To save the species, Romeo and Juliet need to make tadpoles.

Researchers in Bolivia recently, and to much fanfare, found a potential mate for the world’s loneliest frog, whom they called Romeo, thought to have been the last of his species. While the search is over, they now need to make sure that the match leads to viable tadpoles to help save the Sehuencas water frog from extinction.

Romeo is a fully aquatic frog (Telmatobius yuracare) native to the cloud forests of Bolivia, and for the last decade or so he has shared an aquarium at the K’yara Center for the Research and Conservation of Threatened Amphibians in Cochabamba with two cousin species, but never one of his own kind. When the other frogs sang their mating calls, Romeo would call out, too, suggesting he would be ready to reproduce if a partner was ever found. There are also pads on his front feet, called nuptial pads, that have turned black, signaling reproductive readiness. Herpetologist Teresa Camacho Badani and her team are hopeful this means that Romeo will get down to the business of making more frogs—once he meets Juliet.

For now, Juliet is in another tank, under quarantine with four other recently discovered Sehuencas (two males and one more female) until it’s certain they are free of chytridiomycosis, chytrid for short, a deadly fungal disease that has been decimating frog populations worldwide. When the new frogs are clear, they will be moved, with Romeo, to a shipping container that has been retrofitted into a rescue habitat. There, scientists have replicated the temperature and water current fluctuations of the frogs’ native cloud forest. Camacho and her team believe that reproduction happens once a year for Sehuencas, at the end of a rainy season, some time in February or March. They hope to have the frogs together by then.

Romeo was discovered in 2008 by ecologist Oliver Quinteros Muñoz in Bolivia’s cloud forests, or yungas. Although on the decline, Sehuencas populations seemed okay at the time, though chytrid, the introduction of predatory trout, and habitat loss loomed. When Romeo was brought to the K’yara Center, no one imagined it would be so challenging to find him a potential mate. But ensuing expeditions failed to turn up more, and things began to look dire.

Sehuencas water frogs generally live about 15 years, so by 2018 Romeo’s biological clock—and the clock of his entire species—was ticking loudly. Global Wildlife Conservation teamed up with K’yara Center researchers to help fund ecological expeditions to search for Romeo’s Juliet (she had a name before she was even found) and to bring global attention to the species.

After intensively vetting areas where Sehuencas were most likely to be found, with permission from local communities, researchers spent days spent slogging through streams and turning over stones. On December 7, 2018, Camacho’s team finally found the first Sehuencas water frog that had been seen in the wild in ten years—a male. The following day, Camacho discovered Juliet by a waterfall.

The project has garnered a lot of attention because of the outreach the Global Wildlife Fund conducted with Camacho and her team at the K’yara Center. It started on Valentine’s Day 2018, when amphibian bachelor Romeo was first introduced to the world via a Match.com profile, and then a Twitter feed. Camacho says the profile and feed capture the frog’s character quite accurately—he is shy, lonely, and enjoys swimming.

Working with animals, “You realize that they all do have their individual personalities and you can create emotional bonds,” says Christopher Jordan, Global Wildlife Conservation's Central America and tropical Andes coordinator, who has worked closely with Camacho and her team to create a future for the Sehuencas. “Scientists are trained not to communicate about those bonds, but we all feel them.”

Take Camacho. Though she has worked with Romeo for years, she still gets a warm feeling when she reads the Twitter feed: “It feels like he’s talking to me, he really loves me.”

Jordan and Camacho both acknowledge that the emotional bond is likely one-sided, and far less important than whatever biological bond they hope he’ll form with Juliet. Ultimately, after careful breeding, the hope is that Romeo, his soon-to-be companions, and their descendants will be reintroduced to the wild, so researchers don’t want them to get too comfortable with human companionship, and that means keeping them isolated.

Although Romeo and Juliet have become overnight internet celebrities, the paparazzi has been limited to two photographers: Robin Moore of Global Wildlife Conservation, and more recently National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, who shot both frogs for Photo Ark, an effort to document every captive species on Earth in danger of extinction.

“When Joel took out Juliet, most people in the museum had never even seen her,” says Camacho.

Now the focus is on making conditions as comfortable as possible for the pair’s first date. Eggs were developing visibly in the female frogs that were just captured in the field, but hope must be tempered with caution.

“Just because they have eggs doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily reproduce. Sometimes if the conditions aren’t right the females might reabsorb the eggs,” Camacho says, and it would be back to the drawing board for another year.

Mongolanthropus was one of us.

It’s hard to be a hominin fossil. More than 30,000 years later, people are still arguing over what, exactly, you represent.

Take Mongolanthropus. Research published yesterday in Nature Communications reassigns the skull fragment, which was found in northern Mongolia’s Salkhit Valley in 2006, from an archaic hominin species to our own modern variety. Scientists originally believed that the fossil belonged to folks like the Neanderthals, or Homo erectus, or maybe even the Denisovans—who were only first identified in 2010. The prominence of the area just above the eyes seemed consistent with what our archaic cousins might have sported, says Thibaut Devièse, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit and lead author of the new study. But there was more to the skull than what met the eyes.

Devièse and his colleagues were struck by the carbon to nitrogen (C:N) ratio previously recorded for the skullcap’s collagen; it was butting right up against the high end of the acceptable range, indicating too much carbon in the sample. Contaminating materials, says Devièse, are generally younger than the sample, so the researchers thought they should take another look. To reassess the skullcap, they applied a new method and extracted just one amino acid—hydroxyproline (HYP)—from the collagen, rather than a sample of the collagen itself.

The isolated HYP, protected from potential contamination, could provide more reliable data, and indeed: The tests pushed Mongolanthropus about 8,000 years further back in time, to around 34,000 years ago. That moves it from the Early Middle or terminal Late Pleistocene to the Early Upper Palaeolithic, when modern humans were making stone tools in Mongolia.

The evidence that ultimately established Mongolanthropus as a modern human, however, is far more conclusive. DNA analyses conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that the skullcap’s mitochondrial genome linked up with what modern humans carry in Eurasia today. (Devièse notes that other researchers had also speculated that the skull might have belonged to a modern human, after comparing it to other samples.)

Mongolanthropus remains the only Pleistocene hominin fossil ever discovered in Mongolia. It’s not surprising, says Devièse, that the fragment could be reclassified as a modern human even after being pushed further back in history, as we know that modern humans interbred with their archaic counterparts, and as some researchers have pointed to modern humans from more than 100,000 years ago in present-day China. As part of the PalaeoChron project to chronologically map the arrival of modern humans in Eurasia, Devièse says that he and his colleagues had been “hunting” for hominin skulls from the area. Reclassifying this one as that of a modern human gets the researchers one step closer to telling our story in the region.

Staff at "Station X" threw their teacups into lakes and stuffed them into hedges.

Deep in the English countryside, some 50 miles northwest of London, sits the sprawling estate known as Bletchley Park. Beneath its sleepy exterior, however, once lay a vital secret. During World War II, Bletchley Park (or “Station X”) was a critical part of the Allied effort to decipher and analyze intercepted Axis communications. Unbeknownst to the public, Bletchley Park housed translators, technicians, clerks, and, most famously, codebreakers. Their collective efforts may have shortened World War II by two to four years, according to some estimates. Perhaps inevitably, the geniuses toiling away at Bletchley Park were not without their eccentricities. Often, their unconventional habits manifested in the curious relationships they had to their teacups.

The estate features an imposing mansion, but the prefabricated "Huts" were where the site’s most important work took place: breaking German, Italian, and Japanese ciphers. Several Huts even contained the famed Bombe and Colossus code-cracking machines vital to the Allied war effort. Almost as importantly, at least for the perpetually overworked staff, one Hut housed a tea room.

Also situated on the estate is a large ornamental lake. This lake was one notable location where the teacup shenanigans of the Park’s “boffins” surfaced. Scholar and codebreaker Dilly Knox, whose work led to the decryption of over 140,000 messages of Germany’s military intelligence, would stroll along the shores of the lake, cup of tea in hand. If inspiration struck, he was known to throw his saucer and teacup into the convenient body of water before hurrying back to his station.

Josh Cooper, the head of Bletchley Park’s Air Section, was of legendary eccentricity. He would similarly hurl his cups into the lake as a matter of course—no stroke of inspiration needed. It was not unheard of for other codebreakers to gently set their cup and saucer upon the water’s surface and allow both to slowly float away. Following the war, Bletchley Park’s administrators dredged the lake in search of discarded code-breaking machines. What they found instead were mounds of discarded tea cups, saucers, and other cutlery.

As author Sinclair McKay noted in his book The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, teatime led to its fair share of “crockery friction.” Codebreakers not only discarded cups and saucers in the estate’s lake, but stuffed them into shrubs and hedges, much to the consternation of the administrators. Owing to losses of cups, saucers, and spoons, eventually the administration no longer supplied them to the staff of Bletchley Park. Those wishing to indulge in a cup of tea had to provide their own crockery. A 1940 memo admonished staff that “the rate of loss [of teacups and cutlery] is no less than five times that normally experienced in a man-of-war” (that is, a warship). The memo also sternly informed staff that site security would stop those absconding from dining halls with government cups and tableware.

Bletchley Park’s most famous codebreaker, Alan Turing, was not not immune to this curious tea culture. Like many of his colleagues, Turing was something of an eccentric as well. (One quirk was his habit of traversing the countryside on his ramshackle bicycle while wearing a full gas mask.) In terms of tea, Turing took to securing his mug to a radiator each evening with a lock and chain. This proved irresistible to his colleagues, who would occasionally pick the lock and make off with Turing’s mug in his absence. Yet in retrospect, securing his mug was a prudent move. Like Knox and Cooper, Turing’s deputy Hugh Alexander was known to toss teacups into the lake. Hut 8 today contains a recreation of Turing's office, complete with a mug chained to the radiator.

While they disrespected the dishware, tea played an important role in the lives of the Bletchley Park denizens: unsurprising, given the beverage’s cherished place in English culture. Tea breaks in Station X’s spacious cafeteria or Hut 2 provided much-needed respite from the intense work undertaken by codebreakers and staff. Yet the genius and peculiarities forming the “strange intellectual whirlpool” of Bletchley Park often led to the estate resembling a university quad, rather than the site of some of the most valuable work of the Allied war effort. With mugs deposited into hedges, set adrift into lakes, or securely attached to radiators, that the British staple of tea would be caught up in the quirks of the estate’s codebreakers was perhaps inevitable.

