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  Wikipedia Curio Shelf

Here lies my cabinet of wikipedia curiosities. Don't mind the cobwebs, this one gets updated enough. I do have to warn you, my hyperlink curios can be bizarre, morbid, and at times, downright disgusting. Eating while you inspect these crevices is not only unwise, but liable to make you explode. Jokes aside, I've got some extra things to tell you, just before you start:

  •  Pages with photos of disease or medical gore are marked with this "⚕" symbol; the Rod of Asclepius.
  •  Pages with photos of human or animal corpses are marked with this "🕱" symbol.
  •  Pages with sexual or pornographic content are marked with this "⚤" symbol.

A

Name Corny Blurb
Absurdism What if life was perhaps, just a little bit, silly?
Allerton Oak The oldest oak in Northwest England.
Alitta virens Looks like a centipede, actually a worm.
Alpenglow That reddish glow the sun casts onto peaks and horizons.
Alvinella pompejana The deep-sea hydrothermal vent worm.
A Modest Proposal Poor? Sell your children as delicacies for the nobility.
🕱 Amorphous globosus Nature's very own bouncy ball.
Amorphophallus titanum Stupendous but stinky.
Aniridia When you don't have irises.
Animal pound Where everyone who hotlinks from this website will go.
Anomalocaris "Abnormal shrimp" indeed.
Anomalous experiences When you hallucinate, even although there's nothing wrong with you.
Anthropodermic Bibliopegy Now I love hardback books, but this is just too far...
Anticipatory grief The grief before the grief.
Aplysia vaccaria The biggest (and blobbiest) of the sea slugs.
Apophenia When your brain makes nonsensical connections.
Architecture terrible A style of architecture designed to torment people.
Argonaut The octopus with a shell.
Armillaria ostoyae This fungus can get humongous.
Asterism That star-shaped gleam on precious gemstones.
Attitude (Heraldry) The pose a heraldric figure is drawn in.
Avebury The largest stone circle in the world.
Aventurescence The glittery look in artificial gemstones.
Azoth The stuff.


B

Name Corny Blurb
Baskerville Effect When heart-attacks allegedly happen more often on unlucky days.
Beast of Gévaudan A beast, none the least.
Bedale Leech House A lounge for leeches.
Belgica antarctica The largest terrestrial animal in antarctica.
Bioindicator Living litmus paper.
Biscione One of the coolest heraldric motifs I know.
Black swallower The handbag of the sea.
Blood as food Vampires love this page.
Blue hour Those times in the day when everything goes blue.
Bog butter Butter of the bogs.
Bonnacon Dare to brave its bowel movements?
Book curse Best used on comically embarrassing personal diaries.
Bouba/Kiki Effect "I don't know...it just looks like a billybob."
Boustrophedon The real name for backwards text.
Bridge chapel All your sins can be water under the bridge.
Brimham Rocks Some big funky rocks.
British Rail sandwich The British version of those airplane food jokes.
⚤ Breast-shaped hill Where I post from.
Busby's_stoop_chair A haunted chair said to curse anyone who sits on it…to death.
Buttered cat paradox A slippery one.
Byne's Disease The bane of natural history archivists everywhere.


