Mirabilia.
Human stories. Interviews, case studies, people.
A Roman pet owner named the family cat before naming the family
A 1,800-year-old mosaic in southern Turkey labels a cat 'Emerald' and a dog 'Ocean', giving two household pets the kind of individual identity Roman art rarely bothered to record.
For four centuries a chair killed no one, but everyone in Valladolid believed it did
A sixteenth-century chair bolted upside down to a wall in Valladolid was blamed for the deaths of two caretakers and two students. New research says the devil had nothing to do with it.
A Puppet with No Strings Attached to Just One Country
Two centuries after Carlo Collodi's birth, Pinocchio is being claimed all over again, this time by New York, through cinema, scholarship and a Brooklyn bookshop.
The only chair to survive Bronze Age Europe still has its otter skin seat
In a Danish burial mound, a chieftain was laid to rest with a folding chair some 3,400 years old. It is the only one that has ever come down to us whole.
A one-tonne bronze ballerina just vanished from an Italian fuel magnate's private collection
Thieves stole a 1,200-pound Manzù sculpture and works attributed to Picasso from a collector's headquarters in Abruzzo, in a heist that needed heavy machinery and a crew.
A sixteen year old artist out-trolled Damien Hirst, and the Metropolitan Police had to save him from himself
A teenage graffiti artist mocked Damien Hirst's diamond skull, so Hirst had him arrested for half a million pounds of art theft over some pencils.
Lasers Just Found a Portuguese Town That the Amazon Swallowed Whole
LiDAR scans have revealed the streets of an 18th-century Portuguese settlement buried under Brazilian rainforest for two centuries.
A man has spent fifty years building a machine to watch the North Star drift out of place
In the New Mexico desert, Charles Ross has spent five decades building Star Axis, a stone observatory designed to make visible 26,000 years of Earth's wobble.
A Forest Went Missing in a Canadian Lake, Then Turned Up 20 Miles Away
A floating island the size of two football fields vanished from a British Columbia reservoir and reappeared weeks later, still growing trees and birds.
A Door That Opens Onto Nothing Was the Whole Point
At Saqqara, archaeologists have unearthed a 4,000-year-old tomb built around a door that leads nowhere, designed for a soul, not a visitor.
Thirty Stolen Choirbook Pages Came Home Because One Scholar Recognised the Damage
Thirty illuminated pages stolen from a Tuscan museum in 1982 have finally gone home, tracked down after decades by a private art scholar who simply recognised them.
In Molise, a stone face has been watching over a shrinking village for centuries
On a ridge above Duronia, a natural rock formation shaped like a giant human face has stood guard for centuries over one of Italy's emptying villages.
A drawing your grandmother kept in a drawer just became the most expensive Michelangelo sketch ever sold
An anonymous heir uploaded a phone photo to an auction house's online estimate tool. Eleven days later, Christie's sold the sheet for 27.2 million dollars.
An Eight-Year-Old Picasso Theft Ended Because a Landlord Noticed Dust
A Milwaukee landlord found a forgotten print in a vacated apartment. It was a Picasso etching stolen from a gallery in 2018, worth up to $50,000.
The Sahara Was Once a Shark's Hunting Ground, and the Teeth Prove It
Fossil hunters found teeth from seven shark species buried in Egypt's Western Desert, a place now defined by sand but once submerged beneath an ancient sea.
Ada Lovelace Wrote Software for a Machine That Was Never Built, and Was Right About What It Would Do
In 1843, Byron's daughter wrote the first computer program for a machine made of brass gears, a century before anyone built one.
A Cave Called 'Women' for Three Centuries Just Told Archaeologists Why
Deep inside a Valencian cave, 110 Latin inscriptions reveal a Roman goddess cult that women appear to have run themselves.
At Karahan Tepe, someone carved a man riding a leopard eleven thousand years before the wheel
A newly unearthed statue at a Turkish Stone Age site shows a human astride a leopard, a scene archaeologists say has no known parallel.
A Toad That Never Moved Just Rewrote the Climate History of La Brea
A tiny fossil pulled from the tar in 1929 turns out to be a new Ice Age species, and it proves La Brea was once a wetland.
Before Egypt Built Pyramids, Its Architects Were Already Solving Their Central Problem
Two 5,000-year-old tombs found near the Nile show builders tapering walls for stability centuries before Djoser's step pyramid existed.
A Peruvian geoglyph survived 1,500 years. It did not survive an eviction notice.
After authorities cleared illegal occupants from a pre-Hispanic site in Peru, the geoglyph itself was destroyed. The state arrived, then the heritage disappeared.