This miniature foe is munching through the stone walls of Sé Velha.

On a hillside in the center of Coimbra, Portugal, sits the Sé Velha (Old Cathedral), one of the longest standing Romanesque cathedrals left in the country. Constructed like a fortress, the cathedral was part of the defense line against the Moors during the Reconquista and remains intact to this day. However, a new miniature foe is munching through the edifice's stone walls.

The Sé Velha is on the campus of the University of Coimbra – Alta and Sofia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. During an experimental survey checking for biodeterioration, scientists from the university made a shocking discovery. Microcolonial black fungi (MCBF) had begun cultivating on the cathedral walls. Black fungi are key players in the erosion of stone buildings. However, this wasn’t the typical funky fungi: The team had in fact discovered a new strain of MCBF. Their findings and research were published in MycoKeys.

During the survey, the team noticed some of the artwork in the cathedral’s Santa Maria Chapel was covered in a black mass. They began scraping the fungal chunks into a collection tube for testing. “We first took samples from the limestone surface, isolated the organism, and conducted an extensive and integrative analysis,” says João Trovã of the University of Coimbra, the lead author of the study, via email.

The results were peculiar. Data didn’t allow for a proper classification into any known taxonomy. They had discovered a new species, genus, and family. In terms of destructiveness, the newly named Aeminium ludgeri acts similarly to its corrosive brethren.

MCBF are the bane of conservators and biologists working to preserve historical sites. Black fungi are extremely difficult to remove and they devour stone structures. Once they colonize, stones turn black and fissures are created when their tentacle-like hyphae, their primary means of vegetative growth, begin to root.

Black fungi are also extremely slow-growing and resistant to many physical and chemical treatments. According to Trovã, these fuzzy cultures can withstand extreme temperatures, high solar and ultraviolet radia­tion, osmotic changes, and severe drought. This tenacity is a byproduct of their physical makeup.

Physiological adaptations allow them to colonize virtually any stone. Trovã says MCBF are considered “one of the most resistant [to extreme conditions] eukaryotic organisms known to-date.”

In the study, the researchers write that the species, "might be endemic to limestone quarries on the Iberian Peninsula," raising concerns about other stone structures. Trovã says further research is needed to understand the extent of where the fungi spread, but currently the dastardly cultures have only been found in the cathedral. Additional studies will also aid scientists in profiling its biodeterioration abilities in order to implement better intervention strategies going forward.

The cathedral has survived for 800 years. For its legacy to continue, conservators will need to better understand this fungal scourge.

Wikitongues offers video samples of Lemerig, Texas German, Aranese, and many more.

In 2014, three friends from Brooklyn founded a nonprofit they call Wikitongues. The idea was to create an open-access platform with the ambitious goal of documenting, in some way, every language in the world. In the last five years, the team has collected more than 435 of them via video submissions of native speakers. Though this digital oral history project has received significant support since its inception (as any free-use language resource should), Atlas Obscura decided to ask Daniel Bogre Udell, one of the founders (along with Frederico Andrade and Lindie Botes), a few questions about his relationship to the languages he’s been documenting. While some of Udell’s motivations are personal, it’s impossible to embark on an archival project of this scale without a real investment in people all over the world, and bringing attention to the future of at-risk tongues.

Are you specifically looking for submissions of languages that are at risk of dying out?

Every language in the world considered, when we have the opportunity to document a critically endangered or under-documented language, we make that a priority. For example, our community leader for Southeast Asia, Kunto Nurchayako, is based in Borneo, and we’ve been working with him to document the island’s indigenous Dayak languages, many of which are academically unclassified and politically unrecognized. So, in recording those languages, Kunto is welcoming potential cultural activists into a global community of people fighting for linguistic diversity, as well as creating documentation for their languages that can be used to eventually study them, teach them, or relearn them if they ever go extinct. He’s also creating the first and only representation of these languages online.

Are there any languages in particular that you really, really wanted to document?

If we had more resources, I would want to prioritize under-documented languages whose last remaining speakers are elderly, so that we could guarantee their descendants have the tools they need to revive these languages in the future if they so choose. One example of this is the Lemerig language, which we were able to capture thanks to Daniel Krauße, a linguistics student from Germany. Isso, the speaker featured in the video, is one of two remaining speakers of the language, which doesn’t yet have a lively revival movement.

How many languages do you speak?

My mother tongue is English, and I fluently speak Spanish and Catalan. I can hold most conversations in Portuguese and basic conversations in French and Italian. I have a working knowledge of Polish, but can’t speak it conversationally, and have studied Galician, too. Right now, my focus is Hebrew, since I’m Jewish, and have been inspired to reclaim an ancestral language like so many Wikitongues contributors are doing.

Was there a particular language or dialect that really knocked your socks off when you became aware of it? Texas German and Drehu are interesting finds!

I was excited about Texas German, too! I was also taken very romantically by the Aranese language, which is a variety of Occitan. In France, where Occitan primarily originated, the language was beaten out of people in the 1900s by the government’s oppressive French-only policies, so Occitan speakers today are struggling to keep it alive in French culture. However, Aranese is an exception, because it's spoken by people in an isolated Pyrenean Valley—the Aran Valley—in Catalonia. Today, the regional Catalan government, driven by its own commitment to sustaining Catalan, enthusiastically supports Aranese-language efforts. The language is regionally co-official with Catalan and Spanish, and Aranese is actively taught in local schools, so it’s being passed on to children.

Separate from my Iberian passions, I’ve been really excited about sign languages as a whole, because they’re often left out of conversations about linguistic diversity. More than 300 of the world’s 7,000 languages are signed, so I was thrilled when we received videos in languages such as Kenyan Sign Language (thanks to our friends at Deaf Haven), Namibian Sign Language, and Finnish-Swedish Sign Language.

So 2019 is the UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages. What is Wikitoungues doing in coordination with it?

The International Year of Indigenous Languages (#IYIL2019) was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly as a way of making 2019 a platform for promoting linguistic diversity and the recent groundswell of activism to sustain it. This was accomplished thanks to the hard work of indigenous activists who spent a long time lobbying for this level of recognition. UNESCO is stewarding the year-long campaign, since they’re the branch most concerned with cultural preservation. Wikitongues was brought on board to help bridge the gap between UNESCO and the grassroots organizations, so we helped build a coalition of civil society organizations from the around the world to amplify the spirit of the year.

Wikitongues will be working to encourage people to use their languages publicly, especially online, so we’ll be designing and copromoting fun and creative social media campaigns that do just that, such as the Mother Language Meme challenge, which is self-explanatory, or Indigenous Language Challenge, which encourages nonindigenous people to learn indigenous languages in solidarity, and indigenous heritage speakers to reclaim their ancestral languages. Expect more from this soon!

Note: This conversation has been edited for length.

Spherical landscapes helped an 18th-century scientist convey the enormity of the Alps.

Instagram is full of photo trends, but one of the most visually stunning is #tinyplanet. A circular, instead of horizontal, panorama, the tiny planet is an immersive photo that stitches together the entire environment to otherworldly effect. The ground appears like a small, green planet and buildings, people, plants, animals, and trees all shoot and soar around the little sphere. The technique became a popular way to rethink the panorama of the iPhone, but this spherical landscape was pioneered over 200 years ago and helped spread the idea of immersive pictures.

During the 18th century, a new world opened in two ways: One, scientists started to investigate and explore the mountains with a new perspective on studying and capturing the natural world; and two, balloon technology appeared that allowed people to see the world from above, looking down. Scientists pioneered circular landscapes to try to capture these new perspectives. Horace Bénédict de Saussure is perhaps the most famous of these trailblazing designers. He is not as well-remembered as his early 20th-century descendant Ferdinand de Saussure, who wrote about semiotics in linguistics, but the older Swiss aristocrat contributed significantly to the study of geology and meteorology through his detailed descriptions and natural history of the Alps.

Originally from Geneva, de Saussure conducted numerous scientific expeditions among the alpine slopes, documenting his attempts to reach Mont Blanc and the other peaks. Published from 1779 to 1796, his multi-volume text Les Voyages dans les Alpes was an important natural history of the mountains and inspiration to other geologists. His work would lead to the explosion of tourism in the mid-19th century. Although Thomas Manning, one British contemporary, wrote to his friend, the great Georgian essayist Charles Lamb, “the views in Switzerland are far inferior, I think, to those in North England,” the illustrations that accompanied de Saussure’s publications transported the reader into the center of the precipitous mountain glaciers.

In 1776, de Saussure was a member of a team that was among the first to reach the summit of Mont Buet in France. He and his colleagues were primarily interested in collecting meteorological data and specimens of shell fossils, “the most singular petrifications … previously unknown to Naturalists.” Upon reaching the summit, the team was spellbound by the beauty of the surrounding mountains. De Saussure knew he wanted to share such a landscape with his readers, but he struggled with how he might illustrate the immensity and towering nature of the surroundings. “I saw clearly that it would be impossible to give to my Readers a little clear idea without joining my designs there,” he wrote.

From the Renaissance onwards, artists resurrected and perfected the practice of linear perspective to realistically portray objects in front of a viewer. First drawing a straight horizontal line on the canvas, the artist could establish the same distant horizon in front of the viewer. Then, the artist would pick a central point, known commonly as the vanishing point, that represented the “perspective” of the viewer toward the horizon; and from that point, the painter drew orthogonal lines to create the realistic effect of three-dimensional space.

However, linear perspective was limited in focusing on a single view of a landscape. Creative artists, in the subsequent years, found innovative ways to play with multiple views in perspective; but in general, if an artist bound themselves to realism, landscape painting could only show a single frame in front of the viewer.

While on the summit of Mont Buet, de Saussure had an idea to resolve this conflict:

“Following the method I have employed, the Designer paints the objects exactly as he sees them by turning the paper in proportion to how he turns himself. And those who after his work wish to form an idea of the objects he has defined have but to arrange themselves as though they are placed in the center of the design, adding by the imagination what they see in the middle of the center, and making, by turning the design, the review of all its parts. They see successively all the objects outlined among them, and absolutely what it presents to an Observer situated on the summit of the mountain.”

