Edward Mordrake is basically a staple of “weird but true” and “incredible actual medical cases” but the whole thing is actually not true at all. That “photo” you’ve seen floating around the internet for ages is a wax sculpture, the one pictured in this article is papier-mâché.
As I’ve explained before, there really is nothing stopping you from taking your human skeleton on a plane.
Strange Biology is now a Weekly Vertical at Ripley’s!
Good news! I signed a contract with Ripley’s Believe it or Not! and I will now be writing Strange Biology articles for them every week! Huzzah!
Read some of the articles I’ve done so far here, and feel free to keep sending in coverage suggestions. :) Thank you to my followers for being part of this, it’s a bit of a dream for Strange Bio to be a part of Ripley’s now!
Why are do these animals have pink skeletons? They have been prepared using a process called “diaphonization.” Read all about it in my latest Ripley’s piece.
Featuring photos and an interview with @arsanatomica. The artist/scientist who created these is also doing a Kickstarter for an anthology about the interesting things you can learn from processing animal remains.
Meet the Man who Makes Some of the World’s Biggest Monsters
“A big part of my job is getting really big animals through really small doors,” Staab explained.
Bentley had a rare condition called situs inversus, which is almost always fatal. The condition places the liver, stomach, and other organs in the abdomen in the wrong place, which can be dangerous when the blood vessels don’t reach the organs properly. However, Walker explains Bentley was lucky because her heart was (literally) in the right place, so her condition was much less dangerous. Medical literature describes two other people with the same condition, with similarly positioned hearts, and they both lived normal lifespans, into their 70’s.
I actually wrote about the Narwhal/Beluga hybrid more than a year ago as one of the accepted whale hybrids, based on the physiology of its skull, but now it’s been confirmed by DNA evidence. Blue whales and fin whales have also hybridized, as have several different species of dolphin, in both the wild and in captivity.
One of the most famous nature documentaries in the world lasts less than a minute and may be a complete hoax. However, one world-famous taxidermist, who has worked at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, takes it very seriously. Read more at Ripley’s.
Basilosaurus, which means “King Lizard,” was actually a whale that lived 30-45 million years ago. Scientists have also just published a paper indicating that it was likely apex predator.
(image: Voss et al., 2019)
Ripley’s events tomorrow
Tomorrow (Jan 6) at 9PM East Coast, 8PM Central, 6PM Pacific, PBS will be screening a biography of Robert Ripley, the king of weird. They will also be live tweeting extra stuff.
7-8:30PM/6-7:30PM/5-6:30PM Edward Meyer will be hosting a Reddit AMA. Meyer is the VP of Exhibits and Archives; he’s generally in charge of Ripley’s social media campaigns.
Book Recommendations
There is a certain character among you, so I put together a reading list so that you can all be even more weird and creepy. I have put together a list of books that not only are related to the content at StrangeBiology, but have in fact informed a lot of the knowledge behind it. If you enjoy anomalous, extreme, weird, and biological, then these are the books for you.
(And here are some stores you’d like too.) Click on the titles for links to Amazon.
1. Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
No book has better cemented my qualifications as resident “weird things expert” than this one.
I’d say this is the best and most interesting trade paperback about teratology out there. It’s easy to read, yet eloquent and packed with science, stories, history, illustration, and event fitting descriptions of mythology. Each chapter explains what a different type of mutation is, how it forms, and how it has been interpreted throughout history. If you found genetics a little boring in bio, let Armand Leroi show you how fascinating they can be.
The only problem with this book is that a number of people thought I was reading about X-Men.
2. Freaks: We Who are Not As Others
Also a great read by a man who actually lived the carny life. (With it and for it!) These are stories of people who have serious pathologies, from their own experiences and with their own words, such as the Elephant Man, and amazing stories about how their physiological difference affected their lives. This takes a less scientific approach, more human approach than Mutants. This book is particularly wonderful because you get a glimpse into history that isn’t available anywhere else. The only problem is that means that some of the stories I found I couldn’t confirm.
(Honorable Mention: The Shocked and Amazed! periodical is also a great way to learn about sideshow, freakshow and big top history, lingo, and practices.)
3. Racing the Antelope: What Animals can Teach Us About Running and Life
This is my absolute favorite book. Yes, I found it because I had typed the word “antelope” into Amazon. But it turned out to be one the best book about biology I had ever read, and the only good book about running I’d ever read.
This was later republished as Why We Run. If you are interested in biology and also a runner, this is a must-read. If you are one or the other, it is still highly recommended. In this book, Bernd Heinrich discusses the issues that runners face, such as keeping cool, pacing, endurance, speed, and hydration. He analyzes animals and how they deal with these issues. This is a story of origins of humanity, running, nature, and our connection to all other life.
EDIT: I just read Life Everlasting by the same author, and if you like dead animals (vulture culture), that’s another must-read.
4. The Best of the Best American Science Writing
I recommend the whole series of The Best American Science Writing and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.
The Best American Series is a series of series’ of collections of the best American writing published each year, organized by topic and aggregated by someone who reads a whole lot about that topic. These books are very useful because it saves you the time of looking for good writing and finding that your articles were simply click-bait or lacking. Every article contained therein is guaranteed to be one of the best articles published in that entire year, according to the editor(s).
