Here's A Bunch Of Cool Random Facts We Learned In October

Crows are petty and hold grudges, just like you.

At BuzzFeed, we travel to some weird parts of the internet for work, occasionally picking up fascinating tidbits as we go. Here are some cool things we learned in October that we can't stop talking about.

BBC

1. Crows are petty animals that can remember your face — and hold a grudge against you if you wronged them.

FOX

"As an Aries, I feel very connected to crows because I recently learned that not only can they recognize faces, but they also *have the capacity to hold grudges*. Researchers in Seattle abducted a murder of crows for five years (yes, a group of crows is called a murder), released them into the wild again, and after going _a year_ without seeing their abductors, when the crows were exposed to them again, they cackled, swooped, and dive-bombed them. Don’t say Alfred Hitchcock didn’t warn you."

—Tom Vellner

2. Dead bodies can get goosebumps.

giphy.com

"Dead bodies are pretty multitalented. They can fart, they can grow hair, hell, they can even orgasm. But if you thought the fun stops there, get this — the hair on corpses can literally stand on end once rigor mortis sets in. Rigor mortis is a stage after death that causes the muscles in a body to stiffen; it even affects hair erector muscles, like those found on the arms. So what happens when those muscles stiffen on a dead body? You guessed it, posthumous goosebumps. Eep!"

—Anjali Patel

3. The ~golden age~ of cowboys in the US only lasted for just 20 short years.

TriStar Pictures

"In pop culture, the cowboy is a Very Big Deal. Even as an Australian, I grew up watching cartoon cowboys (hello, Lucky Luke and Yosemite Sam) and as a teenager and adult, saw the obsession with cowboys and the Western genre continue to grow and evolve — the most recent example being Westworld. For this reason, I was understandably surprised to learn that real-life cowboys weren't actually around that long? The cowboy era was apparently only from around 1866-1886. For the impact they've had, I'd always imagined they'd been around for hundreds or, at the very least, 50 years. The more you know, I guess!"

—Gyan Yankovich

4. The Edinburgh Zoo has a daily penguin parade.

youtube.com

"I recently found out there's a daily penguin parade at the Edinburgh Zoo. Apparently sometime in the 1950s a zookeeper left a gate to the penguin exhibit open, and a bunch of the penguins just followed the zookeeper around. Visitors to the zoo that day loved seeing it so much that the zoo decided to make it a regular thing! Every day, visitors line the walkways while a bunch of penguins waddle around before heading back to their exhibit. The most delightful part is the note from the Edinburgh Zoo:

'Please Note: The penguin parade is run on an entirely voluntary basis. It is the penguins choice to take part, we do not encourage them with food. Unfortunately this does mean that occasionally the parade is cancelled if they do not wish to go out.'"

—Cates Holderness

5. A full day on Saturn is 10 Earth hours, but a year lasts more than 29 Earth years.

BBC

"Saturn spins on its axis quickly, giving it super short days, but it rotates around the sun really slowly, making its years long. Crazy!"

—Jacqueline Thomas

6. If someone got what was coming to them, you'd say they got their "just deserts," NOT "just desserts".

FOX

"Last month, I read Kory Stamper’s The Secret Life of Dictionaries (which is fantastic, BTW). It’s filled with tons of interesting tidbits about words, and I learned a little something new from one of the footnotes. Apparently, the phrase that I always thought was 'just desserts' (as in, “The guy who ‘ghosted’ on his ex got his just desserts,” meaning comeuppance) is actually 'just deserts.'

BUT! BUT! When you use it to mean comeuppance, “just deserts” isn’t pronounced like 'just an arid region'...IT’S STILL PRONOUNCED LIKE 'DESSERTS'!!!! Apparently, it’s pronounced like 'deserved' in this instance — which actually makes sense, because the phrase means that the person got what they deserved. The English language is wild."

—Rachel Wilkerson Miller

7. Poisonous frogs aren't naturally poisonous — their poison comes from their diet.

Velora / Getty Images

"I just learned that poison frogs don’t make their own poison! I always assumed their bodies were like tiny poison factories, but that’s actually not the case. Poison frogs get their poison from consuming mites and ants. Not only that, but National Geographic explained to me that they 'carry around a toxin 200 times more potent than morphine'.”

—Kayla Suazo

8. Continents shift at the same rate that fingernails grow.

BBC

"At 20 millimeters per year, it definitely sounds like Pangea broke up pretty slowly, for example — until you think about how often you have to clip your nails."

—Hannah Loewentheil

9. Young armadillos are called armadiglets.

Photocech / Getty Images

—April Rene Bingham, Facebook

10. And the Angostura Bitters label is too big for the bottle because men don't know how to communicate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

amazon.com

"That oversized label's been the source of angst for type-A people for decades, and it's all thanks to the Siegert brothers. Their father, Dr. Johann Siegert, invented the cocktail classic in 1824, and left the company to his two sons after he died in 1870. They decided that one of them would design a new bottle, and the other would design a new label...but they never discussed what size each needed to be. They slapped the large label on the small bottle, entered their product into a contest, and lost — but the distinct packaging drew so much attention that they stuck with it."

—Terri Pous

Tell us what strange and cool things you learned this month!

Paramount Pictures