Dave Shealy and the Skunk Ape sculpture. (Photo: Lucia Davis)

Unlike the elusive primate that it chronicles, it's impossible to miss The Skunk Ape Research Headquarters.

Tucked in the middle of Florida's Everglades, there's no easy way to get there—one road in, one road out. You'll have been driving for almost two hours when suddenly, it emerges from the swampscape. There are signs, of course, bright vintage green and gigantic, but the undeniable evidence that you're in the right place is the six-foot tall statue of an open-armed King Kong cousin—or, as it's called in these parts, a Skunk Ape. 

An illustration from Everglades Skunk Ape Research Field Guide by David Shealy. (Photo: Courtesy www.skunkape.info)

Virtually unknown outside of the Everglades, the Skunk Ape is allegedly a large, bipedal mammal that lives exclusively in south Florida's tropical wetlands. Legend has it that males of the species can stand more than six and a half feet tall and tip the scales at 450 pounds. Even at that size, it's smaller than your average Sasquatch, which can supposedly grow up to 10 feet tall and weigh more than 1,000 pounds.

Like its relative, it's a cryptid—an animal whose existence has been suggested but has not been discovered or documented by the mainstream scientific community. The term applies to living creatures considered to be extinct, such as Kenya’s Muhuru bay monster; wild animals inhabiting places drastically far from their natural habitat, like Phantom Kangaroos; and beasts that appear in myths or are reported. The Skunk Ape falls into the final category, joined by the likes of The Jersey Devil, Nessie and the Chupacabra. Because of its reliance on anecdotal evidence rather than scientific proof, cryptozoology is not recognized as a branch of zoology nor as a scientific discipline. As such, devotees ardently search for hard evidence of existence, like DNA samples or a body.

The Skunk Ape is no different and the mission of the Research Headquarters is to find proof.

Inside the research center. (Photo: Lucia Davis)

The man behind the monster is Dave Shealy, who has dedicated his life to studying this evasive, probably imaginary creature. An Everglades native, Shealy grew up hearing about Skunk Apes as a child, as some creature hiding in the swamps. Though President Truman formally dedicated Everglades National Park in 1947, the original 2.2 million acre tract was a fraction of the total land area now protected by the government. It wasn't until 1978 that the majority of the region was officially declared a wilderness area. Born in 1963 in what's now Big Cypress National Preserve, Shealy is among the last generation of locals not from the Seminole tribe. As such, the area had a much higher residential population during Shealy's childhood. More people meant more Skunk Ape sightings. "It was kind of the topic of conversation at the time," Shealy says.

Shealy was just 10 years old the first time he laid eyes on a Skunk Ape. "There was a rule around the house: if my brother, Jack, and I could kill a deer before school, we didn't have to go to class," Shealy tells me. One misty morning, hunting for hooky in the high grass, Jack spotted movement up ahead. "He lifted me up to where I could see over the grass and, maybe a 100 yards away, there was an animal—looked like a man covered with hair walking across the field in front of us," he recalled. Excited and terrified, the boys ran home to tell their parents.

In the 40 years since that cardinal encounter, Shealy has become the leading, if not the only, Skunk Ape expert. In addition to establishing the headquarters, he's written a field guide; made countless television appearances; been interviewed by dozens of publications, from The Smithsonian to The Naples Daily News; and has seen the creature on three additional occasions since that first boyhood sighting. From Gatorland veterinarians to park rangers, if there's something strange in the neighborhood, Shealy's on speed dial.

Shealy with a plaster cast of a Skunk Ape footprint and an image of a Skunk Ape footprint. (Photo: Courtesy www.skunkape.info)

This is why, four years ago, a pair of terrified tourists wandered into the Research Headquarters—a ranger sent them.

"There was an incident on the Turner River Road, which was reported to the National Parks Service," Shealy prefaced before recounting a series of events part “creature feature," part Thelma and Louise. Two vacationing European women were photographing bromeliads when they heard something rustling in the nearby bushes. They turned towards the sound and were confronted by a male Skunk Ape, standing just feet from their rented convertible. Not only was he agitated, but he appeared to be “ready to mate,” Shealy recalls with a chuckle. A leering Bigfoot looking for romance is hilarious in theory, but proved terrifying in person.