They did one better in 2010 and published The Best of the Best American Science Writing, which includes the very best articles from the previous ten years of books published in the series. You will probably never read a better collection of general-population-targeted science articles.
(They also have other titles, but the only other title I’ve read include some from the Crime Reporting series, which has sadly been discontinued.)
Ben Goldacre (bengoldacre) is a doctor whose book will literally change the way you think. This should be required reading for all journalists, doctors, and scientists, and it’s highly recommended for everyone.
Goldacre makes it his business to expose bad medicine and other types of pseudoscience. In this book he tackles quackery like homeopathy and Brain Gym. He explains how statistics can mislead people, how trials are misrepresented in literature, how media sources cling to faulty science practices, and why people believe in fake results. This book would make most readers smarter people.
6. Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Series
Ripley’s is a big part of why I’m interested in the strange. Their books (of which there are many) are usually very colorful and image-heavy. For that reason they are great for kids. There are also a lot of books that an adult may prefer, such as A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert Ripley, but I read all different ones. For the last ten years they have released annual books full of the most interesting news. Of course they are not limited to biology, but their books often include chapters such as “Animals” and “Bodies.”
7. Strange Biology: On Anomalous Animals, Mutants, and Mad Science
Of course, the book with the content most appropriate for followers of this blog would be the upcoming book based on it. Right? You can always find the link in the sidebar!
Just like strangebiology, the book features the freaky aspects of the life sciences. The chapters are on goat-unicorns, ethics of the body trade, mammoth ivory, de-extinction, recreating the Pleistocene, Paleoart, Jackalopes, the Loch Ness Monster, a headless chicken, two-faced animals, half-male, half-female animals, combining humans and animals, and two-headed dog experiments. I funded it on Kickstarter and it is wow so great, so go buy a physical copy ($19.95) and a Kindle Version ($3.99). Anyway I am obviously financially biased in favor of this book, just for full disclosure.
8. Transplanting your Head: And other Feats of the Future
This book, published in 1999, is a collection of essays aggregated by the editors of Scientific American. The content is a little dated (It’s been 15 years) but the topics are fascinating. The chapters are Our Bodies in the Future, When Things Go Really Wrong, Using Biochemistry on the Defensive, Working with the Genome, What Can We Do with Gene Therapy, What Can We do with Cloning, Extreme Biology, and Taking Humankind to the Extreme.
9. A Brief History of Bad Medicine: True stories of Weird Medicine and Dangerous Doctors
Not to be confused with Bad Science, Bad Medicine will teach you the history of medicine through anecdotes of some of the worst doctors, practices, beliefs, and accidents of the field. It’s funny, it’s tragic. For a while it had me telling my friends “You’ll never believe what this one doctor did…”
10. Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts
Cloning, genetic engineering, prosthetics, and animal mind-control. This book explores how animals are being used and altered in the new face of biotechnology. It was published in 2013, so the information is pretty solid. It’s also easy to read, and so full of great information, I kind of want to make a new blog post every time I read a new paragraph. If you like Strange Biology or technological advancements, you need to put this on your reading list.
11.
The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers
Scott Carney, who has a weirdly perfect name to write this book, explores the trade in human body parts. Focusing on India and the US, chapters include true tales that are at once gruesome and infuriating. Carney also explains the complicated bioethics behind incentivizing organ and egg donation and the terrible price we pay for medical privacy.
Heads up freaks—Ripley’s is giving away FREE copies of their Dear Mr. Ripley book for EVERYONE who submits something to their latest contest.
The best submission of the week gets their new annual, too. The contest runs for 12 weeks. The grand prize winner gets THE ENTIRE COLLECTION OF 10 ANNUALS.
All you have to do is mail in something strange without packaging. Like a coconut or something, with the address and postage written on it. Then when you’re filling out the form from their website, it would be cool if you would mention Strange Biology. (I have no affiliation with Ripley’s. Sadly.)
ALSO, if you enter multiple weeks, the website says “Repeat submitters will receive a different Ripley publication for each subsequent entry." So if I understand this right, you could get a different Ripley book every week! You could just get the whole collection! Did I read that right?
I’ve read Dear Mr. Ripley, the book that you are guaranteed to get if you send an item without packaging, and the item makes it to HQ. I liked the book a lot, and with this review I am legally required to inform you that I got it for free. Ripley’s has always been one of my favorite publishers, I love them so.
From the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum in Baltimore. A two-headed (dicephalic) calf, a piglet with two butts, a six-legged lamb, a seven-legged kid, and a hyrax.
Art by gaff artist AlexCF.
AlexCF created a fictional account of a Robert Ripley-like man who traveled the world in search of undescribed animals and then mysteriously disappeared, leaving boxes of preserved dragons, fairies, demons, dinosaurs, plesiosaurs etc. The artist claims that he is the keeper of all these fantastical mummified specimens and skeletons, and he sells and shows them at galleries. He is also open for commissions.
When two brothers were playing cowboys, they stumbled into a fire ant nest and were stung. Years later, the older brother made this portrait using 200,000 dead red fire ants. It took him 2 years and $2,000 worth of fire ants, bought from a science supplier, to finish.