To this end, de Saussure commissioned Marc-Théodore Bourrit, one of the members of the team, to design such a circular landscape. A Genevan mountaineer himself, Bourrit published numerous illustrations of the Alps throughout the 18th century; and when asked to limn de Saussure’s idea, he attempted the 360-degree perspective of the summit of Mont Buet, “with enthusiasm...and the happiest of success,” according to de Saussure.

For the design, Bourrit stood at the top of the mountain, which is the center of the circular landscape, and he faced Mont Blanc. Instead of a line, he drew a circle for the horizon. He turned and progressively drew in perspective from that position until he had made an entire revolution. Thus, with the resulting circle drawing, he was able to realistically show the relative height and depth of the mountains in the scene.

According to Saussure’s description of the map-like painting, the “spectator is supposed to be placed in the center of the figure.” To orient oneself, the viewer should begin with finding the letter a, which is printed above the peak of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. Left of the 15,777-foot summit, between the letters a and s, the viewer can see the gradient and path one follows to descend from the mountain into the rest of the alpine chain. Further left rotation brings one to the Argentière Glacier. Other physical formations visible from the center are the l’Aiguille and the Glacier du Tour.

De Saussure’s view of Mont Buet is a revolutionary perspective on landscapes. While Thomas Baldwin published another circular landscape in Airopaidia, the circular landscape would not penetrate the public’s consciousness until the 19th century. Other examples of immersive artwork, such as Robert Barker’s “Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures,” used wall paintings inside a building so that the individual could feel as if they were in a virtual space. These spaces were popular in London and Paris, and it’s in reviews for these art installations we find the first coinages of panorama. Barker’s success surpassed the niche scientific publications of Saussure and Baldwin; but together those two innovators offered a unique vision of the word, the first images of #tinyplanet.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Wildlife conservation gets the most attention when it’s focused on the big and exciting—polar bears, condors, sea turtles, elephants. They are our iconic mascots of nature, and ensuring they can survive and thrive requires a massive effort.

But nature and wilderness and loss don’t just exist on that scale. Take a cave in northern Italy called Bùs del Budrio, one among many worn out of the limestone in the foothills of the Alps. In it there was a waterfall, and below that a pool about the size of a one-car garage. And in that natural pool were tiny, white freshwater worms thought to exist nowhere else in the world.

The worms were flatworms called planarians—think back to high school biology class, where their simplicity and ability to regenerate make them useful model organisms for study. Back in 1936, entomologist Mario Pavan discovered some unusual planarians swimming in the cave pool. He sent specimens of the flat, eyeless worms, each about the length of two grains of rice laid end to end, to the University of Pavia, where anatomist Maffo Vialli deemed them members of a unique species. He named the species, known from this single pool, Dendrocoelum italicum. And then no one thought about them at all for eight decades or so.

In 2016, biologists from the University of Milan came across what looked to be another unique planarian species in another cave, about 80 miles away. They wondered how these new flatworms compare to the only other described species in northern Italy, D. italicum. So they made their way to Bùs del Budrio. Upon entering the cave via an old, winding staircase and a long passageway, they were struck not by what they saw, but by what was missing. “The original description of the cave mentioned a pool, but it wasn’t there,” says Raoul Manenti, a wetland ecologist who led the project.

A concrete barrier was diverting the water that once filled the pool. It had been installed back in the 1980s, along with a pipe, to feed the water to a nearby farm. By the time Manenti and his team arrived, the pool had long dried up, and the waterfall was reduced to trickle that fed a narrow rivulet on the cave floor.

The research team scoured the water for signs of the white flatworms, which had been largely forgotten since their discovery eight decades earlier. They weren’t hopeful at first, as conditions were far from ideal—planarians prefer still water, and the rivulet was turbulent and contained little food.

Yet, against all odds, D. italicum had hung on, just barely. In various surveys, the team counted between eight and 109 individuals. It’s amazing that they weren’t yet gone, but Manenti was keenly aware that it wouldn’t take much for the only known population of the worms to vanish for good. And it wouldn’t just be the loss of an odd white worm—in the nutrient-starved cave environment, they might as well be lions. “These planarians are at the top of the small trophic web of the cave water … they likely play an important role in regulating the other aquatic invertebrate fauna of the cave,” he says.

It was an opportunity, not only to save a species and its ecosystem, but also to return the cave to its natural condition—a feat in its own right. So, Manenti orchestrated what he believes was the first-ever habitat restoration project designed specifically to save a worm. At flatworm scale, at least, it was a massive effort.

First, the team needed the appropriate permissions. Since the cave is located in the Cariadeghe Plateau, a protected region, Manenti sought approval from area’s administrators to restore it. That was easy enough, but the local community was a harder sell. The idea of outsiders coming in and tinkering with their cave was initially met with suspicion, says Manenti.

To get the locals on board, Manenti organized a series of cave tours in which his team educated them on the unique species within. “We really focused on the fact that this worm is their worm because it’s endemic,” he says. They also piggy-backed on popular excursions to the bùs del lat, which roughly translates to “milk holes”—small caves in the region historically used for milk storage and cheese processing.

Next they had to convince the farmer, Giuseppe Bodei. Luckily, he was no longer reliant on the water to irrigate his land. The cave was as a kind of institution for his family—for generations, his ancestors had taken advantage of its low temperatures to store ice for use in the warmer months. Bodei found returning it to its natural condition an appealing prospect; his family mused about running tour groups between the cave and their farm, perhaps selling some of their produce in the bargain.

With all of the permissions and approvals out of the way—which took around six months in total—on December 4, 2016, the plan went into effect. The team carefully drew 73 planarians out of the rivulet with pipettes and temporarily housed them in tanks. Local cavers assisted in taking down the concrete barrier. “It was on the ceiling of the cave, so we had to climb it,” says Manenti. “It was very, very difficult to remove.” Despite the physical challenge, the job was done in just three hours, and the natural pool began to refill. By the next day, the worms were again swimming around in their original habitat, which had been gone for 30 years.

“It’s a pretty remarkable achievement,” says Pedro Cardoso, an entomologist and curator at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki, “to have gotten all of these stakeholders involved and [performed] all of these conservation actions for a planarian.” In a 2011 paper, Cardoso pinpointed a general disregard for invertebrates as a major stumbling block to their conservation.

Had the team been working to conserve a big, furry mammal—a panda or a tiger, say—the public might have been keen to support the project from the get-go, without the public relations effort, says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon. “We tend to see mammals in a better light than invertebrates because they look like us,” he says, while creatures such as planarians are more alien. “The neat thing about this [project] is that they were able to get the community on board—it just took that special effort.”

Manenti and his team have made regular visits to the cave since its restoration to see how the flatworms are doing. A year later, there hadn’t been any notable surge in their numbers, they reported recently in the journal Oryx, but that may still come. Closely related planarian species, especially those that dwell in caves, are slow to reproduce. Even when they do, baby planarians are so small that they’re nearly impossible to detect. Manenti plans to keep returning the cave to keep tabs on the population’s growth. But then again, success isn’t only measured in numbers.

“Just the fact that it was possible to work with this many people, and that the local community now has knowledge of this unique species,” says Cardoso, “it’s really a victory for the project, irrespective of what happens with the population.”

Plus, there’s something comforting in knowing that this unique species is back where it belongs.

Sprouted from seeds that traveled to space in 1971, many haven't fared so well back on Earth.

The Moon is not an easy place to be a living thing. The little cotton seeds that germinated on the far side of the Moon recently, aboard China’s Chang'e-4 lander, died soon after. The water, oxygen, soil, and heat source inside their cozy biosphere were no match for the Moon's version of night—two weeks of darkness and temperatures reportedly dipping down to -310 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s not to say it isn’t possible for plants to grow off-world. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station tend and sometimes harvest and eat romaine lettuce, cabbage, and more from carefully calibrated chambers. And while the Chang’e-4 experiment marked the first time that humans have sprouted something on the Moon, our rocky satellite was involved in another case of lunar gardening, in the form of seeds that went to the Moon and were brought back to Earth. Turns out many of those "Moon Trees," as they are known, have had a bit of a rough go of it.

In 1971, just before he blasted off with Apollo 14, astronaut Stuart Roosa—who had formerly worked as a smokejumper for the U.S. Forest Service—stashed several hundred seeds from redwoods, loblolly pines, sweetgums, sycamores, and firs in his personal kit (the small tube in which crew members can stow sentimental stuff unrelated to the mission). The seeds got little attention at the time, amid the bigger buzz around the mission and the general sense of cautious optimism combined with fear that followed the heroic but troubled experience of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

The seeds spent a total of nine days in space, and when the Apollo 14 crew splashed back to Earth, the seeds did, too, with little fanfare. With the exception of a few internal documents, “I never found anything from the time the mission went up,” says Dave Williams, an archivist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who has become the de facto chronicler of the seeds’ journey. “No one had heard about these even for some time afterwards, until they planted them.”

The U.S. Forest Service watched over the seeds until they sprouted, and once they had grown hardy enough, seedlings were fanned out across the country to be planted. (There may have been a rush to germinate as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible, out of fear that they'd been ruined when the canister holding them popped open during quarantine.) In 1975 and 1976, local papers from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Huntsville, Alabama, reported on astronauts, politicians, and other public figures dropping by to help place the 18-inch sycamores or foot-tall pines into their new homes in parks, squares, and other sites in honor of America’s bicentennial. Some other seedlings were planted a few years on, and in at least one case, when a much-less-photogenic root clipping arrived instead of a seedling, an entirely different tree stood in until the handsomer version of the Moon Tree was ready to be planted later.

There was something heroic in trees grown from seeds that had traveled so far from home. They were cast as a testament to innovation, engineering, and ingenuity—fragile things that Americans had successfully shepherded through a cold, dark trip. The trees were also emblems of what makes Earth stand out in the solar system. They were often planted alongside patriotic plaques that said things like, “America’s Green World of Trees.” The sturdy, iconic species celebrated our lush, leafy existence.

The problem is that once they’d been planted, many people forgot about them—including many people at NASA.

The NASA archivist Williams didn’t know anything about the Moon Trees until the mid-1990s, when he was making early webpages to showcase information about previous missions and data. He listed an email address on pages relating to Apollo missions, and that’s how a third-grade teacher from Indiana reached him with a question about the trees. Her kids wanted to know about a tree they’d spotted at a nearby Girl Scout camp, with a little sign that identified it as a “Moon Tree.”