"They ran around the car, jumped in over the windshield, and took off down to the park service to tell them what happened. By the time they got here, more than an hour had passed but they were still shaking," Shealy says. "They were very afraid."

Though colorful, this was a very atypical Skunk Ape encounter. "It's the only occasion I've seen where anybody was frightened by one," Shealy says. "There’s never been a reported incident of a Skunk Ape ever attacking a person," he adds, "but there’s an old legend here in the 'glades that if you go in the woods and hurt one of them, you’ll never get out of the woods alive. And there are many people unaccounted for, missing, in the Everglades."

Vintage sign in the research center's reptile zoo. (Photo: Lucia Davis)

Tan, jovial and seemingly rational, you wouldn't peg Shealy as a man deeply invested in the cryptozoology cause. Shealy admitted that, apart from “education,” the primary drive behind his Skunk Ape research is the fact that local jobs are scarce and "there's not much to do around here.” Still, the Research Headquarters has drawn countless zealots out of the woodwork, much to Shealy’s amusement. From the UFO enthusiast who insisted Shealy must have been abducted by aliens because “only the chosen ones can see Sasquatch," to the threatening calls in the middle of the night from Bigfoot devotees telling him he was "full of it," Shealy's efforts have not gone unnoticed in the vast community of true believers.

"It’s just something that’s interesting, it never gets boring," Shealy told me. "I’ve fished and hunted all my life. I’m fished and hunted out." In fact, more than anything else, Shealy comes off as . . . an environmentalist. In addition to possessing an in-depth knowledge Everglades flora and fauna—from the legendary (the ghost orchid) to the stuff of legends (the Skunk Ape)—Shealy shows great respect for the preservation of the region. "I get these jerks calling me, 'Hey we’re coming down to the Everglades, we want to go out on an airboat, we want to hunt a Bigfoot!'" Shealy recalled, with disgust. "You can’t airboat here! I don’t know what world you live in, but it’s not what’s going on here. People just got the wrong idea."

Skunk Ape sighting (maybe.)(Photo: Courtesy www.skunkape.info)            

He's licensed by the National Park to do kayak rentals and swamp buggy tours, the latter which Shealy says is the most effective way to get out into the wild and look for a Skunk Ape. "The truth of the matter is, we’re on a government trail and we can’t go off of it," Shealy tells me. "If I had my way, we’d be 10 miles from here at the end of this swamp instead of over here where everybody’s at, but this is where we got to be."

"We’re right here in the heart of the Everglades, and it is, as a matter of fact, the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi," Shealy explains. "With the state lands and the National Parks, all combined, total’s over three million acres. If you ever want to go out into the middle of nowhere in Florida, this is about as close as you can get." Consequently, it's the same habitat the Skunk Ape calls home.

That spider is sitting on a goldmine! (Photo: Takuma Kimura on Flickr)

At Will Knight’s Spider Web Farm in Williamstown, Vermont, the farmers don’t rely on Charlotte’s Web-style barnyard serendipity to make silk—the arachnid webs are carefully cultivated on frames. Once a web is spun, it is spray painted white to make it stand out, preserving the work with a layer of lacquer and a wooden frame. The spiders (orb-weaver spiders to be exact) are just creating a home, but to Knight, they are spinning fractal works of art, each as unique as a snowflake. Both see spider silk in different ways, but one thing is clear. It’s a miraculous material.

Almost ephemerally light, and marvelously resilient, spider silk is one of nature’s miracle materials, that we as humans have never been able to replicate in any quantity worth noting. Knight is not the only one who saw the artistic potential in spider silk. In fact, the single largest piece of spider silk cloth ever created was made as a piece of art. Finished in 2009, a large golden cape was created that spanned 11 feet by 4 feet of intricately embroidered silk cloth. The project was spearheaded by artists Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley, who oversaw a team of over 80 workers who toiled for four years to create the garment. Dozens of people would head out into the Madagascar wilderness to collect golden orb spiders, which would then be milked for their silk. This silk was then woven into thread for the cape. In the end, it was estimated that over a million spiders were used in the creation of the golden throw.

