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The morgue
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Two Jurassic fossils from Wyoming reveal a bizarrely broad belemnite rostrum and extend the known history of an ancient cephalopod lineage. Paleontology would like everyone to stop calling it a squid butt. We respectfully decline.
Mendeleev predicts missing members of the periodic table decades before atomic structure is understood. Future discoveries of gallium, scandium, and germanium provide an inconvenient amount of evidence.
Meteorologists humanize hurricanes, and wives, girlfriends, and weather systems become entangled in naming history. Public discovers severe weather is more memorable when it sounds like a neighbor.
Researchers accuse 160 million years of convergent evolution of false advertising. Oversized skull and slender snout point to a fast-snapping predator with no living mammalian counterpart.
Diabetes diagnosis before modern labs was considerably more hands-on than advertised. Before glucose meters and lab strips, sweetness was diagnostically useful information. And that required taste testing.
One of the founders of modern hygiene became so convinced that cholera required the right combination of microbe, environment, and host conditions that he swallowed the organism himself to demonstrate that the bacterium alone wasn't sufficient.
Neglected bacterial cultures become an unexpected breeding ground for one of medicine’s most important discoveries. Click through for the accidental discovery that changed modern medicine.