Lost World

did not coexist. It was a chronological impossibility. And yet there's a belief that species from both sides may have crossed paths at some point in history. Valdemar juls Rud certainly believed that. He was a hardware store owner from Germany. In the sum of nineteen forty four, while on horseback near the Mexican city of Akambaro, he noticed something sticking out of the ground in a dried up river bed. Actually, he noticed many things, small figurines made of clay that

looked like animals of some kind. Several of them had rows of sharp teeth, and some were depicted in battle with humanoid figures, while others had the human figures. Writing atop their backs. He hired a local farmer to help him dig around the area. Maybe there were more of these clay creations to be found. Soon it was clear that the two men had gotten much more than they had bargained for. They pulled over thirty thousand clay figurines

out of the dirt. The human shaped ones were of particular interest because they seemed to represent cultures from all over the world, including ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, people not known to have ever set foot in Mexico. Thinking that he had stumbled upon an archaeological gold mine, Joel's Rudd collected all of the figurines he had found and stored

them in his home. Were Words spread of the strange pieces, and eventually people came to find out for themselves whether they were truly an ancient plaything or just discarded modern art projects. Charles de Pesso, an archaeologist working for a cultural preservation organization in Arizona, immediately dismissed the Akambaro figurines as fake. They showed nowhere no dirt in their crevices. They couldn't have been more than a few years old, he said. Most likely they were made by the local

farmers as part of an elaborate hoax. Others weren't so skeptical, though. In ninety one, Los Angeles Times reporter Lowell Harmer traveled to Joels Rad's home in Mexico to see them for himself, and he was convinced of their authenticity. His article about the figurines led to more stories from other papers, all of which fueled further exploration of the area. Mexico sent for archaeologists to the site to see if there were other figurines that hadn't yet been found. There definitely were,

but there was more as well. The bones of two dinosaurs were also discovered a little deeper underground. After the government shut down the site from further digging, rumors about what had been found there only grew larger. Another archaeologist, Charles Hapgood, wasn't convinced with Dipesso's claim that farmers had made the roughly thirty two thousand figurines on their own. For one, they had no reference for what a dinosaur

was supposed to look like. The farmers were poor and uneducated to think that they'd sit around sculpting lizards out of clay, rather than tending to their farms didn't make any sense. Hapgood's colleague, Earl Gardner, apparently agreed. He sent a few of the figurines to a lab for radio carbon dating, which placed their age at roughly thirty five hundred to sixty years old. Further tests would yield a

more accurate time period of around BC. Other tests have been conducted over the years to Scientists attempted to run thermo luminescent dating on a few dozen figurines, but the results were in conclusive. Of and the fact that no one has been able to accurately chart their origins hasn't helped skeptics or believers prove the validity of the figurines.

Over the years, debate has raged as to whether the Acambaro figurines or remnants of a time when man and dinosaur or something like them coexisted, or perhaps they were someone's idea of a historical prank. We may never know the truth about where the figurines came from, but it sure is a curious vision of the past, isn't it. However improbable it might be, it's fun to imagine a time when humans might have done something typically only seen

in Hollywood blockbusters. Riding a top ferocious dinosaurs like a common horse, and if they did, it would be easy to see the Akambaro figurines as something very familiar to our modern minds action figures. World War Two ripped Europe apart, but out of it came countless innovations we still used today. Penicillan, although discovered years earlier, was first put to use on

the battlefield to stave off infection in wounded soldiers. British radio experts Robert rats and Watts and Arnold Wilkins helped introduce the world to radar by reflecting radio waves off a bomber as a way of detecting enemy aircraft. In fact, the British were behind quite a few wartime technologies, all developed to give the Allies and edge in the field. However,

as one side was evolving, so was the other. German U boats had come into their own during World War One, but the Treaty of Versailles, signed in nineteen nineteen forbade Germany from building new subs again. Of course, the Germans weren't going to let something as small as a global declaration of peace stopped them. Under the guise of research, they continued developing U boats until their undersea fleet was

the large just in the Second World War. The subs could travel long distances in frigid temperatures, far from shore and beyond the reach of most land based planes. That made finding and stopping them almost impossible until an English inventor came up with an idea for a new kind of vessel. He sent his proposal for a modified aircraft

carrier to Lewis Mountbatton, a British Royal Naval officer. It would be a stealth craft designed to withstand the freezing temperatures of the mid Atlantic, able to transport fighter planes to areas where U boats were known to occupy. They called it Project Tobacic, and the first step was to construct a scale model of this carrier at Canada's Jasper

National Park. The inventor, Jeffrey Pike, wanted to make sure it would be able to withstand artillery fire from the Germans, so he got to work on a sixty ft long prototype fitted with a one horsepower engine. He hired a team of people to constructed at Patricia Lake in Alberta, not telling them exactly what it was they were building. Unfortunately, they had gotten a late start. It was already April

and the weather was heating up. Soon there would be no way to verify the ship's resilience against the harshness of the icy mid Atlantic, But rather than give up and wait until the next year, the British look to the Americans to assist in their efforts. Due to a previous issue while working with the United States on a separate initiative, Jeffrey Pike was cut out of Project Tobaccic,

absent their fearless leader. Engineers from both countries worked around the clock for months as ambitions around the aircraft carrier grew. It had to be bigger, they said. It had to travel for longer distances too. Its hull had to be over forty thick to withstand towering ocean waves and enemy torpedoes,

and it would carry more than fighter planes. Bombers were added to the list, which meant its runway needed to be over two thousand feet long, and it also had to turn on a dime, so a one foot high rudder needed to be included. Unfortunately, no one had ever installed or controlled one that large before. They built three different models based on Pike's original design, but none of them managed to incorporate every requirement into a single one.

Initial tests were successful, though the vessel moved much slower than the British had hoped. When it was all said and done, Winston Churchill and mount Batton gave the engineers the green light to build and launch a full size version as soon as possible, and they would have if they had had enough time. The researchers had been so scared of Churchill that they didn't have the heart to tell him that one ship would cost over seventy million dollars and take almost a year to build. Oh and

it probably would have melted in the end. You see. Given the steel shortages due to the war effort, Pike and his scientists had to come up with another method for building an aircraft carrier capable of floating undetected into the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. The clear choice,

quite literally was ice. Had Project Tobacic been complete did it would have been a six hundred foot long ship weighing two million tons and made entirely of ice, two hundred eighty thousand blocks of it to be exact well in ice based compound. At least. The first prototype built was originally made a solid ice, but it was too weak to withstand rough weather or gunfire. That's when Pike came up with a new kind of material he called

Pike Creet. It was a mixture of ice and wood pulp that was stronger, more buoyant, and took longer to melt than regular ice. During one demonstration at a top secret conference in nineteen forty three, Lord Mount Benton set up a block of Pike Creek beside a block of ice. His audience Winston Churchill, Franklin, Delano Roosevelt, and several other high ranking military officials. He then unholstered his service pistol and fired a shot at the pure ice block, breaking

it into a million small pieces. Then he fired a shot at the Pike Creet, which deflected the bullet, sending it whizzing past US Admiral Ernest King's leg. He wasn't hurt, but his pants got a quick lesson in the strength of Pike's new building material Sadly, Project Tobacco never made it past the prototype phase. Aside from the massive construction costs, newer technologies had arrived, which allowed British planes to fly farther distances for longer, canceling the need for a frozen

floating runway. Baton eventually exited the project, leaving it um dead in the water. And there you go, A cool idea to help win the war that never really took off in the end. Curious, isn't it. 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. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, eas and television show and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah h