Fun Facts: Ten More Things That Sound Made Up (But Aren’t)

ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER
Issue #037   ·   Useless But Fascinating   ·   July 2026

Fun Facts: Ten More Things That Sound Made Up (But Aren’t)

A tailor who jumped off the Eiffel Tower. A moon where it rains petrol. A family photo sitting in the lunar dust. Ten more true things that have absolutely no business being true — checked, sourced, and ready for your next conversation.

You seemed to enjoy the last batch, so here’s another ten. Same rules as before: every one is true, every one’s been checked, and every one is perfect for derailing an otherwise sensible dinner. Off we go.

1. Mount Everest isn’t the tallest mountain on Earth

Everest is the highest — the bit that pokes furthest above sea level. But tallest, measured base to summit? That’s Mauna Kea, the Hawaiian volcano, which runs to about 10km top to bottom. The snag is that most of it is underwater, so only the top four kilometres or so stick out as an island. Everest wins on a technicality and has been dining out on it ever since.

2. In 1912, a man jumped off the Eiffel Tower to test his home-made parachute

Franz Reichelt was a tailor with a dream: a wearable parachute suit for pilots. He tested it on dummies, got wildly overconfident, and then — despite everyone present begging him not to — put it on and stepped off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower. It did not deploy. There’s newsreel footage of the whole thing, which we’d gently suggest you don’t go hunting for. A cautionary tale about believing your own hype.

3. We’ve explored less than 0.001% of the ocean floor

We have better maps of the Moon and Mars than we do of our own seabed. Out of some 335 million square kilometres of ocean floor, we’ve properly laid eyes on a patch roughly the size of Rhode Island. Everything else down there — most of the surface of our own planet, really — is still essentially a rumour.

4. Male anglerfish don’t mate — they melt into their partners

Life is bleak in the deep sea, so the tiny male anglerfish has given up on independence entirely. When he finds a female — often many times his size — he bites on and simply fuses, his body dissolving into hers until he’s little more than a permanent sac of sperm she can draw on whenever she likes. Romance is dead. Quite literally, in his case.

5. It rains methane on one of Saturn’s moons

Titan is the only place besides Earth we know of with proper weather — clouds, rain, rivers, lakes, the works. The catch is that it’s all methane. It’s far too cold there for liquid water, so instead there are seas of the stuff we use to fire up a barbecue, sitting quietly beneath a hazy orange sky.

6. Beavers don’t live in dams

Common misconception. The dam is just civil engineering — it floods the area to make a nice deep pond. The beavers themselves live in a separate structure called a lodge, built behind the dam, with underwater entrances so nothing unpleasant can wander in uninvited. They don’t live in the wall. They built the wall to protect the house. Frankly, more sensible than most of us.

7. Medieval warhorses were roughly pony-sized

Forget the enormous armoured beasts from the films. When researchers actually measured the surviving bones, the mighty medieval warhorse turned out to be no bigger than a modern pony — often under 1.5 metres at the shoulder. On the plus side, if you got knocked off in the heat of battle, you didn’t have far to climb back up.

8. There’s a family photo sitting on the Moon

When Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke walked on the Moon in 1972, he left behind a snapshot of himself, his wife and his two sons, wrapped in plastic, on the grey dust. No wind, no rain, nothing up there to disturb it — so as far as anyone knows it’s still lying there, a little family portrait a quarter of a million miles from home. The Sun has almost certainly bleached it blank by now, but it’s the thought that counts.

9. A single LEGO brick can take the weight of 375,000 more

Someone actually tested this, because of course they did. An ordinary little LEGO brick can withstand roughly 375,000 other bricks stacked on top before it finally gives — which works out to a theoretical LEGO tower about three and a half kilometres tall. The only real reason we don’t build houses out of them is cost. That, and the sheer agony of standing on one.

10. You’ll spend about three and a half years of your life blinking

You blink somewhere around 11,500 times a day without ever deciding to. Add it all up over a lifetime and you’re looking at roughly three and a half years spent with your eyes shut — a decent chunk of your existence you will never actually see. You did several while reading this sentence. There goes another.

SOURCES

BBC Science Focus — “151 random fun facts that will blow your mind” (the jumping-off point for this issue’s round-up).

Mauna Kea vs Everest — base-to-peak height comparison (US Geological Survey / NOAA).

Franz Reichelt — the 1912 Eiffel Tower parachute-suit jump (contemporary Paris press; British Pathé newsreel record).

Ocean-floor mapping — Seabed 2030 / NOAA estimates of the proportion of seafloor directly surveyed.

Anglerfish sexual parasitism — deep-sea ceratioid biology (Pietsch, “Oceanic Anglerfishes”).

Titan’s methane cycle — NASA/ESA Cassini–Huygens mission findings.

Beaver lodges and dams — beaver ecology (Wildlife Trusts / mammal-society sources).

Medieval warhorse size — University of Exeter “Warhorse” project (2022).

Apollo 16 family photo — NASA lunar-surface record; astronaut Charles Duke.

LEGO brick compression — Open University test for BBC (2012): ~375,000 bricks before failure.

Blink time-of-life and bat vision — BBC Science Focus explainers.

Challenger Deep depth; lunar recession (~3.8cm/yr, lunar laser ranging); age of the Earth (radiometric dating); estimated cost of the body’s raw ingredients — BBC Science Focus and standard reference sources.

ONE MORE THING

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