Millions of years ago, North America was the first and only home of camels. The fossil record is full of them, around 100 species of camel that are now extinct. They ranged from tiny little herbivores that stood two feet tall to species that resembled deer to the giant Camelops that stood seven feet tall at the shoulder. When continents shifted and land bridges arose, these North American camels spread to the Old World and became the dromedary and Bactrian camels we have today. They migrated south and evolved into llamas, vicunas, and alpacas. Then camels in North America died out, the last ones disappearing around 13,000 years ago. 

In the 20th century, American camel fossils took a backseat to horse fossils, which also flourished and then went extinct in America. Indeed, many camel skulls were misidentified as horses. But paleontologists are now focusing on the astonishing diversity of extinct American camels. Read what they've found at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Jonathan Chen) 

The animated short Chain is about the ferocity of nature and the clever adaptations of predators and prey in the natural world. A cute cicada chomps down on a tiny worm until he's confronted by a praying mantis, obviously an orchid mantis in this case. But then comes a peacock spider who would love to eat them both. This simple scenario even has a sexy dream sequence. The viewer doesn't know who to root for in this standoff because they're all emotionally expressive, but then again they are all bugs. That's when it gets a little Looney Tunes. 

In nature, it's either eat or be eaten, and you can't feel safe no matter how high you are on the food chain. Chain is based on the Chinese proverb “The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind.” It's won an awful lot of film festival awards. -via Nag on the Lake 

Peggy Gavan at The Hatching Cat writes about cats in vintage New York City, but found a tale that was so utterly bonkers that she had to share it, despite the fact that an unnamed cat only made a cameo appearance. To fix a plumbing problem in 1893, workers tore a hole between an upstairs kitchen and a downstairs dining room. The upstairs neighbor shooed the plumbers away, and the hole remained. That seemed okay until the upstairs cat fell onto the dining table below during dinner, and the feud was on. The guy upstairs began throwing objects through the hole on a regular basis, including the cat. 

The story involves neighbors in their underwear, a large saber, harsh words and threats, and finally a police chase before the matter was resolved. The saga made the papers, of course, and that is why we get to enjoy the full story. -via Strange Company 

It stands to reason that, if humanity should advance, it should grasp at every possible opportunity to gain knowledge and power. It is only by ambition that humanity can rise above fleshly constraints. This is the lesson of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus:

A sound magician is a mighty god:

Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a diety.

The food blogger Seeded at the Table understands, hence the need to create marshmallow treats, but without the traditional puffed rice cereal. Nay, such glutinous confections must be structured around Flaming Hot Cheetos to blend the tart powered cheese flavor with the sweetness of marshmallow.

-via @369sosa, who warns, "God will deal with you."

Simon's Cat encounters a patch of catnip and decides he likes this plant. This scenario seems so familiar to me as I have a catnip patch and it brings all the neighborhood cats to the yard. The cartoon cat is more expressive than mine, so we see the experience from his point of view. It's been a year or so since I've found a Simon's Cat video that was new and not too long, so I'm glad to share it. 

Then I read the top comment from @cricketrox4ever. They got a cat 18 years ago and named it Simon after the cartoon. 

I was 11 at the time and my mom said we’d only keep him until we found him a home. Simon was with me for 17 years. He went with me to college, moved with me 5 times, and lived to be and old man. He just passed last year.   

Could that possibly be true? I went back in the archives and found that the first Simon's Cat video was posted here 18 years ago today. How coincidental is that? 

A manuscript from Isfahan, Iran, was written by a soothsayer about astrology, magic, and demons. You might think the 56 illustrations that accompany it were from the medieval era, especially one that shows a demon riding an elephant that has no ears. But the watercolor images were added to the volume in 1921, ten or twenty years after the text was written. Plenty of these paintings, although not all of them, depict terrifying demons that come to bedevil humans, plucking out their teeth and poisoning their food. A common theme is that of a demon appearing to people as they sleep, like this monster who licks feet, while his tail sports another mouth and tongue. 

These definitely sprang from nightmares. Other beings sport multiple heads, human-animal mixes, and plenty of horns. Read more about the manuscript on demons and see a gallery of pictures at the Public Domain Review.  -via Messy Nessy Chic 

The Spanish band Broken Peach goes all out for Halloween, as we've seen in years before. This year's Halloween video has them performing Metallica's "Enter Sandman" mixed with a bit of "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads. The music is good, but the presentation is superb. The costumes are not full body skeleton suits as they were in past years, but convey the idea well with makeup and chains that imply bare ribs. And check out those fingernails! They still have those well choreographed, jerky dance moves that we've come to expect. 

Broken Peach is much more than a cover band, as they've built a reputation for highly entertaining live shows in Spain and around Europe. And they do much more than just Halloween and Christmas songs, but those holiday offerings get them noticed around the world every year. If you enjoyed this, check out Broken Peach's Halloween playlist at Spotify. 

A couple of months ago, we posted some of the top images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest. Wouldn't you know it, the photograph that won the contest wasn't even included in them! The contest winners have now been announced, and the top prize goes to Wim van den Heever for the image above, titled "Ghost Town Visitor." The Grand Title image is of a rare brown hyena framed against a building of an abandoned diamond mine in the ghost town of Kolmanskop, Namibia. The image also won in the category of Urban Wildlife. Below is the winner of the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.   



Winner Andrea Dominizi named this photo "After the Destruction." It shows a longhorn beetle witnessing the machinery destroying his habitat. This image also won in the 15-17-year-old category. You can see the winning photos in the different categories here. 

