My Dumb Little Brain Is Totally And Completely Blown After Seeing These 50 Absolutely Fascinating Pictures For The First Time Last Month

    Just truly incredible stuff.

    1. Before he died, Abraham Lincoln had a "life mask" made of his face. This is what it looked like:

    Close-up of Lincoln's craggly face and sunken eyes

    2. This is what a fingerprint from a person born without fingerprints looks like:

    Close-up of a fingerprint without ridges

    3. Recognize these big ol' rocks? This is Mount Rushmore before the presidential heads were carved into it:

    Close-up of Mount Rushmore sans faces

    4. This is what the "American Selection" in an Irish grocery store looks like:

    Selection includes Cheerios, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, steak and other sauces, beef jerky, Pop-Tarts, toaster pastries, Cheese Whiz. Marshmallow Fluff, Nerds, Reese's, Hershey's, Mike & Ike, and other candies, pancake mix, and LaCroix seltzers

    5. This is what it looks like when a whole bunch of horses fly on a plane:

    Horses in individual crates on a plane

    6. Alaska is big. REALLY big:

    A map showing the number of times other states fit into Alaska (Iowa: 12x; Texas: 2x, Delaware: 264x)

    7. And Australia...Australia is also very, very big:

    Map showing European, South American, Asian, and African countries (plus New Zealand and some US states) that fit into Australia

    8. This is what a polar bear's paw print looks like compared with a human handprint:

    A polar bear paw print next to a much, much smaller handprint in the snow

    9. This is how an offshore oil platform is transported to the location where it will be installed:

    It's horizontal and being pulled on a ship by several tugboats

    10. Before it found its home in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty's head was on display at the 1878 Paris World's Fair:

    The very large head on display on a platform at the fair

    11. And here's what Lady Liberty looked like while she was being packed up to be shipped to the US:

    The statue with scaffolding up to her shoulders

    12. This is what a living sand dollar looks like compared with a dead one:

    A large, brown, flat circular sea urchin and a smaller, white one with small slits

    13. This is what a peeled lemon looks like:

    Very pale slices of fruit on a plate

    14. The doors on the presidential limousine are ridiculously thick:

    A Secret Service agent opening a car door for President Joe Biden

    15. Way out on the edge of the galaxy is this big ol' hunk of rock called Ultima Thule, Arrokoth, or (486958) 2014 MU69 — the farthest thing from Earth humanity has ever "explored up close":

    A fuzzy, black-and-white image of two spherical objects

    16. This is what the Roman Empire at its greatest extent looks like inside North America:

    It extends across the coasts with huge gaps above and within (the boot of Italy falls near Kansas)

    17. Baby Legos exist. BABY LEGOS EXIST!

    A tiny Lego figure on a finger

    18. Traffic lights are absolutely huge:

    A traffic light on the ground next to a man about the same height

    19. This right here is Vincent van Gogh's painting palette:

    Splotches of color on a palette

    20. This is what a map of the United States looked like in 1783:

    A map of "State Claims to Western Lands, 1783–1802," showing the eastern part of the US, "British Possessions" where Canada is now, Massachusetts territory where Maine is now, and Virginia territory extending up to the Great Lakes

    21. This is what the skull of the largest ape to ever roam the Earth, the Gigantopithecus, looks like compared with our tiny little human head:

    A huge skull next to a human skull that barely rises above the skull's teeth

    22. This is what a $1,000 bill looks like:

    A $1,000 bill with the usual elements, plus Grover Cleveland in the middle

    23. Cough medicine used to have a very special ingredient in 1919:

    Arrow pointing to heroin on the label of a very old bottle: "Cough Persistent With Heroin": Dose is "one tablet every three hours for dry hard cough with scanty expectoration"

    24. This is what the inside of a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine looks like:

    A soda fountain with lots of slots showing brands of various beverages

    25. There are pants that shine INCREDIBLY bright when hit with light:

    A man in shadows wearing luminous pants

    26. American Froot Loops and Froot Loops from other countries are totally different colors:

    The non-US box's Loops are less pastel and varied (light yellow and shades of red and purple) than the US label (with green, blue, orange, purple, yellow, and red)