At first, he didn’t really have any information to offer. “I had never heard of them!” Williams says. So he started poking around, “and slowly, this little story started coming together.” He learned that there was one near his own office, close to the visitors’ center at Goddard. He’d had no idea it was there. “That’s why I’m not running a detective agency,” he says. A Moon sycamore was “planted practically in my backyard, and I didn’t even know about it.”

Williams decided to make a webpage about Roosa’s seeds, and at the bottom he invited people to get in touch if they knew anything about Moon Trees in their neck of the woods. The emails started pouring in. People might say that their dad had planted one, or that they’d stumbled across one in a park. “It sort of kept growing, and I became the Moon Tree guy,” Williams says.

Williams still keeps tabs on the status of the known Moon Trees. It’s not known exactly how many seeds Roosa took to the Moon, or how many sprouted, or how many eventually took root in the ground, but there are roughly 90 trees currently accounted for, and about a third of those are already dead. The spindly sycamore in Philadelphia’s Washington Square, its trunk no wider than a fist, is a clone of the park’s original Moon Tree. The long-leaf pine near the “Moon Tree” plaque at the G. W. Andrews Forest Services Laboratory Research Station in Auburn, Alabama, is not actually a Moon Tree, but replaced a loblolly pine that was. In 1980, an Indiana paper reported that a Moon sycamore in Niles, Michigan, was still going strong, four years after it went in the ground. It had shot up by four feet since it was planted, the paper noted, but its three Michigan cousins all perished.

The fate of many of these trees likely has nothing to do with their jaunt to the Moon, Williams says. Compared with seeds that never blasted off, “there was no detectable difference at all, which is what anyone would have expected.” He imagines that a longer spaceflight—with more exposure to radiation and zero-gravity—might have changed them, but this particular journey resulted in perfectly average seeds with a cool stamp on their extraterrestrial passports.

Far more important was what happened to these seeds once they returned to Earth and sprouted. Williams was never able to find information about how many were planted, and it’s possible that many died in the first year or two—a time when transplanted trees are especially vulnerable to being parched, infested, or toppled. Speaking to Indiana’s South Bend Tribune in 1980, the director of the nature preserve that housed Michigan’s surviving Moon Tree speculated that some of the others had been in for a shock when they moved from the place they were sprouted—often in Mississippi or California—to where they were planted, particularly if the climates differed.

Think of it this way: The trees that you find in a given place are, by definition, the ones that survived by some luck of sunlight and soil and freedom from accidents or disease. Birds and wind drop seeds in all sorts of places, and lots of these seeds might even sprout, but the vast majority never survive long enough to become trees. Any Moon Tree planted in a decent spot probably had the same chance as any other seedling, Williams says, but surely, “not everyone who planted them knew what they were doing.” They may have chosen a spot that was pretty, or central, but not the right fit for that particular tree. Others might have been uprooted up by accident. That fate befell the sycamore planted near the Wyoming Police Department in Michigan, which was destroyed during construction.

As anyone who has cycled through houseplants knows, it can be hard to keep something alive, and the same is true for histories. Williams still gets a trickle of emails about the trees, particularly when they die, but he also suspects that there are many that have simply been forgotten. If a plaque vanishes, a legacy can disappear with it, and even established trees are still vulnerable. In New Orleans, for instance, a Moon pine was removed after sustaining damage in Hurricane Katrina. (It’s not clear that the damage was the reason for removing the tree, Williams notes, but it—and its plaque—disappeared sometime between December 2005 and August 2006, and he’s not sure what happened to them.) But some Moon Trees do live on in various ways. Some second-generation trees—spawned from seeds or cuttings—have gone into the ground more recently, including a sycamore dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery in 2005, in honor of Roosa (who died in 1994) and “other distinguished astronauts who have departed our presence here on Earth." Williams has a second-generation Moon Tree in his yard at home, too—a sycamore from a ceremony at the National Arboretum.

We owe much of what we know about the charming mystery of the Moon Trees to Williams’s willingness to do some sleuthing, and enthusiasm for collating dispatches from other people who love them—everyone from Forest Service employees to folks who document them in their neighborhoods, or go out of their way to find them. Like hundreds of thousands of other federal employees, he spent much of January 2019 furloughed by the government shutdown, and returned to work to find an avalanche of emails. More than a thousand of them had piled up, and one of those could hold the first piece of a new puzzle. He does his best to respond to everyone, but it’s not always possible to dig deep into each question. “I think back and think I could have just as easily said, ‘No, I’ve never heard of them [the Moon Trees], I’m sorry,’” Williams says. Thanks in large part to him, the story has been able to take root again.

The early text can help scholars understand how the legend evolved over time.

Medieval fragments of Arthurian legend have been sitting in the Bristol Central Library for hundreds of years and no one noticed—until now. The newly discovered text—hidden in a later book—tells of a battle in which Merlin leads a charge using a dragon banner that actually breathes fire.

The 13th-century manuscript pages were tucked away in the binding of a later, printed book, a four-volume set of the works of Jean Gerson, a French scholar and theologian. The Gerson text was printed in Strasbourg, on the French-German border, sometime between 1494 and 1502, before making its way to England. ”The [Gerson] text would have come to England unbound, without covers—it’s lighter and easier to travel that way,” explains Leah Tether, a librarian and president of the British branch of the International Arthurian Society. “In England, whoever ordered them would then have taken them to a local bookbinder, and he would have added the covers.” That’s where the much earlier Arthurian pages came into play.

Paper-making and bookbinding weren’t yet codified crafts in 16th-century England, and piecing together fragments of old manuscripts to hide unsightly binding features of new books was a trick of the bookbinding trade. Vellum pages like those of the Arthurian fragments were written on painstakingly prepared calfskin. Too precious to be thrown out, vellum, regardless of what was already on it, would have been kept in a workshop to be used again in a pinch. In this case, they had been repurposed as pastedowns, or the endpapers covering the boards of the Gerson book’s inside cover.

Then, sometime in the 19th century, a Bristol book conservator carefully lifted these pages off the hard inside cover of the book and rebound them as flyleaves, those extra blank pages at the beginnings and ends of books. “Sometimes things that don’t have value to one person might have some value to someone else,” says Tether. “Maybe they thought, ‘Let’s turn them into flyleaves so someone who wants to can read them one day.’”

That someone was librarian Michael Robinson, who found the 13th-century pages while searching for examples of the vellum recycling practice to use as teaching material for a medieval bookmaking history course at the University of Bristol. Lucky for Robinson, a catalogue published by a prescient Bristol city librarian in 1899 noted manuscripts in the collection with this feature. This was an unusual practice, as annotations about binding are not usually found in library catalogues, Tether says. Robinson photographed the recycled manuscript flyleaves at the library and was examining the images back at home. “Having seen signs of conflict in the narration, I think the phrase ‘chastel de Trèbes” first set me thinking. ‘Gauuein,’ ‘artu,’ and ‘merlin’ followed,” Robinson says via email. With these indications of a known battle from the legend and the characters Gawain, Arthur, and Merlin, Robinson contacted his colleague Tether to help determine the significance of his discovery.

Because the pages were once glued down, one side of each sheet is legible and the other side damaged. But the researchers have already found enough to generate excitement.

The Arthurian manuscript is written in Old French, the first language in which the tales were recorded. “We can tell immediately by the handwriting style that it’s from the 13th century,” says Tether. While library scientists are still working to pinpoint its age, they believe it dates from some time between 1250 and 1270. The earliest known Arthurian texts are from 1220, so this is a remarkably early version. Tales of King Arthur were passed along orally long before they were written down. It would still be at least a hundred years from this French text's time before they were written down in English.

The librarians have determined that the newly discovered pages tell the story of the Battle of Trèbes, in which Merlin, King Arthur’s advisor, exhorts Arthur and his worn-out troops to persist in their fight against King Claudas, after which he leads the charge with the fire-breathing magical banner. There are some minor differences between how the battle is described in these pages and the version commonly accepted today. For instance, the story usually states that King Claudas suffered a thigh wound in this battle, considered a metaphor for castration or impotence. In the newly discovered version, the type of wound isn’t specified. These early details may change our understanding of the familiar tale, and tell us more about how the story changed as it went from oral renderings to French to English—and to modern versions.

Tether points out that it’s unusual to find a text of this kind recycled in this way. Usually these pieces were religious or liturgical texts, fragments of theological ideas that had gone out of vogue. Fictional tales were more highly prized, and less likely to be left for recycling. So why did this gold nugget end up as scrap?

Tether suggests it may be because it lacked illuminations and illustrations. Another theory is that this text was an exemplar—a sample from which scribes copied—and was simply retired after a while.

“I think what really delights me about this discovery,” Robinson says, “is that it may be an inspiration to our students.” It may be a rare discovery, but it is also a reminder that you never know what you’ll find when explore a library.

For the "enemy aliens" held at Fort Missoula, suet was an insult.

It started with suet. Some say camp administrators decided that Italian internees should cook with suet instead of olive oil to cut costs. Others say lower ranking internees, who had been crew members on the ships they were taken from, suspected that former officers were getting olive oil while they were stuck with beef fat. Either way, tensions hit a breaking point when a group of angry internees charged into the kitchen.

“They were swinging suet at the cooks,” says Carol Van Valkenburg, a Professor Emerita at the University of Montana School of Journalism who wrote a history of the Missoula internment.

It was the summer of 1941 in Fort Missoula, Montana. The United States would soon be at war. Approximately 1,200 Italian nationals, most of them sailors on boats stranded in American waters or employees of the Italian Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, had been rounded up by the American government as “enemy aliens” and brought to Fort Missoula. The Italians called the camp Bella Vista, meaning beautiful view, but during the early months of their stay, when rules on visits to town were stricter, their view was marred by barbed wire.

In some versions of the olive oil tale, the Italians were so angry they rioted in the mess. Guards rushed in and sprayed tear gas to break up the fight, and in the chaos, a watchtower guard accidentally shot himself in the foot. According to Van Valkenburg, however, the olive oil agitation didn’t escalate, and the tear gas spraying and accidental self-shooting occurred during a more serious riot between the pro- and anti-fascist internees at the camp.