C

Name Corny Blurb
Cabinet of curiosities Museums before museums.
Cadaver Synod The time the corpse of a pope was exumed and put on trial.
Cairn Stones for the departed.
Caprellidae Skele-shrimps.
⚤ Catullus 16 A lavicious latin poem.
Carcinisation Fuck it, crab.
Carnyx TEEEET!
Casu Martzu A perfectly normal cheese.
Cat fugue A fugue allegedly composed by a cat.
Cat gap Cats doing what they do best...in the fossil record.
Causey Arch The oldest surviving single-arch railway bridge in the world.
Cave Pearl Pearls outside of clams.
⚤ Cerne Abbas Giant A very endowed hill figure.
Chalice Well The ancient english well with red water and alleged healing qualities.
Chained Oak You can’t escape now, you devil.
Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag A chapel carved into a cliff-face.
Chimera (Genetics) A "breed one, get one free" sort of deal.
Chlorine Trifluoride Local chemical too angry to die.
Chrysolina cerealis One of the most beautiful beetles.
Clachan Bridge Wanna cross the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of minutes? Now you can.
Clock of the Long Now Ten O'clock just got a new meaning.
Codex Seraphinianus What if encyclopedias did magic mushrooms?
Coffin birth Death does funny things to the pregnant.
Coffin Stone Here lies this...ummm...
Colleoni This heraldry has balls.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously Grammatically correct but completely nonsensical.
Cooksonia The first vascular plant.
Corpse road Roads for transporting the dead.
Cosmic Calendar Normal calendars are so last 100 million years ago.
Costasiella kuroshimae The japanese sea-slugs that photosynthesise.
Crappit Heid Scotland's fetish for stuffed flesh rears its head again.
Crisp Sandwich One of the few british meals that isn't a complete culinary atrocity.
Crooked Forest "Okay, one more drink and we can all go ho-".
Cross Bones A medieval-era graveyard for the outcasts of society.
Custom of the sea When seamen have to eat seamen.


D

Name Corny Blurb
Dancing mania A time so disease-ridden that dancing itself joined the roster.
Dead leaf mantis The mantids that look like dead leaves.
Death and the Maiden (motif) The motif of a young woman being pinched by a skeleton.
Death and the Mother Yoink, my baby now.
Deathbed Phenomena The things people see while they're dying.
⚤ Death during consensual sex What if you wanted to come, but it was actually time to go?
Deep Blue (Chess computer) The chess-playing computer.
Defenestrations of Prague When people get thrown out, literally.
Devil's Bridge, Ceredigion Imagine a trifle, but it's bridges.
Devil's Footprints That time the Devil landed in Devon.
Digital Dark Age A lot of the time, the internet isn't forever.
⚕ Diprosopus Let's face the facts, these guys have two.
Divination Bones Bones to tell the future with.
Dolmen Megaliths for the dearly missed.
Dord A word that's not supposed to be a word.
Dowsing Apparently you can find things in the ground with funky sticks.
Dragon of Wantley The first recorded case of Achilles' Arse.
Dule tree British hanging trees.


E

Name Corny Blurb
Eaves-drip burial Better than burying a dog alive?...
Edward Legge When promotion is posthumous.
Elephant of Henry III The first elephant in England since 43 AD.
Ellen Blight The “Lion Queen” is dethroned in a most hairy way.
Endoceras The genus of Ordovician sea-wizards.
Epomis The beetles that eat frogs.
Erdstall Unknown tunnels with an unknown purpose.
Eternal flame Fires that don't stop burning.
Eulagisca gigantea A rather scary scale worm.
Extinction Event When it's die-time.
Extinct Language Yes, even these die too.
Extremes on Earth Sunglasses, skateboard and cap not required.
Extremophile Something about crushing pressure and oppressive darkness.


F

Name Corny Blurb
⚤ Fascinus Cock worship, literally.
Fatal insomnia The diabolical offspring of prions and sleep deprivation.
Fatberg The accumulations of filth in victorian-era sewers.
Fish Ladder No legs? No problem!
Flies' Graveyard British self-deprecation strikes again.
Folly Buildings designed for show, and not much else.
Fool's mate Chess' very own practical joke.
Form constant Some of the shapes you can see when you're under the influence.
Foxfire One of nature's many bioluminescent mushrooms.
Frog battery Real life frankenstein-antics.
Frog Coffin Because cats aren't the only creatures to have fancy burials.
Franz Schmidt German executioner decides to take up writing.
Fucking_Grove,_Bristol One of the many unfortunate names a place can have.