Yes, that is pure spider silk, in its natural color. (Photo: Ian Irving on Flickr) 

While these uses focus on the aesthetic beauty of the material, its durability is also a thing of legend (and science). There is an oft-repeated adage that says spider silk is stronger that steel, and in some ways this is true. While a strand of spider silk is not necessarily harder to break than a strand of steel the same size would be, spider silk has a remarkable amount of elasticity that allows it to bend and absorb energy in ways that steel, and really, most other popular materials cannot match. This property has made spider silk a popular candidate for the future of armor. Were scientists able to harvest enough silk to create a layered piece of body armor, it is theorized that it would be as much as three times stronger than kevlar, as well as lighter and more flexible.

Silk’s amazing ability to absorb shock energy has other potential applications such as in airbags and replacement joints.

The strength and elasticity of spider silk is not its only sought after feature. Spider webs are also naturally adhesive, as anyone who has ever gotten themselves tangled in one can attest to. This natural glue is unique in that it needs to be wet to work properly, which is the exact opposite of most synthetic adhesives. This natural stickiness could have uses ranging from waterproof bandages to ship repair.

Ship glue? (Photo: Vincent Lock on Flickr)

So, why aren’t we all driving silk cars and diving into battle wearing spider-armor? It’s simply because we are just not as skilled at making spider silk as spiders are. We are able to harvest spider silk in small quantities, and in fact, already have been for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks are said to have made bandages out of the stuff, and Native Australian fishermen have been observed using silk for fishing line. Strands of the silk were even used in telescopes and gun sights up until World War II. Unfortunately, even in the modern day, obtaining the silk has required farming the silk from the spider is a laborious and delicate process that does not produce enough for large-scale production (see the four-year cape above).

Many materials researchers and companies have endeavored to produce silk without the spider, but no matter science’s best efforts, we have yet to perfectly recreate what arachnids spin out so naturally. Everything from synthetic materials to injecting spider-genetics has been attempted without complete success. Some scientists in Utah have even gone so far as to splice goats with spider DNA, that they might produce silk in their milk. Truly the mad quest for silk will be our doom.

Despite the heated quest to find a way to literally make the most out of spider silk, Will Knight is content to just let them do their thing, allowing the spiders to mold their super-strong, material gold into beautiful shapes. The framed webs might not stop a bullet, or revolutionize materials science, but he sees how amazing the silken constructions are all by themselves.

Knight's creations. (Photo: Michelle Enemark on Atlas Obscura)

If you’d like to see Will Knight’s webbed creations for yourself, visit the farm during our Obscura Day Event on May 30th.

Rhodiola rosea. (Photo: Botanischer Garten TU Darmstat/Flickr) 

Al Poindexter’s front yard in the south-central plain of Alaska has been taken over by a spread of more than 2,000 cell trays, each growing dozens of plants that look “like something you’d expect from Mars,” he says. The little ones look like little nubs; the larger ones are no more than an inch tall and feature a spiral of fleshy leaves.

“I tried killing it—you can’t kill it. That’s my kind of plant,” says Poindexter. “It can go weeks without water. Moose don’t eat it, rabbits don’t eat it, weather doesn’t seem to bother it. It’s a real easy plant to grow.”

This is Rhodiola rosea—golden root, rose root—a succulent that was used for centuries as folk medicine and once considered something of a Soviet military secret. Decades ago, the Soviets realized that Rhodiola could boost energy and help manage stress. These days, a small group of Alaskan farmers are hoping that it could enter the pantheon of plants (coffee, chocolate, coca) whose powers people take seriously—and, along the way, become Alaska’s most valuable crop.

In Alaska, farmers spend a lot of time trying to coax plants that would prefer to be growing elsewhere into surviving in Alaska’s tough conditions. Rhodiola, though, comes from Siberia’s Altai Mountains, and it seems right at home in the frigid ground.

