more than in 1990, Germany’s federal statistics office reports. Asia has the most, about 45.2 million.

These are colonies kept by beekeepers, and the trend is not the same everywhere: in Northern America the number fell. Wild bees are a separate story.

After centuries of clearing land for farms, US forest fell to about 754 million acres by 1910. The USDA Forest Service says the forest area has been relatively stable since then, although the population has more than tripled.

In 2012, the country had 766 million acres of forest, a third of its land. That is a little more forest than in 1910, measured by area, not by a count of trees.