G

Name Corny Blurb
Garden Hermit A friend to go with your flowers.
Gastrolith Stones made inside stomachs.
Gelert Too good of a boy for this cruel world.
Geomancy Telling the future with the soil.
Giraffe weevil Traded the typical weevil snoot for a comically long neck.
Glass frog Don't drop it.
Glass Octopus I'd say "don't drop it" but it lives in the bathypelagic zone.
Glyphoglossus molossus The inflatable frog.
Gongoozler A person that likes to stare at canals.
Götz von Berlichingen One of the most metal guys I know.
Gowk Stane Scottish standing stones.
Ghoti Fun fact, this means "fish".
Graveyard poets Gothic revival before gothic revival.
Gravity Hill Think you can escape the whacky world of optical illusions by going outside? Think again.
Great Famine of 1315 The first domino of the medieval decline conga-line.
Great Stink The time victorian London reaped what it sowed...through its nostrils.
Greeble (psychology) People can recognise faces, and these things.
Guerrilla gardening When rebellion takes seed.
Gynandromorphism Beasties with both.


H

Name Corny Blurb
Hadean Zircon Rocks from the birth of this earth.
Hagfish Get slimed.
Hairy frog That's not even the weirdest part about this thing.
Halifax Gibbet The guillotine before the guillotine.
Hallucigenia Spines or spindly legs? You decide, because science is stumped.
Hannah Twynnoy Another big cat mishap, starring one silly barmaid.
Hand of Glory You've got to hand it to them.
Hawker's Hut The world's smallest home office.
Heslington Brain The oldest preserved human brain in Eurasia.
Hericium erinaceus A very pettable mushroom.
Hellmouth A stylish entrance to hell.
He never married “This man was a raging homosexual”.
Herepath Old English military roads.
Highgate Vampire Vampire hysteria: 1970’s England edition.
History of lions in Europe This page isn’t lion.
Hobby tunneling Dungeon Keeper in real life.
Horse Burial In case human burials don't tickle your funny bone.
Human Placentophagy Is it or is it not cannibalism?
Hundatorra A bronze-age era village.
Hydnellum_peckii The fungus that bleeds.
Hydra Effect When some things just can't die.
Hydrus (legendary creature) It's incredible to be inedible.


I

Name Corny Blurb
Inbreeding Depression The Habsburgs could have done with this page.
Irreversible binomial Why it's Fish-and-Chips, and not Chips-and-Fish.
Irony Punctuation Turns out we've been trying to show tone in text for a while.
Island gigantism Small islands can have big effects.


J

Name Corny Blurb
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher A special way to word a sentence.
Jeremy (Snail) A special snail.
John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland A special english nobleman.
Joke chess problem A special kind of nerd humour.


K

Name Corny Blurb
Kallima inachus The mascot for camouflage.
Kasparov versus the World One chess champion vs 50,000 people.
Kindlifresserbrunnen That one Swiss fountain sculpture of a man eating live babies.
Kiwa (crustacean) A hairy crab.