“It’s actually an environment that the plant wants to grow in, as opposed to everything else we grow in Alaska,” says Stephen Brown, a professor and district agriculture agent at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. “It’ll grow in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. It wants our long days. It’s already coming up out of the ground—and the ground’s still frozen."

Rhodiola growing in a test plot in Alaska (Photo: Stephen Brown)

In the northerly parts of the world, reports of rhodiola use go back centuries—long before Carl Linnaeus first named the plant in the 18th century. It was thought to boost strength and endurance, as well as help with altitude sickness. One analogy, Stephen Brown says, it that, if caffeine makes a person’s engine run faster, “Rhodiola gives you a bigger gas tank.”

For decades, Soviet researchers worked on divining the source and strength of the plant’s power. It’s not entirely clear when their investigations began: a significant portion, Rhodiola enthusiasts say, was never published but kept close in Russia government files. In 1961, one ecologist led an expedition to the Altai mountains to search for the source of the root, and by mid-decade, serious study into the plants’ effects had started, a group of researchers reported in the journal HerbalGram in 2002.

“It was considered a Soviet military secret,” says Dr. Petra Illig, the founder of Alaska Rhodiola Products, a cooperative of Rhodiola farmers. “Most of what was done back then was unpublished and hidden in drawers in Moscow. They used it for the physical and mental performance of their soldiers and athletes.” She and other investigators have confirmed that cosmonauts in the country's space program have also experimented with Rhodiola.

One of the first vocal advocates for Rhodiola in the United States was Dr. Zakir Ramazanov, a professor of plant biochemistry and co-author of the HerbalGram article. He first encountered it during his service in the Soviet-Afghan war—not through any official source, but a fellow soldier whose family sent him Rhodiola to make into energy-boosting tea. When he came to United States in the 1990s, he started importing the plant and would travel back to the former Soviet Union to try to collect the associated studies. He was able to trace the history of Soviet research back to the 1940s, Science News reported in 2007.

Rhodiola growing in Norway (Photo: Randi Hausken/Flickr)

Dr. Illig, who’s “a standard show-me-an-x-ray-and-blood-test doctor,” as she puts it, first found out about Rhodiola from that Science News article. She had recently moved up to Alaska, and “had more time on my hands than money,” she says. She started looking into it, figuring that since Rhodiola grew in the Siberian mountains that it would also grow in Alaskan mountains. By 2010, she had given over her yard to Rhodiola seedlings—100,000 of them. She applied to the state for a grant to expand the operation, which is how Stephen Brown got pulled into the project.

“We get a lot of these application where someone is proposing these herbal medicines,” he says. “I would refer to them as ‘unicorn and rainbow’ applications”—filled with promises of cure-alls. Rhodiola, though, was different: it was backed by credible citations and peer-reviewed literature. Brown wasn’t convinced the plant actually had beneficial properties, but thought if there was a market for Rhodiola, it might be worth growing, regardless.

Now, though, he’s a convert.  “I'm a marathon runner and I'm trying to do marathon in every state,” he says. “Normally, I hit the wall at mile 19.” But, then he decided to try Rhodiola. “I never had that sense of total exhaustion I normally get. That’s when I realized that there’s something to this.”

(Photo: Tero Laakso/Flickr)

Among Rhodiola boosters, personal conversion stories like this one abound—though they’re quick to say that of course there needs to be more peer-reviewed research of the highest quality, including double-blind studies. The studies that have been published, however, do show that Rhodiola has extended the life of “flies, worms and yeast.” And it's been reported that sales are growing in American health food markets, and even faster in U.S. mainstream markets, where it’s been newly introduced.

What matters for Alaskan farmers is that, compared to crops like potatoes, Rhodiola has the potential to be sold at a much higher price per acre. “The big thing we’re trying to do right now is to expand the acreage,” says Brown. There are about five acres, in total, under cultivation right now. “At 200 acres, it would be the most valuable crop in the state.”

