Mental Floss

NATURE





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The Mola mola—which looks like a prehistoric shark that lost a tail in an epic battle—might be the world's weirdest fish. Here are just a few reasons it's the most fascinating marine creature around.

Shaunacy Ferro




Space Camp Facebook

When a presidential candidate says adults in America are suffering from a "fun deficit," you know it's time to take the issue seriously. The following 20 camps are alternative ways to spend your allotted vacation time.

Sonia Weiser
Christina Radcliffe/iStock via Getty Images

With their incredibly strong teeth for cutting down trees and adaptions for semi-aquatic living, beavers are nature's wetlands engineers.

Hannah Keyser




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From burrowing in the soil to popping baby frogs out of their backs, the frogs in this list have some very strange habits.

Erin McCarthy


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They look cute and cuddly, but koalas are straight-up miracles of evolution. Here are a few surprising things you might not have known about koalas.

Molly Oldfield


Johann Seligmann, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

Just over a century ago, the world’s last passenger pigeon died at Ohio’s Cincinnati Zoo on September 1. The extinction set off a worldwide bird conservation movement.

Erin McCarthy
Olivier Testa

In 2010, a group of scientists went on an expedition into the Abanda caves in the rainforest of Gabon. Among the many creatures they found there—bats, snakes, moths, spiders, crickets, scorpions and other insects and arachnids—there was a surprise: An ora

Matt Soniak
We live among ancient trees that are thousands of years old.

The oldest known trees are thousands of years old. The ancient plants have witnessed the rise and fall of multiple civilizations.

Haley Sweetland Edwards




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There’s only one thing in this world shaped like an egg. Not exactly spherical, not exactly an oval, it’s kind of hard to describe what an egg looks like. “Asymmetric tapered oval”? Sure, why not.

DeAnna Kerley


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


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When I saw the Caribbean Sea in person for the first time, my eyes metaphorically popped out of my head. As a kid who grew up in South Jersey, I was used to the dirty, almost brown, kinda-sorta blue color of the coastal Atlantic Ocean. But this was differ

Will McGough
Australian Museum

In 2008, an international team of scientists was trudging through the forests of Vietnam’s Bidoup-Nui Ba National Park when they found a frog they didn’t recognize. Actually, no one recognized it, at least not formally. It was new to science and the speci

Matt Soniak
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In the wild, giant panda mating occurs just as nature specials would have you believe. There’s intense competition for each female, and the dominant male will mate with her several times to ensure success. And that strategy works: Wild female pandas gener

Erin McCarthy