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In this 1485 manuscript, people live inside giant snail shells

By: Popkin
11 August 2026 at 14:45
giant snail shells — Robert Testard, Traponee (f. 60v) from Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle, ca. 1485, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 22971 / public domain (via The Public Domain Review)

A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.
Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'AngoulΓͺme, a count in southwestern France, as one of 56 miniatures in Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle.Β  β€” Read the rest

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A Versailles painter drew people with the faces of animals

By: Popkin
11 August 2026 at 14:30
Charles le Brun β€” Charles le Brun, the relation of the human face to that of the eagle, Wellcome Collection / CC BY 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Charles le Brun (1619–90) drew a set of human heads that match the heads of animals: an ox, a fox, an eagle, a raven, a parrot, and a pig. Louis XIV put him in charge of the decoration of Versailles in 1669, and the palace pictures needed crowds of figures a viewer could tell apart at a glance. β€” Read the rest

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A Siamese cat co-authored a physics paper in 1975

By: Popkin
11 August 2026 at 14:15
F. D. C. Willard β€” A Siamese cat, photo by Karin Langner-Bahmann / CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

F. D. C. Willard was a Siamese cat named Chester, who lived from 1968 to 1982. In 1975, his owner, the physicist Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University, wrote a paper on low-temperature physics and used the word "we" throughout, according to Wikipedia. β€” Read the rest

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