Nevertheless, food was serious business for the Italians at Fort Missoula, who often complained about the provisions. Unused to canned food, they claimed it was making them sick. Envious of the supposedly superior food eaten by their diabetic counterparts, internees fell victim to a “diabetes epidemic”—until the camp doctor warned them that true diabetics had to undergo uncomfortable treatment. For prisoners far from their homes and families, food mattered.

The Italians at Missoula were just a fraction of the 600,000 Italian Americans whom the U.S. government labeled “enemy aliens” during World War II. Across the West Coast, federal agents placed thousands of Italian immigrants under curfew. Authorities confiscated fishermen’s boats and forced 10,000 of those living close to the California coast to relocate inland. Across the country, intelligence agents surveilled Italian neighborhoods, searching for Mussolini supporters. Immigrants who had made the United States their new home found themselves suspect.

The Italian internees weren’t alone. Missoula held over 100 Germans and 1,000 Japanese Americans, who had been rounded up as part of a much larger surveillance program that the American government had been developing for years.

When the United States entered the war in 1941, the intelligence machinery swung into action. Federal agents forced Japanese Americans from their homes and into camps. Initially, agents targeted Japanese Americans with prominent roles in their communities: newspaper editors, judo teachers, Shinto clergy. But more than for anything they’d done, says Brian Niiya, content director at Densho, an organization dedicated to preserving the memories of interned and incarcerated Japanese Americans, the U.S. government targeted Japanese-American people for their race.

Like many in the field, Niiya and his organization use the word “internment” to describe the status of Japanese Americans rounded up in this earlier wave. They use “incarceration” to describe the later, much larger group of over 117,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were U.S. citizens, forcefully relocated to camps under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s racist 1942 executive order.

The 1,000 Japanese-Americans interned at Fort Missoula were officially there for “loyalty hearings” conducted by the Department of Justice's Alien Enemy Hearing Boards. But for Japanese Americans, says Niiya, determinations of loyalty often derived from racial stereotypes.

“There was this sense of racial inscrutability,” says Niiya. “With people of European extraction, there was this idea that you can investigate, you can tell who should be interned and who was okay.” But when it came to the Japanese, he says, “The Japanese people were the enemy, not a particular leader.”

Missoula residents treated the prisoners differently too. While townspeople viewed the Japanese internees with “suspicion,” Van Valkenburg says, “the community accepted the Italians with open arms,” viewing them as “happy-go-lucky.”

This belief extended to the highest echelons of American government, with Roosevelt himself famously declaring Italians to be “a lot of opera singers.” Among the Italian internees at Fort Missoula, the stereotype wasn’t entirely false. The seamen and World’s Fair workers included several musicians, and the Italian internees even performed for the Missoula residents.

Racial tensions at the camp extended to eating arrangements. Italian and Japanese internees lived in segregated quarters, with separate mess and kitchen facilities. Each group cooked their own food. According to a newspaper account from the time, camp officers provided each group with rations according to their cultural preferences, with “spaghetti, olive oil and garlic for the Italians, and rice, soybeans and fish for the Japanese.” Administrators purchased the Italians’ food from a local grocery store set up by Italian immigrants who had come to work for the railroads.

In 1943, Italy surrendered and soon joined the Allies in fighting its one-time German partner. In 1944, the Italians at Fort Missoula were allowed to go home. Some returned to Italy, delighted to see their mothers again, the local newspaper, The Missoulian, reported. Some stayed in the United States, fearing their native country would have no work. Some remained in Missoula. Alfredo Cipolato, who maintained an Italian deli in Missoula until he was 94 years old, became a town icon.

The Italians left things behind: An archive full of photographs. A train platform full of sobbing local women (two of whom, Van Valkenburg says, discovered during this tearful farewell that they had been dating the same Italian man). At least one child, the fruit of such a union.

They also left positive memories. “There has been no hate toward the Italian people and there has been not the slightest desire to punish the Italian people for the misdeeds of their criminal leaders,” an editorialist wrote in the Missoulian newspaper in 1943.

But for the Japanese internees, Missoula was only the first stop in a long journey that, for survivors and descendants who live with the historical trauma of incarceration, continues today.

Many of the Japanese Americans interned at Fort Missoula went on to what Niiya and his organization refer to as concentration camps: the 10 crowded, desolate camps operated by the War Relocation Authority, in which Japanese Americans were incarcerated solely for their race.

Food mattered at those camps, too. For many incarcerated people, the American food served in camp messes was not only bland and of low nutritional value, but a sign of the assimilation forced upon the community by the United States government. In several camps, incarcerated Japanese Americans protested on the suspicion that white kitchen workers were stealing incarcerated people’s rations. In Utah’s Topaz camp, which suffered from meat scarcities, residents agitated against the serving of organ meat. Eventually, Japanese Americans used the camps’ coercive agricultural work programs and their own resourcefulness to become self-reliant, growing vegetables, raising livestock, and making staple foods like tofu.

For Niiya, interned and incarcerated people’s agitations over food were about more than taste. “It may not seem so to us, but for that population it was a really important thing,” Niiya says of the Italians’ aversion to suet. “Just like the Japanese eating the organ meat: It would keep you alive, it would feed you, but it was just repulsive to a lot of the population.”

By agitating for familiar foods, interned and incarcerated people demanded more than just to stay alive: They demanded lives of dignity.

Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski’s collection has grown to over 30,000 rabbit-related items.

At the Bunny Museum in Altadena, California, visitors will find bunny clocks, bunny stuffed animals, ancient bunny rings, bunny drawings, and more. The museum was born out of Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski’s infatuation with rabbits. Early in their relationship, the couple began giving bunny trinkets and ornaments to each other as gifts on birthdays and holidays. Soon those occasions felt too infrequent, and bunny exchanges happened daily. Their wedding cake—a carrot cake—was even topped with a bunny bride and groom. After four years of collecting, Frazee and Lubanski opened the Bunny Museum to the public.

Today, the collection consists of over 30,000 rabbit-related items. Frazee compares the pair's love for bunnies with a belief or way of life. Lubanski describes the museum as “a way of showing a couple’s love toward each other and how it perpetuated the collection further and further.” In the video above, Atlas Obscura unpacks the museum's unique origin story.

The Atlas Obscura Society Los Angeles hosts special events at the Bunny Museum—check the calendar for the most up-to-date schedule.

New research suggests that we will see deeper shades of blue and green by 2100.

Climate change doesn’t just happen in the air, in the dirt, or in the fearsome pages of damning studies. It happens before our eyes.

And so, as our planet continues to warm, our oceans will turn deeper shades of blue and green, according to research published today in the journal Nature Communications. The changes in color are in part a function of the fluctuating populations of phytoplankton, or algae—the microscopic plants that, across their thousands of different species, do some rather heavy lifting for the global ecosystem. Running a model through the end of this century, the researchers estimate that more than 50 percent of the world’s oceans will exhibit changes in color by the year 2100, as their algae populations rise and fall.

Because every species is different, climate change will wreak different effects on different communities of phytoplankton. In the subtropics, for example, the waters are expected to become more blue as the population of algae falls. Waters near the poles, on the other hand, are expected to turn deeper shades of green as the warmer conditions beckon the algae to boom. More algae means more green because their chlorophyll pigments—the ones that absorb sunlight for photosynthesis—absorb more of the blue end of the electromagnetic spectrum, and less of the green. Water itself does not absorb blue light, so the emptier it is, the bluer it will be.

The research builds upon earlier models, in use since the 1990s, in which scientists derived water’s chlorophyll levels based on the colors in satellite images. But this method did not provide a complete picture, says Anna Hickman, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton in England, and a co-author of the new study.

Chlorophyll levels could suggest what was going on with phytoplankton populations, but not necessarily with the other organisms making up a diverse marine community, reflecting and absorbing light on their own terms. Chlorophyll levels could also be skewed by isolated weather events that temporarily tweak algae populations, but which don’t necessarily evince the systemic workings of climate change, said Stephanie Dutkiewicz, the study's lead author, in a press release. The new model uses color to analyze the light itself as it’s being reflected and absorbed by everything in the water, and not only to analyze the presence of chlorophyll. The researchers watched the colors change in the model as they raised the temperature by three degrees Celsius—an increase that, judging by current trends, could really occur by 2100.

Hickman says that the changes in color may not be noticeable to the naked human eye, however clear they are to satellites. But other changes in the water could be all too apparent: Where algae populations fall and fish have less to eat, global fish catch could decline by 20 percent by the year 2300, according to the World Economic Forum.

These giants fascinated both conservationists and loggers.

Galen Clark loved big trees whose trunks dwarfed log cabins, let alone men. Born in present-day Quebec in 1814, he eventually moved west to California in an effort to either stave off sickness or die with one hell of a view. There, he grew enamored with his soaring, leafy neighbors. In a grove that would come to be called Mariposa—in the striking swath of land that would eventually become Yosemite National Park—he found peace, poetry, and a cause célèbre: protecting the several hundred sequoias that clustered there.

An album of snapshots, up for sale this month at Swann Auction Galleries, evokes the decades when naturalists and lumber companies looked at the same landscapes with vastly different perspectives. Clark, for his part, was so moved by the state’s stately giants that he put his feelings into verse in the prologue to his volume, The Big Trees of California, writing:

“I’ve been to the groves of Sequoia Big Trees,

Where beauty and grandeur combine,

Grand Temples of Nature for worship and ease,

Enchanting, inspiring, sublime!”

Many of these trees were so hulking that burly men could seem to vanish next to their bark; some of them had grown over more than 2,000 years. After President Abraham Lincoln transferred the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the State of California, in 1864, and declared that “the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation” for all time, Clark was appointed as its guardian. (After he died, in 1910, he would be buried nearby, watched over by sequoia seedlings he had grown from the giants in the Mariposa Grove and planted himself.)

As Clark swooned over the sequoias’ beauty, others looked at enormous trees and saw dollar signs. Even after Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park were established, in 1890, the naturalist John Muir—who ardently campaigned for conservation—lamented that other giants were at risk, poised to be toppled, lugged away, and turned into lumber. "As timber, the redwood is too good to live," he wrote in The Atlantic in 1897. “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, and avalanches," Muir noted. "But he cannot save them from fools.”