A crocodile mummy mask at the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich (Photo: captmondo/Wikimedia)

In addition to mummifying humans, the ancient Egyptians mummified millions of animals—ibises, cats, crocodiles—as offerings to gods.  

"You would go to a special site, buy an animal mummy, using a system of barter. You'd then give it to a priest, who would collect a group of animal mummies and bury them," Egyptologist Lidija McKnight explained to the BBC.

But when McKnight and her colleagues at the University of Manchester recently scanned about 800 of these animal mummies, using CT scans and X-rays, they found something surprising: only a third had full skeletons inside. Some had partial remains, but many—about a third of all the mummies examined—contained only sticks, muds, and some animal-related products, like feathers or eggshells.

McKnight's theory is that mummy-makers just couldn't breed and then preserve enough animals to keep up with demand—and these small amounts of animal materials were enough to appease the gods to which they were offered. To speculate for a second, maybe the mummy-makers were just acting like good entrepreneurs and making different products for different price-points. After all, it's not everyone who can afford a fully mummified crocodile, with actual crocodile heads inside.

Not all animal mummies are empty. (Photo: University of Manchester, Manchester Museum)

Every morning, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com

(Photo: Carolina Freitas)

In the floodplains of the Brazilian Amazon, in lakes where the currents are not too strong, there are floating forest islands—locals call them matupás. It’s difficult to walk on the surface. They are, Carolina Freitas was told, very dangerous places. Alligators and snakes—including, by legend, the Giant Anaconda—congregate here.

Freitas, who is an ecology researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, in Brazil, first heard about the islands when she was traveling through the Piagaçu-Purus reserve. She was told that some people were using the islands to grow watermelons, but the more she asked about the floating islands, the more fascinating they seemed—and the less known to science.  

In the sparse scientific literature, there are a few, anecdotal references to animals, mostly manatees and alligator-like reptiles called caimans, spending time on these islands. But Freitas’ interview subjects mentioned many more—yellow-headed side-neck turtles, fish like arapaima, capybaras, jaguars, pumas, snakes, and all sorts of birds. The most surprising rumored inhabitant of matupás, though, might be the snake known as the Giant Anaconda.

(Photo: Florian Wittmann)

As she learned more about matupás, Freitas realized that the people living in the area had detailed ecological knowledge of this phenomenon, and she set out to collect it. Matupás, she and her colleagues report in a paper recently published in PLOS ONE, begin when aquatic and semi-aquatic plants begin to crowd together and transform, over time, into a buoyant soil disc where shrubs and trees feel at home. The islands can be almost 10 feet thick and anywhere from a few square yards to a few acres in size. Some are strong enough for people to walk on—strong enough even to grow food on.

They’re created when blocks of grass assemble during the flood season, sink to the bottom and begin to rot. This happens in a particular type of lake, located in lowland areas flooded by white water rivers and deep enough that they never dry up entirely. During the dry seasons, those amalgamation of rotting grass float back up, forming a raft for seeds to grow on. This process continues for years—as one interview subject told Freitas, “It dies, it lives, dies, lives. And when you think it’s gone, there it is again, fully formed.”

Sucurijú Gigante, the snake that controls the rivers (Photo: joabe_brill/Flickr)

The Giant Anaconda is also a character in Amazonian folklore—a guardian of water and aquatic life.  “I had no idea that for local people matupás were so closely related to the Giant Anaconda,” says Freitas. “I realized that much of the local fear regarding matupás probably has to do with it.”

Not everyone Freitas interviewed made this connection, and some people were embarrassed to mention it, she says. But a small segment thought the correlation between the two was essential: “We think the snake’s got a magnet to make the matupá grow where she lives,” one person told Freitas.

“Everyone was very impressed when they knew that I wanted to conduct research about matupás,” says Freitas. “People actually seemed to find me a little bit crazy for wanting to work in these floating islands.”