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is held annually by the Natural History Museum in London, and the best of the 60,000 or so photos entered will be the subject of an exhibition opening Friday and running into July of next year. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: M3COPT3R4)

With so many people taking digital photos with their phones all the time, there's going to be some that will surprise or confuse you. These guys in Romania are looking down on tiny little people, but there's no Photoshop at work here. I'll explain it, but you've got to stop reading here if you want to figure it out on your own. The "big guys" are standing on the bucket of a heavy construction vehicle, high above the street. The edge of the bucket lines up nicely with the street lines, so you might not see it right off. Sometimes you spot an illusion as it happens, and since you have a camera right there with you, you record it to share, like this building in Osaka.

(Image credit: Raxxla) 

It's a tower that extends through a hole in the sky! Or is it  a blue ceiling with a hole in it? No, the building has a metal rim jutting out from the top, so shiny that it reflects the rest of the building. You can see it better in this picture. These are just a couple of illusions in a list of 50 of them at Bored Panda that might take you some time to figure out, but you'll be glad you saw them.   

Look at the size of this pumpkin on the banks of the Colorado River! It's not a garden pumpkin, though, it's made of mineral deposits. This is Pumpkin Spring, named for the obvious reason. The pumpkin is the result of a warm mineral spring that deposited limestone as it met the river, creating a natural pool. The water churns inside and then spills over the top, leaving orange streaks down the outside, giving it an autumn harvest color. 

Inside, Pumpkin Spring is more like a witch's cauldron than a gourd. The warm water contains all kinds of dissolved metals, including a high concentration of arsenic. Yes, people swim in it, although it is not recommended, and it is forbidden to drink the water. It is the most poisonous water in the Grand Canyon. Pumpkin Spring is not that easy to get to, anyway. There are no trails, but if you're boating down the river, you'll find it at mile 212.9. See more of Pumpkin Spring at Atlas Obscura, where it is today's "place of the day." 

(Image credit: Nate Loper) 

Here's something you probably didn't know about bats: the common vampire bat has a natural knife sharpener in its mouth to keep its teeth sharp enough to pierce skin. Cool, huh? Vampire bats are the only mammals that can live solely off the blood of their victims (insects are another story), and they have developed adaptations that make them really good at it, like saliva with anticoagulants in it. It might have rabies virus in it, too, but that doesn't help or bother the bat at all.

The good news is that vampire bats only take a small amount of blood relative to the size of the victim, which is usually livestock, and they learn to do it without being noticed. That's all fine and good until your pig comes down with rabies. And it's all the more reason to make sure your window screens are in good shape if you live in vampire bat territory. Vampire bats are scary enough without having to look at them up close, so this TED-Ed lesson animates these bats as much cuter than they actually are.   

Yesterday marked the 959th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which was the decisive battle of the Norman invasion of England. William the Bastard earned the sobriquet William the Conqueror when he defeated and killed King Harold Godwinson at Hastings.

The Norman yoke then fell upon the people of England. From a certain point of view, Harold Godwinson was the last legitimate King of England.

Internet rumor tells us that, every year, on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, the Hastings Observer prints a notice of memorial to him.

-via the patriotic Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry:

The Anglo will never forgive the Frenchman for teaching his ancestors how to speak civilized, not eat with his hands, use a toilet, etc. https://t.co/JSaEJiJ03n

— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry_en) October 14, 2025

The Netty is quite small--just two rooms. But those rooms are luxurious and comfortable. This is what you would expect from an underground Victoria Era public toilet in the UK.

According to The Independent, the restroom in central Oxford was built in 1895 and closed in 2008. Up to two guests can stay in each of the two suites. You can see floor plans and photos here. Although there is no room service, there are restaurants on both sides of the street. Tourists have immediate access to the Ashmolean Museum of art and archaeology literally a few yards away.

-via Oddity Central

Sobibor was a Nazi death camp that operated in Poland beginning in 1942. It was a relatively small camp, because the Jewish people who were brought in by train were immediately killed. The only permanent inmates were a few hundred workers who had skills necessary to run the camp, like carpentry or cooking. Then in the fall of 1943, the Nazis planned to close Sobibor and turn it into a munitions facility. The workers knew that they, too, would be executed instead of transferred. The standard procedure at death camps was to leave no witnesses. 

Yet 58 people survived their time at Sobibor. They had nothing left to lose, so they staged an uprising on October 14, 1943. The plan was put into place after Alexander Pechersky arrived at Sobibor. He was a captured Red Army soldier who had hidden his Jewish heritage from his captors for a year. He was the first actual Allied soldier the inmates of Sobibor had met, and they looked to him for leadership. Some of the camp's German guards or other employees were recruited for the effort, but among the prisoners, few knew what the exact plan was. When prisoners started killing SS officers on the 14th, it caused chaos all through the camp. Around 365 prisoners made an escape attempt, but most were shot. Another 100 or so were caught outside. All the remaining camp inmates were executed. But 58 people made their way to safety, and served as witnesses to the horrors of Sobibor. Read their story at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Azymut (Rafał M. Socha) -image cropped) 

Joy is a young woman trying online dating in hopes of finding someone she's compatible with. But she's really Sofia, a much older woman who is using Joy as her cover. Sofia isn't evil, she's just lonely and desperate. For her part, Joy isn't exactly perfect, either. The short JOY by director Steve Oen is a recent offering from DUST. It's partially in English, partially in Dutch, but there are captions. Contains NSFW language. 

However, you should know that JOY was made during the 48 Hour Film Project Amsterdam in 2019. It was written, shot, and edited in only 48 hours, a "weekend of adrenaline, caffeine, and creativity." The prompts in that competition (to make sure every entry was new) were a character named Frits or Freija who is a cartoonist, the line "blind birds do not fly far," and perfume as a prop. JOY won Best Film in that competition, and went to place third in the global 48-hour film competition the next year. -via Geeks Are Sexy