Far From Home

of his book The Go Between. An instantly iconic simile, it describes how alien even our own history looks to ourselves. With enough time, history just becomes archaeology. But if human history is a foreign country, natural history is like another planet. Cleopatra live closer in history to the invention of the iPhone than the construction of the Great Pyramids. Your lifespan is closer to your great great grandparents than a Tyrannosaurus

rex was to a Stegosaurus. And after the passage of so much time, it requires an immense act of imagination to fill the gaps left by time. When you enter a natural history museum, for example, one of the first sites you're likely to see is a fully assembled dinosaur skeleton. They're impressive, eye catching, and give a sense of immediacy and scale to the past that might otherwise elude us.

We can easily imagine what it would be like to be in that thing's presence, even if our species never overlapped. But what we don't often think about is all the trial and error that it took to assemble the skeleton properly. Some skeletons are found intact, but others require mixing and matching with bones from other sites or replicas made to replace missing or damaged fossils. And if multiple fossils are found the same place, the possibility for mixing creatures up

becomes very present. And one of my favorite examples of this happening took place in central Germany. Sometime in the seventeenth century, workmen who were mining near the town of Magdeburg unearthed the Strange Cave. In this cave, they found strange bones, bones that looked nothing like any animal they had ever seen. Word quickly spread throughout the town, and eventually the mayor Otto von Gurika studied the bones himself.

Gurica was initially quite worried that the workmen had damaged the bones by handling them improperly, but as worries were soon eclipsed by his own excitement at the discovery. He wrote an article about this amazing find in the local newspaper, and shortly thereafter they set about reconstructing this strange, strange beast. We have to remember that the field of paleontology just

didn't exist back then. There was no ruling authority for Gurka to report to for this kind of esoteric discovery, so instead Gurika brought the bone bones to the town's abbess, who helped lead a reconstruction of the creature. As they tested which bones fit with which they were met with another miraculous revelation. This creature had a long horn protruding from its skull, sharp as a knight's lance, and for many years, local legend had contended that there were unicorns

in these lands. In fact, there was a small cottage industry among the villagers that involved selling medicine made out of unicorn bones, but this was the first full skeleton assembled of such a creature. It would become a prized possession of the town, famed in local legend. Later in the seventeenth century, a German polymath named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz drew a version of the creature's skeleton, using Gerica's description

as his primary basis. The resulting depiction of the so called Magdeburg unicorn looked strange, a strong jawed skull with two massive forelegs framing ribs, and a spinal column that tapered off with the tail. The bipedal creature didn't really look like a horse, like one assumes in most unicorn legends, but more like a narwhal with an enormous head and two over developed front legs. Although the bones themselves would be lost over the centuries, the creature passed into legend

thanks to the drawings that leaven it's maid. Of course, it would become obvious that Gurica, the Abbess and the people of Magdeburg had not discovered a unicorn. They'd made a haphazard assembly of different prehistoric animal fossils. The so called unicorn is mostly made up of fossilized wooly rhinoceros, a creature whose existence was not known at the time. To the modern eye, it looks downright outrageous, a goofy

bipedal creature with proportions out of a cartoon. And while we don't know for certain how seriously this discovery was taken by the scientific community of its era, we do know that the Magdeburg unicorn has a special place in the annals of science. It's gone down in history as the worst fossil recon instruction of all time. It was August of nineteen eighty five, and New York City was in the grip of its annual late summer heat wave.

In downtown Manhattan, two young boys strolled through the busy sidewalks, gaping at the towering skyscrapers an endless stream of yellow cabs. They were ten year old Keith Burne and thirteen year old Noel Murray, and this was their first time in the Big Apple. They were here without their parents or permission, and so far they were loving every second of it. The boys had been dreading the rapid approaching school year and had decided to squeeze in one last summer adventure.

So two nights before they'd met up just before dinnertime. Ignoring Keith's mother's insistence that they not go too far, Keith and Nol headed straight for the local train station, where they snuck under a turnstile and hopped aboard a random train car. They didn't have a plan or a destination in mind, but they kept changing transportation at random until they wound up in New York. The city was like anything they had ever experienced, and they spent hours

soaking in the sights and sounds. They kept their hunger at bay by fishing coins from public fountains and using the money to buy hot dogs and chips. The boys were just discussing their next move when a shadow fell over them. They looked up into the stony face of one of New York's finest The cops said that his name was Officer White and asked the boys where their

parents were. Nol slipped on a confident, easygoing smile and gestured back down the sidewalk, as if to say that she was just behind them and would catch up at any minute. This trick had served the boys well throughout their adventure, getting them passed more than a few ticket agents, but Officer White did not buy it. He pressed them for answers, and eventually Keith stammered that they were on their way to meet their parents in the center of town.

Officer White frowned, and then he reached for his radio, and minutes later the boys were seated in the back of Officer White's police car, racing through the busy New York traffic. Despite finding themselves in police custody, Keith and Knowle were in high spirits. They marveled at the cruiser's controls and pestered Officer White to turn on his sirens and his megaphone. And while they knew that their trip was rapidly coming to a close, they didn't mind too much.

This was shaping up to be a better adventure than they could have ever hoped for. When they got to the precinct, Officer White and his sergeant put the boys in a holding room. After feeding them hamburgers and soda and letting Noel play with an unloaded pistol. They begged the boys to say where they were from, and finally Keith and Knowle agreed that it was time to come clean first. Though Noel asked how Officer White knew that they were runaways, Officer White laughed and said that he

suspected something was up. When Noel mentioned meeting their parents at the center of town. A local might say that they were meeting a friend in Midtown or maybe even Times Square, but no New Yorker would ever say the center of town. However, the real giveaway was their thick accent.

The boys laughed at the comment and finally told Officer White the whole story about their journey, how they had stowed aboard several trains, a ferry, and finally a seven forty seven, all without ever paying for a single ticket. When he heard the tale, Officer White was sure that they were pulling his leg yet again, but he made

some calls and discovered that it was all true. He managed to get a hold of their parents, as well as the airline they had conned, which responded by putting Keith and Nol up in a five star hotel for the night. To keep them busy and out of trouble. Officer White's sergeant took them sightseeing and bought them all the souvenirs they could carry. A few days and a plane ride later, the adventure was finally over. Keith and Nol were safe and sound back home in Dublin, Ireland.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts. Or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.