L

Name Corny Blurb
Land Bridge Letting us see the world since forever.
Latin obscenity The Greco-Roman grocery list of vulgarities.
🕱 Lazarus sign That spooky jolt that corpses like to do.
Lazarus taxon Not dead, just hiding.
Leo Belgicus Map of western europe, but make it a lion.
Leucochloridium paradoxum The flatworm that makes snails kill themselves.
Lewis chessmen Sometimes, chess gets gallic.
Ley Line A proposed (and pseudohistorical) explanation for the alignment of particular landmarks.
⚤ LGBT Slang From argot to all over the world.
Link rot Is it on your website?
List of ancient oceans Where the seas used to be.
List of animals displaying homosexual behavior In nature, nothing's unnatural.
🕱 List of bog bodies Welcome to the wet world of these soggy mummies.
List of botched executions Even more horrifying than normal executions.
List of cakes I know, not very weird...But those culinary pages are rabbit holes!
List of colors (alphabetical) Ever wanted to know what that exact hue was? Now you know.
List of common false etymologies of English words All the times you've fooled yourself.
List of common misconceptions All the silly things that people believe.
List of endangered plants It's not just animals we keep messing with.
List of English-language expressions related to death I think we have a bit of an obsession.
List of examples of convergent evolution All the times nature said "Let's do that again!".
List of extant pinfolds in Cheshire A comically specific page that I had to feature.
List of fallacies For your next flamewar or an upcoming dinner-table fiasco.
List of garden types All the ways you can do a garden.
List of hors d'oeuvre All the starters before your main meal.
List of human disease case fatality rates Now you can finally know how boned you are.
List of hybrid creatures in folklore All of man's mixed-up monsters.
List of largest known nebulae Even crazier spacedust!
List of lost settlements in the United Kingdom All the places you cannot have beans on toast.
List of non-water floods Who says floods have to be natural disasters?
List of paleocontinents Feel like shit, just want them back.
List of unusual deaths The deaths of all time.
List of reportedly haunted locations in the United Kingdom Now serving Beans-on-Ghost.
List of Revived Languages Lazarus languages.
List of Sandwiches The sandwich showcase, some sensible...some silly.
⚤ List of sexually active popes The page that makes catholics cry.
List of shortest-reigning monarchs The elusive speed-run category that you never knew about.
List of surviving ancient ships Boats that beat the odds.
List of vampiric creatures in folklore It's the mash! It's the Monster Mash!
List of works based on dreams When dreams do come true.
Lithops The plants that look like stones.
Little Chapel A tiny chapel made out of china, pebbles and shells.
Lloyds Bank coprolite It somehow came out of a person.
London tornado of 1091 Plagues, famines…tornado. Oh, Medieval London…
Long Barrow Some funky neolithic tubes.
Longest word in English You know you want to try and say them.
Long Parliament This complete and utter political disaster.
Lord Uxbridge's leg A famous dismembered leg.
Love Dart Sorry Cupid, nature did it first.
Lud's Church The church that is actually a chasm.
Lullington Church One of England's smallest churches.
Lunar Effect A belief that the moon can make people do stuff.
Lychgate Those gateway arches for churchyards.


M

Name Corny Blurb
Macropinna The genus of transparent-headed fish.
Macquarium Mac Aquatics.
Máel Brigte of Moray Bit a guy post-mortem and made him die.
Maggot farming No creature is safe from our clutches.
⚕ Maggot therapy Gross but good for you.
Major Oak A major oak.
Man-eater These guys want man-meat.
Mantis shrimp The shrimp with the piston punch.
Marzipan Pig Pig without the pork in it.
Mass psychogenic illness When the crowd goes wild.
Medieval hunting Hunting, medieval style.
Medieval Warm Period That warm time in the medieval era.
Metaspriggina The first fish.
Micropsia A condition that makes things look tiny.
Milbenkäse The slightly less wriggly version of Casu Martzu.
Mimic poison frog The dart frog that's not so deadly.
Minerva's Shrine, Chester One of the last Roman shrines in England.
Milesian tale Horny Greco-Roman tales lost to time.
Moonbow Rainbows made by moonlight instead of sunlight.
Moon dog The moon has friends.
Moon illusion The moon’s tendency to fool us.
Mortality salience The awareness of one’s inevitable death.
Moss Lawn The best lawns.
Motyxia The genus of glowing milipedes.
Mow Cop Castle The castle that straddles two county borders.
Mummy brown The colour you get from desecrating the dead.
Murder stone Stones that mark where murders happened.
Mutillidae The family of fuzzy wasps.
Mutiny on the Bounty A Royal Navy fiasco that spiralled so out of control that a whole new island got settled.
Myrmecoleon The medieval bestiary's very own antlion, which makes pretty pearls instead of eating ants.
Myxozoa The littlest guys.


N

Name Corny Blurb
Nábrók These really get under my skin.
NightMare (scareware) One of the first pieces of malware specifically designed to scare you.
Nocebo When good placebos go bad.


O

Name Corny Blurb
Oarfish These guys supposedly started off the whole "sea serpent" thing.
Official Table of Drops A guide for hanging.
Oliver Cromwell's head A famous mummified head.
Onfim A posthumous doodling icon.
Opabinia Middle Cambrian animal that murders things with its trunk.
Ortolan bunting A cute bird subjected to the most ungodly form of predation.