The 289 images in the album, taken somewhere between 1918 and the 1930s, survey massive trees, felled trunks, iconic vistas of Yosemite, and more. Some of the smaller-format prints may have been snatched up by tourists to bring home as souvenirs, while the larger images could have been made by commercial outfits in conjunction with the lumber companies, according to the auction house.

What the images all share is an eye toward illustrating the mind-boggling size of the trees, and the length of their lives. In some, cars pass easily through a tunnel carved out of a trunk. One image shows Clark’s onetime cabin in the Mariposa Grove, looking squat and shrimpy in the shadow of the enormous trees. Another shows a lumberjack posing against a felled giant. (Arms stretched wide, the man’s wingspan doesn’t even come close to touching both sides of the slab.) A few images seem to mingle awe and destruction. There’s one where a giant tree’s rings are annotated with the events that took place during its alleged lifespan—suggesting that this giant had seen a lot, from the drafting of the Magna Carta to the arrival of the Pilgrims. Whether the trees were living or leveled, they were wonders to behold—and to capture on film.

The encroaching desert meant lots of changes.

In Western Sahara, a disputed region on the northwest coast of Africa, there is a 3.5-square-mile plot of land that contains more than 400 ancient stone monuments—an incredible number, even for the Sahara, which “is absolutely full of stone monuments, usually located in places of particular topographical interest,” says Joanne Clarke, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology at the University of East Anglia. Clarke and Nick Brooks, an ecologist specializing in climate change, have been studying this area, just north of the village of Tifariti, since 2002 and recently published the results of their work, according to LiveScience. This remarkable collection of structures and landmarks dates from over 10,000 years ago to 3,000 years ago, and will help the researchers understand how people migrated into the region and adapted to the spread of the Sahara Desert.

The Tifariti area was once a natural basin, and as a water source in an region that was growing increasingly arid, it would certainly have been of interest to migrants thousands of years ago, from present-day Morocco, Libya, and Algeria to the north and what are now Mauritania and Mali to the south. “One of our theories is that as the Sahara dried in the mid Holocene—between five and six thousand years ago—this is one of the refugia, an area where water remained,” says Clarke. And where there was likely to be water, there were people. The variety of these monuments, archaeologists think, reflects the range of places from which these people migrated.

The largest structures are ziggurat-like burial mounds called bazinas. “They look like wedding cakes,” says Clarke, and can be up to 20 or 30 feet high and 60 feet in diameter—all to house the grave of a single person. Such structures were found farther south in Zoug, but smaller bazinas of the Tifariti area share their construction style, which archaeologists believe derives from the Central Sahara. Not all monuments are so impressive on their own, but were assembled in relation to landscape features, or to one another. One example is a group of 65 standing stones—none taller than thigh-high—surrounded by hills containing burial monuments, from which the stones are visible.

The researchers hope to continue gathering data, such as soil samples with pollen that might indicate when and where vegetation, and therefore water, lingered. Burial mounds containing more graves might provide evidence about what people ate, how healthy they were, and how they lived. But what they’ve studied so far already points to a couple of interesting conclusions about how people adapted to a changing world.

The Sahara desertified gradually over thousands of years, suggesting that slow environmental change can be managed through migration and adaptation, but that sudden change is much more difficult to contend with. The researchers concluded that surviving and adapting to climate change can be transformational for a culture. Nomads in the Western Sahara, for example, were once cattle pastoralists, chasing rainfall and following water sources. As these resources dwindled, they transformed their diet and lifestyle to become goatherders, because goats needed to roam less widely and could be raised around a semipermanent water source. It’s hard to say if there are lessons for us in adapting to future climate change, other than the idea that it may involve major shifts in location, diet, lifestyle, and so much more.

A nondescript building in Atlanta, considered a birthplace of country music, may soon be demolished—and become a Margaritaville.

Tucked away on a side street in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, it’s easy to overlook the two-story brick building at 152 Nassau Street NW.

A concert hall called the Tabernacle towers over it. So does one of the area’s newest tourist draws, a 20-story Ferris wheel. It hardly draws a second look from people headed for Centennial Olympic Park, CNN Center, or the gleaming new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the 2019 Super Bowl.

But nearly a century ago, 152 Nassau was where a talent scout from one of the first American record labels set up shop to put some of the sounds of the American South on disc. The result was what historians consider the first commercial country record, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” by an Atlanta musician named Fiddlin’ John Carson.

Preservationists are now engaged in a campaign to save the building—and they’re hoping one of today’s famous musicians can stop the wrecking ball from swinging.

They’re pleading with Jimmy Buffett, the singer-songwriter who parlayed his tales of laid-back beach life into the Margaritaville resort chain, to spare the building. Buffett’s company wants to knock it down and build a 20-plus-story playground for Parrotheads, as his fans are known, in what’s now a booming tourist district.

“Nobody’s trying to say, ‘Don’t do a Margaritaville, don’t do a hotel,’” says Kyle Kessler, an architect and amateur historian who launched a petition to save the building. “It would seem to me that a development and a brand that’s associated with a worldwide-known musician would only benefit from having a piece of musical heritage in proximity to their project.”

The story starts in 1923, when a talent scout for New York-based OKeh Records named Ralph Peer came to Atlanta with what was then the state-of-the-art in audio technology: portable recording gear.

“Record executives in New York were looking for new audiences to expand sales, and two big potential audiences were southern whites and southern African Americans,” says Steve Goodson, a historian at the University of West Georgia.

With the help of a local furniture scion named Polk Brockman, whose family store sold record players, Peer set up a studio in what was then a vacant building and put ads in the newspapers looking for talent. One of the people who responded was Carson, who was already something of a local celebrity.

Carson grew up in nearby Cobb County and settled in Atlanta’s Cabbagetown neighborhood, which was home to a textile mill and full of Appalachian transplants who worked there. He’d won several local fiddle competitions and played on Atlanta radio station WSB, which started broadcasting in 1922.

Record companies were worried about the competition from radio, and Peer wanted to open up a market for what was known then as “race music”—the blues—and “hillbilly music,” says Goodson, author of a book on Atlanta’s popular entertainment scene in that era.

“The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” was a minstrel-show tune that had become a mountain standard by the 1920s. Peer called it “pluperfect awful.” But listeners didn’t agree. Boosted by Brockman, its initial pressing of 500 discs quickly sold out.

Carson’s wasn’t the “absolute first” country record, Goodson says. “But his sold and caught people’s attention. That helped provide momentum to further recordings and the development of this industry in the South.”

And Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, said the recordings made on Nassau Street were “of tremendous significance.”

“It pains me and alarms me to hear that a sacred space so tightly tied to our country’s musical heritage might be demolished in favor of commercial concerns,” Young said in a written statement in support of the petition. “The Nassau building should be a place for education, appreciation, and reflection, and I urge that it be spared the wrecking ball.”

Peer also recorded black Atlanta musicians including the blues singer Fannie Mae Goosby and the pianist Eddie Heyward. The sessions proved successful enough that OKeh and other labels sent scouts to cities such as Memphis and New Orleans to seek out talent there. It’s that mix of early blues, jazz, and country that makes what happened on Nassau Street “a truly unique Atlanta story,” Kessler says.

“There were folks coming into the city, whether they were coming down from the mountains or in from the former plantations … coming into an industrialized city, and they were going to be sharing their cultures together,” he says.

The fight for 152 Nassau Street is a battle with echoes of Atlanta’s cultural and structural history.

Settled less than 30 years before Union Major General William Sherman put it to the torch during the U.S. Civil War, the city never has had much attachment to old buildings—or patience with those who would save them. Andrew Young, the civil rights activist who became mayor in the 1980s, once declared, “Atlanta has no character. We’re building it now.” Architectural landmarks, such as the Loew’s Grand Theater, where Gone With the Wind premiered in 1939, and the Terminal Station rail depot, were torn down before any kind of historic preservation movement caught on.

The first big success came in the 1970s, when preservationists managed to save the Casbah-styled Fox Theater, now the city’s premier concert hall. A historic preservation ordinance now covers 60 buildings and more than a dozen neighborhood districts. Other structures, including civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s birthplace and his family church, Ebenezer Baptist, are now part of the National Park Service.

“We’ve seen fits and starts. We’ve seen individual causes that have brought attention to a particular building that’s been saved,” Kessler says. “But the city still seems to be stuck in this mentality of, ‘This is the way we’ve always operated. We just tear stuff down. We don’t have any history that’s worth saving.’”

The story is also bound up in the city’s legacy of prejudice. Carson got an early taste of celebrity from a song he wrote about the 1913 killing of a pencil-factory worker named Mary Phagan. Today, it’s known as the case that led to the lynching of Phagan’s boss, Leo Frank, a Northern Jewish transplant.

The Frank case led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League—and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. Carson played at Klan rallies and performed at political rallies for segregationist politicians, Kessler says. But he was also involved in labor issues and played a 1933 benefit for a jailed black Communist union organizer that’s now seen as Atlanta’s first integrated concert.

“It’s a very complex story,” Kessler says. “This guy can be singing songs taken by anti-Semites to lynch Leo Frank, singing about African-American folk hero John Henry, he’s attending rallies fund-raising for the Klan, he’s also on Auburn Avenue at the first desegregated musical performance in the city’s history.”

But that history remains uncomfortable for both blacks and whites, Kessler says. During the civil rights movement, Atlanta rebranded itself a business-friendly “city too busy to hate” and then as an “international city”—a global commerce hub symbolized by the world’s busiest airport and its successful bid for the 1996 Olympics.

“Atlanta has always had this inferiority complex, always had this desire to be the New York or Chicago of the South,” Goodson says. But while city fathers would bring in highbrow traveling companies such as the Metropolitan Opera, “It’s this hillbilly and blues recording that really gives it a claim to fame. The Atlanta elite, its civic leaders and all, have never seen particular value in that.”

City planners have signed off on Margaritaville’s request for a demolition permit, which the company filed in December 2018. Margaritaville didn’t respond to requests for comment, and an inquiry to Buffett through his record label went unanswered. But Kessler and his supporters hope the company will incorporate the Nassau Street building into its design.

Peer went on to produce the 1927 recordings of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in Bristol, a mountain town on the Tennessee-Virginia line, that are sometimes called the “Big Bang” of country. And starting in the Great Depression, Tennessee became the genre’s center of gravity. The Grand Ole Opry on Nashville’s WSM radio station became the industry’s showcase, and major labels set up shop there after World War II.