The amazing Kaiser Library, before the recent disastrous earthquakes. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

Since 1895, Kathmandu has had a library so fantastical that its outdoor area is called the Garden of Dreams. “I can only describe this incredible place as a living Wes Anderson tribute to Orientalism,” writes archaeologist Alex Urmeneta about the Kaiser Library, originally a private library housing over 28,000 books, including some of the oldest surviving in the world. The decor involved huge animal heads and leather couches; some texts are impossibly ancient, written in long-dead languages.

On April 25th, when the Nepal earthquake hit, it was, perhaps irreparably, damaged. The 120-year-old palace that houses the library now boasts a new sign, reading “unsafe to enter.” The chief librarian estimated to the AFP that about a third of its book collection is damaged. 

A view from the stacks, in happier times. (Photo: Ang/Flickr.)

Kaiser Shamsher, whose full name and title is “Field Marshal Sir Kaiser Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana,” was the son of the prime minister of Nepal during the Rana Dynasty, which ruled the country from 1846 to 1951. In 1895, the prime minister built his son what’s now known as the Kaiser Mahal in Kathmandu, and in 1920 completed the Garden of Dreams, a massive Edwardian garden full of fountains, pavilions, verandas, and birdhouses.

Note the ornate mini-columns next to columns. (Photo: Ang/Flickr)

As the son of the Nepalese prime minister, Kaiser Shamsher spent a great deal of time in Europe, especially in England, and developed an obsession with the English library. He began collecting books and various tchotchkes that could form the backbone of a glorious private library. Until the 1950s, it was just that—a private library, its use restricted to Kaiser Shamsher, his friends, and family. According to the library’s website, he even kept it private after democracy came to Nepal in 1950. But in 1964, he bequeathed it to the government of Nepal for private use after his death, and in 1969 it opened to the public under the name Kaiser Library.

It is an extraordinary place, a curious blend of British understated luxury, flamboyant South Asian palatial architecture, and almost self-consciously “exotic” touches. There are somber dark wood desks lying next to taxidermied fully-grown tigers, all in view of spectacular branching stairways. Animal heads and weapons line the walls. The book collection spans first editions of the classics of the 19th century to rare texts, some over a thousand years old.

 
The back of Kaiser Library, leading into the Garden of Dreams. (Photo: 3dom/Flickr.)

Perhaps the most precious is the Susruta Samhita, a palm-leaf manuscript that is dated to 878 AD. It is written in Rañjanā script, the Nepali version of calligraphy, and is the oldest Ayurvedic text in the world. The text discusses various medical cures and tinctures and, especially, surgeries, and is considered one of the most important historical medical texts in the world.

The Kaiser Library did not return requests for comment, which makes sense because international press reports say that he late-April earthquake in Nepal has left it in shambles. (Another earthquake, 7.3 and centered at Everest, hit just this morning.) The library has around 60,000 books, documents, periodicals and manuscripts, and perhaps most scary for the collection is the incoming monsoon season, which begins in the early summer, only a few weeks away. Structurally, the library has sustained significant damage and nobody is quite sure how the government will repair it. In the meantime, there are lots of ways to donate to the rebuilding and rescue efforts in Nepal.

John Lanzendorf: hairdresser to the stars and unparalleled collector of dino art. (Photo: Courtesy Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)

“At one time, I could name 700 dinosaurs,” says John Lanzendorf.

Lanzendorf, 69, is a hairstylist who has coiffed Chicago’s socialites for 51 years. He’s styled Rita Hayworth, Raquel Welch, Angela Lansbury and other celebrities. He is also an obsessive collector who amassed a staggeringly vast portfolio of dinosaur art. Once, his 1,250 square foot Chicago apartment was the Louvre of Terrible Lizards: Busts of long-necked Shunosaurus and Dicraeosaurus looked down upon massive sculptures of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus. Bronzes of Dimetrodon and Triceratops commanded tabletops and floors. His collection roamed into every room.

“It got so big, I couldn’t turn around,” says Lanzendorf. 