P

Name Corny Blurb
Paedophryne amauensis The world's smallest frog.
Pareidolia When your brain sees human faces in random things.
Pantheon A heraldric cervine-vulpine beasty.
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass A device based off the idea that snails have telepathic powers.
Pesse canoe The oldest surviving boat.
⚤ Phallic Architecture Penises for the public.
Phantom island Invisible islands.
Phantom settlement Invisible towns.
Pheidole The ants with unusually large heads.
Physalaemus nattereri The frog with eyes on its behind.
Pitchcapping A hot, sticky way to go.
Placozoa The simplest animals on earth.
Plant Blindness When we forget about our floral friends.
Plant Cognition Plants can think!
Ploughman's Lunch Ye olde meal.
Population bottleneck The morbid crossroad a population enters when it gets too low.
Prisoner's cinema Those colours you can see when it's dark.
Prosopometamorphopsia A condition that messes up how your brain sees human faces.
Pseudobiceros hancockanus A flatworm with a a funny name.
Pseudis paradoxa The frog that shrinks.
Publius Afranius Potitus "I'll die for you"? Then perish.
Pygmalion Effect When emotions define success.


Q

Name Corny Blurb
Queen Alexandra's birdwing The world's largest butterfly.
Queen Elizabeth Oak A thick tree.
Quintus Fulvius Lippinus The original snail-farmer; we can probably thank him for escargot.


R

Name Corny Blurb
Reschensee A church in a lake.
⚕ Rachischisis An incompatible-with-life condition that leaves the spine wide open.
Rafflesia The giant flower that smells like a rotting corpse.
Recursive islands and lakes I heard you liked islands, so I put an island inside your island.
Restormel Castle A perfectly circular norman castle.
Risk of astronomical suffering Somehow even scarier than all the other apocalypses.
Robert Liston The fastest surgeon in the west.
Roland the Farter Nobody’s above a good fart joke.
Roopkund A lake full of skeletons.
Rosetta Project The long-awaited sequel.


S

Name Corny Blurb
Sacred Grove Some very special bits of earth.
Saint Guinefort France's very own Gelert.
Šakotis The cake that's a tree.
Saltmen Some mummies of the salt-mining variety.
Sapphirina The parasitic copepods that glow.
Scaly-foot gastropod Snails with scales.
Scotoplanes You've seen the Sea-cucumber, you've seen the Sea-bunny, now meet the Sea-pig.
Scunthorpe problem God help you if you're from Bitchfield, Penistone, Shitterton, Twatt, or-
Selenus chess set The daintiest chess set.
Separatio Leprosorum The ceremony thrown for lepers.
Servilia's Pearl The most valuable gem of all time.
⚤ Sheela na gig An especially lascivious grotesque.
Shitterton Why english place names get teased so much.
Shooter's sandwich A very meaty sandwich.
Short Parliament A chapter in the bloody mess called the English Civil War.
Silbury Hill A nice chalk mound.
Simnia Spelta A sea snail that changes colour depending on what it's eating.
Sino-Roman Relations One of the wildest crossovers in the ancient world.
Skerne Bridge The oldest railway bridge that's still being used.
Smallest House in Great Britain A home so humble you can barely get in it.
Snickelways of York Tiny medieval alleys that are supposed to be haunted by Barghests.
Snipe Eel These squiggly line looking things.
Spectral bat The largest carnivorous bat.
Speyer wine bottle Potion of Instant Death Disease.
Stargazy Pie Forever gazing up to whatever cruel god let this happen to them.
Staunton chess set Playing chess? Choose these.
St. Martin's Church (Split) A church built inside the ancient remains of Diocletian's walls.
Stoned Ape Theory Not mush-room in the realm of science for this theory...
Submerged Forest Trees that have stood against the tides of time.
Sunken lane Roads with ridges.
Swansea Devil A giggly devil statue that got the last laugh.
Sweating sickness The mysterious terror that plagued Tudor England.
Sword-billed hummingbird The hummingbird with a beak longer than its entire body.