Atlanta today is a hub for hip-hop and an incubator for indie rock and alt-country. It’s also been good to Buffett, who regularly played the city’s clubs on his way up and recorded part of his first live album at the Fox. Those fighting to save 152 Nassau are hoping that history will strike a chord with the singer, and that Margaritaville won’t let it waste away.

“Something significant happened in Atlanta in 1923, and this building is the last physical link to that,” Goodson says. “I would be ashamed to see it go.”

Writers and artists found them entrancing.

According to Herodotus, the fifth-century "father of history," travelers in Arabia would without a doubt encounter flying snakes, birds building nests out of cinnamon, and sheep whose massive tails dragged on the ground. To avoid damage to said tails, shepherds with carpentry skills built them supportive, wheeled carts. Herodotus, who lived in Greek cities such as Athens when he wasn't traveling, filled his histories with tall tales that he heard. But the fat-tailed sheep are very much real.

That fact comes as no surprise to much of the world, since some 25 percent of the world's sheep are fat-tailed varieties, according to the Oxford Companion to Food. For millennia, people have bred sheep with huge, fat-heavy tails, which can be found mainly in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Some breeds have heavy, curled tails, while others look like paddles. The tails of Awassi sheep can weigh around 26 pounds, which is modest compared to an 80-pound sheep tail described by 16th-century chronicler Leo Africanus.

For sheep, extra tail fat provides energy reserves in harsh climates. But for humans, the appeal is more culinary: Fat from the tail serves as an excellent preservative and cooking fat. Since tail fat is exposed to cold more often, According to food historian Charles Perry, it has a low melting point that contributes to a buttery rather than a waxy texture. Lebanese awarma, for example, consists of chopped lamb preserved in copious amounts of tail fat. A type of confit, it's often served as an accompaniment to eggs or hummus.

Artists from Israel to India immortalized fat-tailed sheep with rock paintings, mosaics, and glorious golden canvases. There's even a mention of fat-tailed sheep in the Bible. But to Europeans and Americans, who were used to thin-tailed sheep, the creatures were a jaw-dropping concept. Combined with the idea of tail carts, writes Jeremy Strong, fat-tailed sheep have "compelled the fascination of writers for at least 2,500 years."

Travel accounts and farmer's almanacs up until the 20th century breathlessly described fat-tailed sheep à la Herodotus: complete with the attached cart. Such descriptions led skeptics to question whether sheep with tail carts were mythical, on par with cinnamon birds. Yet while photographic evidence of modern tail-protectors is scant, scholar John Goodridge argues that they're very real, and cites 19th- and 20th-century references to sheep-tail carts in Afghanistan.

Huge tails might seem impractical. After all, many farmers of thin-tailed sheep dock tails almost entirely, to keep them from getting soiled or infected. But sheep fat was long appreciated for its taste and cooking usage, notes Perry. It's only now that tail fat as a flavoring and treat is slowly sliding from grace. After all, thousands of years of history are no match for a fat-fearing world.

It is considered one of the most comprehensive works on Cuba’s flora during the colonial period.

After the death of her husband Charles in 1817, an American woman named Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft moved to the Cuban province of Matanzas and began studying the island’s plant life. In the mid-1820s, she compiled that research into a stunning and extensive manuscript entitled Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba. Nearly two centuries after her own death in 1828, her work has been digitized and made available for download at the HathiTrust digital library, by way of Cornell University’s Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba is considered one of the most comprehensive works on Cuba’s plant life during the colonial period. “Its significance lies in the fact that it appears to be one of the earliest known botanical documents containing illustrations of Cuban flora,” writes Anne Sauer, the Stephen E. and Evalyn Milman Director of the RMC, in an email. “That it was also made by a relatively unknown, but clearly well-educated and dedicated female amateur botanist, is also extremely important.”

The watercolor illustrations of plants were all done by Wollstonecraft and includ an analysis of the plant and its biology. According to the Cuban historian and author Emilio Cueto, who gave a presentation on the manuscript in November 2018, only 145 illustrations had been done of plants in Cuba at this point in history. Wollstonecraft was responsible for at least 124.

Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft died just months after sending her manuscript to publishers in New York. However, she did see some of her other writings make it to print.

Under the pseudonym D’Anville, she published two letters detailing her exploration of Cuba’s ecology. In one correspondence entitled Letters from Cuba No. II, published in the spring of 1826 in Boston Monthly Magazine, she describes the array of stalactites hanging in the caves she visited, along with the “fine, full, deep, green foliage” that made up the countryside.

Wollstonecraft, who was Mary Wollstonecraft's sister-in-law and Mary Shelley’s aunt, wasn’t just a champion of natural history, but also fought for the betterment of women’s rights.

Using the same pseudonym, Wollstonecraft wrote The Natural Rights of Women, published a year before her letters in the same magazine. She calls for improvements to the American educational system and stresses that more opportunities need to be created for young girls to study literature and sciences:

“Ladies are no longer afraid, nor ashamed to be acquainted with history, with geography, with natural history, or with whatever has a tendency to enlarge their views, strengthen their understanding, improve their taste, or amend their heart.”

Around 220 pages of text along with 121 watercolor images can be viewed through the digital library. The manuscript appears to be missing 24 visuals, though it is unclear whether they have been lost, or were simply never created by Wollstonecraft in the first place.

Eco-friendly polar exploration on a WindSled.

On December 12, 2018, a four-person team departed from Russia's Novolazárevskaya Base in Antarctica in the hope of reaching the frozen continent's interior … by wind. That’s right: Ignacio Oficialdegui, Manuel Olivera, Hilo Moreno, and Ramón Larramendi, from Spain, traveled for 52 days by what is called a “WindSled” to the Fuji Dome—12,500 feet of ice, and one of the coldest places on Earth. Recently, they finally returned to their starting point.

The team, officially known as Asociación Polar Trineo de Viento, conquered 1,577 miles, LiveScience reports, at temperatures as low as -43.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Their WindSled, a modular vehicle equipped with solar panels and built-in tents was powered by a 1,600-square-foot kite. Though large and strong, the kite was battered by the groundbreaking journey, but not fatally, and the team of four returned in more or less perfect condition.

In a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA), which supported the expedition, Larramendi said, “This marks the first time we’ve climbed the Fuji Dome in a vehicle driven by the wind—everyone who reached there before relied on motorized vehicles.” Larramendi’s sled allowed for a zero-emission voyage to Antarctica’s inner territory, and also disassembles into a quaint bundle of its formerly imposing self, which makes it possible to be moved around the continent easily by plane.

The team completed their trip three days sooner than expected, and conducted 11 scientific experiments along the way, for a variety of agencies and universities. The projects ranged from testing sensors for NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover, to working with a snow-sampling drill for a University of Maine climate change study, to the callibration of ESA’s global navigation satellite system, Galileo. Javier Ventura-Traveset, head of ESA's Galileo Navigation Science Office, said in a statement: "We are very pleased with this pilot scientific experience, having been able to collect Galileo measurements all over the expedition trip as planned," and added that the expedition reached the “most southerly latitude measurements” with Galileo to date.

Larramendi and his team will return to Madrid early next week, where they will continue studying the data they collected over 52 days being pulled by a kite in the Antarctic. “It has been difficult but we consider this crossing a great scientific, technical, and geographical success,” Larramendi told greenland.net. “We have proved that it is possible to travel thousands of kilometers, with two tons of cargo, without polluting, and performing cutting-edge science, in a complex and inaccessible territory such as Antarctica.”

Atlas Obscura readers share their love for specific structures they feel have been unfairly maligned.

It's easy to put together collections of beautiful, soaring buildings that perfectly encapsulate today's hottest architectural trends. But who will speak for the edifices that have gone largely out of favor since they were first constructed? The imposing behemoths and the strangely angled stars of yesteryear's design fads? Atlas Obscura readers, that's who. We recently asked members of our community to tell us about the "ugly" buildings they love, and you weren't shy in sharing your appreciation for your favorite misunderstood structures.

While the style certainly doesn't have a monopoly on unconventionally attractive architecture, the majority of the responses we received pointed to brutalist institutional buildings—especially those featured on college campuses. But overall, what all of your nominees ultimately have in common is a way of inspiring devotion in spite of (or sometimes because of) the way they appear on the outside.

Take a look at a collection of some of our favorite responses below, and if you want to see more, or even add your own, head over to the Community forums and join the conversation!

Hilton San Francisco Financial District

San Francisco, California

“I nominate the Hilton San Francisco Financial District, which was formerly the Holiday Inn Chinatown. In both incarnations, it’s a hulking concrete pile towering above the neighborhood, but there’s nonetheless something lovable about it. Maybe it’s the cool, futuristic concrete bridge that connects it to the park across the street?” — tyler

University of Colorado Engineering Center

Boulder, Colorado

"The Engineering Center campus building at University of Colorado, Boulder is often called the ugliest building in the campus, because it’s decidedly different from the rest of the ‘Tuscan’ style buildings on campus. It definitely stands out, but I don’t think it’s ugly. I’ve spent many hours hanging out and exploring the nooks and crannies of this building, even though I wasn’t an Engineering student." — nagnabodha

Boston City Hall

Boston, Massachusetts

“Boston City Hall is a brutalist beauty!” — sethhardmeyer

Wescoe Hall at the University of Kansas

Lawrence, Kansas

“I lean towards Wescoe Hall on the University of Kansas campus. And, although the outside leaves a lot to be desired, the inside is also an underwhelming, dated, and drab labyrinth of winding and looping hallways. Story has it that the building originally started as a parking garage, but soon became the English department. Whether or not that’s true, I still haven’t heard.” — hallucin

House of the Soviets

Kaliningrad, Russia

“Used to live in Kaliningrad, Russia. We called the (still-unfinished) House of the Soviets building, ‘the robot head.’” — wilsongriffin

The Point

Milton Keynes, U.K.