    27. The inside of a pine cone makes me somewhat uncomfortable:

    What look like hollow bones or even eyes inside the pine cone

    28. While we're at it, this is what the inside of a wasp's nest looks like:

    Inside of a wasp nest showing what looks like rows of honeycomb

    29. There's a street named "Bucket of Blood Street" in Arizona:

    The street sign (with a "Navajo" cross street) above a stop sign

    30. This is what the Eiffel Tower looked like while it was being built:

    Black-and-white image of scaffolding at the base of the tower

    31. This is a proposed warning to be placed at a nuclear dumping ground to warn future generations of the danger of its contents:

    "This place is not a place of honour / No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here / Nothing valued is here / What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us / This message is a warning about danger"

    32. This man, Paul Karason, had his skin turn permanently blue after spending years ingesting colloidal silver:

    Close-up of a bespectacled man with a thick beard and mustache and bluish skin

    33. This is the Speyer wine bottle, the oldest known bottle of wine on Earth:

    A wine bottle containing a murky, motley liquid

    34. This is the personal water closet of the last German emperor, Wilhelm II:

    What looks like an armoire with a toilet and tank inside

    35. Stink bug eggs are little, tiny smiley faces:

    What look like tiny pearls with little dots on them in the palm of a hand

    36. This is the aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, a deadly event that claimed the lives of 21 people in Boston after a container holding over 2 million gallons of molasses burst, sending a wave of molasses several feet high through the city streets:

    A black-and-white image of a pier with lots of liquid on the ground

    37. Coconuts, my friend...coconuts can be very, very tiny:

    A piece of a tiny coconut between a thumb and forefinger

    38. Bottles of soda look adorable before they get blown up with compressed air:

    Small tubes in the palm of a hand

    39. Marisa Tomei's name can do amazing things:

    "Marisa Tomei" as an anagram for "It's-a me, Mario"

    40. South Korea and Ireland are almost the same size, although South Korea has 10 times Ireland's population:

    Side-by-side of South Korea and Ireland (with Northern Ireland)

    41. This is how big a wisdom tooth is compared with a baby tooth:

    A wisdom tooth with long roots and a tiny tooth in the palm of a hand

    42. This is what the leg of the largest dinosaur to ever exist, the Argentinosaurus, looks like compared with a human:

    A woman standing next to the bones of a dinosaur leg in a museum and only reaching the top of the foot

    43. A medium shirt in North America is an extra large in Japan:

    Label of a medium Champion shirt showing it's M/M in Canada, M in Mexico, and XL in Japan

    44. This is the pistol Gavrilo Princip used to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and set off World War I:

    A gun behind glass on a pedestal

    And this is the car Franz Ferdinand was driving in:

    A vintage car with no convertible top

    45. This is what an early design for an electric hair dryer looked like:

    A seated woman underneath a metallic head covering that looks like armor, with metallic cables emerging from it and extending toward the ceiling or behind her

    46. This is what an Italian public school lunch looks like:

    A plate with a large piece of meat and potatoes, with Brussels sprouts, pasta, and a roll on the side

    47. This is what Robert Wadlow, the tallest man who ever lived, looked like when he was 10 years old:

    He's actually taller than his father; both of them are dressed in suits and ties

    And here's Wadlow at his tallest, coming in at 8 feet 11 inches:

    He's wearing a suit and standing in front of a car next to two smiling women, one of whom comes to his hip and another to his waist

    48. This is a list of every cause of death that occurred during a week in London in 1665:

    The "deaths and casualties" include "feaver," "griping in the guts," "jaundies," "vomiting," "wormes," "suddenly," "strangury," "scurvy," sore legge," "sciatica," rupture," "rickets," "quinine," "lethargy," "plague," "aged," and "stopping of the stomach"

    49. This is what a coca plant looks like:

    Green shrubbery with the label "Cocaine plant / Erythroxylum coca / Erythroxylaceae / Ecuador, South America"

    50. And finally, apparently, back in the day, peanut sellers would, well, wear suits with a ton of peanuts sewn into them:

    Two people sitting in a horse-drawn carriage wearing suits and caps completely covered with peanuts