T

Name Corny Blurb
⚕ Tache noir de la sclerotique Corneal Clouding's freakier cousin.
Tempest prognosticator The weather forecast, starring several frightened leeches.
Tetrarchy That time the Roman Empire got split up...before it actually fell.
⚕ Teratoma A tumour with tu-much.
Terminal Lucidity When the dying get one last electrical zap of life.
Testicles as food There's balls in your mouth, and then there's this.
Toad's Mouth A big rock that looks like a toad.
Thanatosensitivity When technology has to acknowledge death.
The Broomway Appearances decieve...
The Dead Lovers A double painting of a couple, one side alive, the other side as a lovely pair of festering corpse people.
The Great Bovine Pestilence That time medieval England saw a ton of its cattle drop dead.
The Great Thunderstorm STRIKE!
The Hum That mysterious rumble you sometimes hear.
The King of the Cats His moggy majesty.
The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh A ballad about a princess that gets turned into a dragon.
Theloderma corticale Goblins, come get your mascot.
⚤ The Miracle of 1511 The time Brussels was seized by the urge to make pornographic snowmen.
The Mug House One of the only known pubs to have been built on consecrated ground.
The Shambles A whole walkable street of medieval buildings.
The Triumph of Death It’s a dead man’s party, who could ask for more?
Timeline of extinctions in the Holocene All the real ones we've lost.
Timeline of natural history Show this to small children when they ask where babies come from.
Timeline of prehistory From stone age to tome age.
Third man factor When you’re experiencing unholy amounts of trauma and you swear there’s someone with you.
Timeline of the far future Existential dread machine or soothing blanket for your brain? You decide!
Thomas Macarte A one-armed lion tamer that died in the ring.
Tiktaalik "This is the guy that tipped over the string of dominos that would lead to us doing taxes" - Lutz.
Tor_(rock_formation) A big rock formation.
Turritopsis dohrnii The immortal jellyfish.
Triprion spatulatus I know there's some shovelheads in this world but this is getting a bit silly now.
Trout tickling Coochie coochie coo.
Turra Coo Protest cow.


U

Name Corny Blurb
Unchambered Long Barrow Some funky neolithic tubes...minus the stone chambers.
Unst Bus Shelter An entirely-furnished bus shelter.
Urine deflector Now you know what those weird lumps are.


V

Name Corny Blurb
Vanitas A motif about the transience of life and the dominance of death.
Vedius Pollio The evillest Equestrian.
Venous hum The sound blood makes.
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time The origin of the Monty Python foot.
Venus figurine The Upper Paleolithic obsession with big women.
Venus flytrap sea anemone The underwater fly-trap.
Venus girdle Not a girdle, nowhere near ancient Rome and actually...a jellyfish.
Volcanic winter of 536 “Was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year.”


W, Z and Numerical

Name Corny Blurb
Wardian Case The prototype of the terrarium.
Weaver ant The ants that build giant leaf nests.
Weasel Word Some people say this is a way to weasel around your words...
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? A paper on what it means to be something else.
Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate York's shortest (and weirdest) street.
Who put Bella down the Wych Elm? That time a skeleton was found in a tree.
Will O' the wisp English ghost lights.
Wild Animal Suffering A long discussed dilemma.
Wild man Some cultures have this thing for fuzzy guys.
Wistman's Wood One of britain's last ancient temperate rainforests.
Witch Bottle Which is for witches.
Witches' Well, Edinburgh A monument dedicated to those sorry souls that met the stake.
Wolffia arrhiza The world's smallest vascular plant.
Wolf of Ansbach The time a man-eating wolf was dressed up like a person and gibbed.
Worm Charming The unexpected sequel to snake charming.
Worship of heavenly bodies The many ways you can love the stars.
Zombie taxon Not to be confused with the Lazarus taxon.