“In Milton Keynes there is a building everyone loves to hate: The Point. It is apparently going to be demolished soon, but at one time this was relatively famous as the home of the U.K.’s first multiplex. It also used to light up at night and it could be seen for miles.” — claudiarosani

Buchanan Tower at the University of British Columbia

Vancouver, British Colombia

“This ugly brute is called Buchanan Tower. It’s on the University of British Columbia campus and houses most of the offices of the Arts professors. It’s by far the ugliest building on campus, but also the coziest, and it has a special place in all of our hearts (especially those in the History department).” — ccass927

Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist

Chicago, Illinois

“Never been in, but it catches my eye every time I pass by.” — tylercortner

The Institute of Texan Cultures

San Antonio, Texas

“The Institute of Texan Cultures building [in] San Antonio, Texas, was the Texas State Pavilion for the 1968 World’s Fair and now it’s the home of the Institute of Texan Cultures museum. It’s also the site of the city’s annual Asian New Year Festival, which I’ve gone to almost every year since at least 2002. I missed 2017 and it threw off my sense of time for the rest of the year. Apparently my brain has come to accept the Asian New Year Festival as a sign that it’s February and can’t really accept that it’s March or later without it.” — Olivia

Wurster Hall at the University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, California

“Marring UC Berkeley’s park-like Beaux Arts/City Beautiful/Neoclassical–inspired campus is Wurster Hall, a colorless, asymmetrical, brutalist argument against form following function. Cal’s ugliest building houses its architecture program, as its students will tell you with both irony and a strange sense of pride. The interior is exactly as attractive as the facade, sculpted from the same cold, unadorned concrete, and left largely unfinished, so that the students can see examples of a building’s working systems simply by looking up to follow the tubes, pipes, and conduits running across the ceilings. The only splash of color you’ll find is the abundance of graffiti in the stairwells, left by there by the students on the rare occasions when they escape the confines of the upper-floor studios.” — pds888

Église de la Très Sainte Trinité de Strasbourg

Strasbourg, France

“Somehow, most buildings that fascinate me in an ugly/lovable way are churches?! In Strasbourg, France, most churches look alike (they’re made from a darkish pink stone like the cathedral), and either pretty or unnoticeable. But there are exceptions. This one, that kind of looks like a space building from Interstella 5555 that was made for worshiping wheat (?!) in the 60s. Why do I love you, ugly, brownish church? Why?” — Bouboulina

Pirelli Tire Building

New Haven, Connecticut

“My hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, has plenty of ugly and harsh, brutalist architecture, but the old Pirelli Tire building on Long Wharf, which was designed by Marcel Breuer, has always been my favorite. It’s fascinated me since I was a kid.” — jmang

Central Hall at the University of York

York, U.K.

“Students at the University of York, U.K., get to graduate in this wonderful concrete spaceship. It’s stuffy, surrounded by waterfowl, and was apparently once wrecked during a Boomtown Rats concert, but it’s such an iconic piece of the campus that there would probably be outcry if it is ever scheduled for demolition.” — AmunyAnkhesenra

Oresundskollegiet*

Amagerbro, Copenhagen

“I lived here for a few months and would always joke about its very prison-like appearance.

*Kollegiums are dorm-like communal residences for students in Denmark.” — Ashley_Wolfgang

Physical Sciences Center at the University of Oklahoma

Norman, Oklahoma

“I nominate the Physical Sciences building at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. It is an unfortunate, running joke on campus that it is ugly. In fact, it is often treated as a unanimous opinion, and even called ugly on promotional tours. There are apocryphal ‘facts’ about its riot-proof origins (these rumors are also present for many brutalist buildings on college campuses around the country), and is affectionately called ‘The Blender’ due to its base+high rise arrangements.

However, I love this building. I think its brutalist, neo-modernist appearance is fantastic, and a breath of fresh air from the anglophilic, samey, ‘we want to be Harry Potter’ neo-gothic appearance of other ‘pretty’ campus buildings. I find its somewhat imposing nature beautiful. It was designed by two very notable Oklahoma architects, and I believe that its maligned reputation is misinformed and not respectful of its historical and aesthetic significance.” — joeyalb

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Los Angeles, California

“This is definitely the funkiest chicken (building) in L.A. Possibly the funkiest chicken building anywhere. It’s weird, but I’ve come to appreciate it.” — ericrapp19

Pope Enterprises

Douglasville, Georgia

“So ugly but I do love it. There’s a fire escape on the other side that local runners run up and down. My old office was across the street so I’ve spent years looking at this monster.” — Lolaswhitetrashparad

Social Sciences and Humanities Building at the University of California, Davis

Davis, California

“The Social Sciences building at the University of California, Davis, known as the Death Star, inspires love or loathing. It has endless weird passages and walkways that my teenage sons used for capture the flag games.” — kosmick

Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel

Toronto, Ontario

“I’m from Toronto, Canada, and I immediately think of the Sheraton hotel downtown. It’s across the street from our City Hall, and in a prime tourist district, and it looks like it went through some kind of horrible war. It’s a heck of an eyesore, but I know we’d miss it if it was gone!” — kathrynkef

Robarts Library at the University of Toronto

Toronto, Canada

“It looks like an ugly concrete 2D pixel peacock.” — Andy416

Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona

“The first time I saw Frank Lloyd Wright’s Grady Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University I laughed out loud. I still think it’s literally one of the loopiest creations, heart-tuggingly ugly, like the wrong wedding dress.” — Urbanerds

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The decks suggested proper technique, and were a path to class mobility.

Push back your chair and sharpen your knife. It’s dinnertime in 17th-century England, and you happen to be flush enough to get your hands on a plump, juicy turkey. You’ve gathered friends and family, and now it is time to carve the bird. You want to make sure there are enough pieces to go around, but also impress your guests with your dexterity—or, at the very least, not splatter them with grease and bits of skin.

Today, you might watch an instructional video, but then you may have turned to a deck of playing cards.

“The genteel house-keeper’s passtime, or the mode of carving at the table represented by a pack of playing cards” was a deck and accompanying booklet first issued by London printer Joseph Moxon in 1677. It had roughly the same dimensions as any other deck, but these cards had a purpose beyond games: to teach people how to carve, hack, and disarticulate any (formerly) living thing they planned to serve. The booklet argued that proper carving can curb waste and buoy appetites. “Methodical cutting,” the anonymous author wrote in a 1693 edition, would protect “weak stomachs” from heaving at the sight of “disorderly mangling a Joynt or Dish of good meat.”

Each suit corresponds to a different type of meat. Feeling fishy? Deal the clubs to learn to how to gut a salmon or dismantle a lobster. The diamonds were for fowl, from duck to pheasant to pigeon (which shouldn’t be carved, but simply “cut through the middle from the rump to the neck”). The hearts featured “flesh of beats,” from the “Sir Loyn of Beef” to a haunch of venison—“begun to be cut near the buttock”—and a boars’ head, which “comes to the Table with its Snout standing upward and a sprig of Rosemary tuck[ed] in it.” Coney, or rabbit, was “most times brought to the Table with the Head off” and placed alongside the body. Instructions for carving "baked meats," such as pies and pasties, were on the spades.

The cards were schematics, but quite vague. The booklet was a useful addition, as it broke down the drawings step by step, describing the process of cleaving wings and thighs and offering tips for adding flourishes to the finished dish. Capon ought to be ringed with thin slices of oranges and lemons around the serving platter, while a goose called for sugary, buttery apples, or maybe some gooseberries or grapes. Lobster meat was best served “mingled or tempered with grated Bread and Vinegar,” and garnished with fennel or a dash of green herbs. The booklet also outlined how the carver should behave and dress. Neatly attired knife-wielders ought to avoid manhandling the meat with their fingers—and if poking couldn’t be avoided, only the thumb or forefinger would do.

“I would say these were not intended for game play,” according to Timothy Young, the playing-card librarian and curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. They weren’t especially cheap to make—cards called for pasting many leaves of paper together so they would hold up to repeat use—but they were particularly useful for conveying information. Educational decks were fairly common at the time, Young says, covering everything from constellations to the countries of the world and historic kings and queens. Cards were portable and easy to pass around, which made them popular among tutors with multiple pupils. They had obvious appeal for the kitchen or dining room. A card tacked to the wall or leaned against a tray on the table would have been a relief for a harried chef wrist-deep in a roast, who might otherwise leave a trail of unsavory smudges across book pages.

The cards fit in with a trove of domestic manuals and instructional books that had come on the market in England in the 16th century, says Jennifer Park, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who works on Renaissance recipes, games, and ephemera. “The idea was that what was [once] in the domain of professionals, you can now do in your household, in your private space,” Park says. “It’s not secret knowledge that’s locked away.” Though this manual and deck were penned by an anonymous writer, the text promises readers that the tips were “set forth by several of the best Masters in the Faculty of Carving, and Published for publick life.”

Beyond teaching useful skills, the cards also helped home chefs reach toward higher status. Young sees the deck as an early example of the middle-class thirst for upward mobility. Moxon’s cards were “designed to aid families who had become wealthy enough to serve meat to guests, but were not yet wealthy enough to hire professional carvers,” writes Edward A. Malone, a professor of technical communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology, in a 2008 paper about playing cards’ history as vehicles for technical know-how and scientific information. The cards would have been indispensable kitchen tools for “people who want to have this mannered, proper way to cook and present food, but don’t depend on people doing it for them,” Young says. The truly wealthy had no need to know how to wield a knife with confidence or elegance, Young adds—their kitchen staff had those skills, and they had little inclination to get their hands dirty. Moneyed diners would think, Young says, “‘I don’t know, I go to dinner and it’s just there.’”

It’s hard to know for sure how many decks were in circulation—Young says contemporary claims about print runs ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, because they were often inflated to drum up publicity—or exactly when they stopped showing up in English kitchens. (There’s no way to gauge when a shop would have worked through its stock.) Malone writes that they were available for roughly four decades, and “must have been popular at the price of 1 shilling per pack.” (The booklet, he adds, was a half-shilling more.) The Beinecke has some loose cards produced around 1680, plus a version from 1693 that had not been cut from the original printing. Wellesley College has a version from 1717, attributed to a different printer who likely acquired the rights—and maybe even the plates—to reprint Moxon’s designs. Judging by the scarcity of other records, the cards probably didn’t have a shelf life much beyond the early 18th century. After that, Young says, “we assume that they dropped out of circulation because we don’t have anything until much later facsimiles.” For the generations of carvers who followed their lead, though, the cards were much more than just an appetizing novelty.