Mental Floss

MYTHS









Release the kraken!

There once was a time when uttering the name Kraken sent chills down a mariner’s spine. The legendary beast was known for dragging whole ships down into the watery depths of Davy Jones’s Locker. Today we see the monster largely as fiction, but that doesn’

Editorial Staff

John Green lifts the veil on some of antiquity's greatest—and most mysterious—civilizations.

Alvin Ward








MWCPhoto/iStock via Getty Images

They've been spotted all over the Himalaya, yet no one has ever captured living proof of a yeti. Here are a few fascinating facts about this furry, mountain-dwelling cryptid.

Mark Mancini
ThinkStock

Sharks are mysterious creatures. Even the origins of the word "shark" are unknown, though it might come from the Mayan word xok. Maybe that's what makes these 400 million year old denizens of the deep so captivating—and why they sometimes fill us with dre

Sean Hutchinson


Who needs nature when you have Paul Bunyan?

Tall tales don't get much taller than America's most beloved lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. Here are 11 natural wonders he's said to have constructed.

Mark Mancini




Wikimedia Commons

One hundred and one years ago yesterday, the Titanic set sail for America. Although the ship never made it across the Atlantic, it’s an event that has been talked about, studied and made into a major motion picture. In James Cameron’s 1997 film of the sam

Bryan Dugan


Getty Images

The holidays are here again. That means family, and family means listening to insane, ill-informed debates over every subject imaginable. But just because your relatives are old and probably a little crazy doesn’t mean everything they say is nonsense. Whe

M Asher Cantrell
Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0

The legendary monsters series continues with some scary stories from Africa. There are so many nations and discrete communities in Africa that the problem here was not finding the legendary stories, but whittling down the list to a manageable number.1.

Miss Cellania

You'd think that there are enough scary animals in Australia that monstrous legends wouldn't be necessary. Apparently the deadly creatures that terrorize people on a regular basis aren't scary enough. The continent also includes New Zealand, and I slid a

Miss Cellania