To a layperson, dinosaur art—or “paleoart"—may conjure up images of goofy roadside attractions or tail-dragging cartoons. But far from spinning out silly caricatures, the best-regarded paleoartists study current research and work with scientists to create the most accurate images of prehistoric animals possible. Without paleoartists, dinosaurs remain an assemblage of bones in the popular imagination. But despite a global fascination with dinosaurs, paleoart collecting was, and remains, rare. When Lanzendorf started stockpiling paleoart, word spread. Paleoartists started talking about the hairdresser in Chicago who was buying dinosaur art. They sought him out and offered him their works. Prolific and passionate, Lanzendorf soon assembled what is one of the largest—if not the largest —collection of dinosaur art in the world.

An example of paleoart by Donna Braginetz. (Photo: Courtesy The Children's Museum of Indianapolis)

As a teenager in Spooner, Wisconsin, Lanzendorf knew he wasn’t meant to stay in a small town. When he couldn’t afford the senior class trip to New York City as a high school student, he boldly convinced the bus driver to take him as far as Chicago.

“They let me off on the expressway and I climbed up the embankment and got to my grandmother's place,” says Lanzendorf. He had $35 and years of experience doing hair for his relatives and classmates. Three days after his arrival, he got a job as a stock boy and attended beauty school at night. He graduated at the top of his class and was soon employed as a hairdresser. Eventually he sought out and landed a spot at a top downtown salon. “And I became one of the most respected, well-known hairdressers in Chicago.”

The dinosaur obsession—as dinosaur obsessions often do—started in childhood. 

“When I was a kid I got a dinosaur in a cereal box and I got hooked on that,” he says. “I used to eat a box of cereal every two days just so I could collect more dinosaurs.”

Tyrannosaurus Rex vs Triceratops by Michael Trcic (Photo: Courtesy The Children's Museum of Indianapolis)

Lanzendorf might have become a paleontologist, but there was no money for college. Instead, starting in the mid 1980s, he started snapping up paleoart in volume. At his peak, he was collecting around one new artwork every week. He especially loved theropods—meat-eating dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex. (“I just love the shape of them and all that.”) He bought bronzes and paintings. Even salt and peppershakers. He acquired sketches from the 1800s.

His collection became a who's-who of the paleoart world: Sculptures from Michael Trcic, lead animator of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, illustrations by James Gurney, author of the Dinotopia books, and works from innovative artists like Luis Rey, whose wildly colorful, feathered dinosaurs reflect the most up-to-date research.

Ornithomimid Theropod Dinosaurs by Donna Braginetz (Photo: Courtesy The Children's Museum of Indianapolis) 

Even without a formal education, Lanzendorf became something of a dinosaur expert, reading everything that he could get his hands on. He attended conferences. The renowned Canadian paleontologist Philip J. Currie invited him to a dig in Alberta. (Currie would later pen the introduction to a book about the collection, Dinosaur Imagery.) Eventually, museums began noticing his work:The first time the Lanzendorf Collection was displayed to the public was in 2000, as part of the Field Museum’s heralded unveiling of Sue, the largest and most complete T-Rex skeleton ever discovered.

Meanwhile, dinosaurs were taking over Lanzendorf’s apartment.

Daspletosaurus Torosus by Michael Trcic (Photo: Courtesy The Children's Museum of Indianapolis)

It was around this time the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis came calling. “When I first met John, he’s got a one bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago and it was wall-to-wall art,” says Dallas Evans, Lead Curator of Natural Science and Paleontology at museum. “You’d look at a wall and there’d be framed artwork, an inch to spare, and another artwork right beneath it, taking up the entire wall. In fact all the walls of the house, even in the bathroom.”

The museum wanted Lanzendorf’s collection for their Dinosphere. In 2001, they invited him on a trip to inner Mongolia. Evans and Lanzendorf toured around the fossil-rich country, visiting digs.

“I found a theropod tooth and a wooly rhinoceros metatarsus in the Gobi Desert,” Lanzendorf recalls. That same year, for an undisclosed amount, the museum bought his collection outright. The dinosaurs had outgrown his apartment and Lanzendorf was ready to move on: “Life is about change, I’ve learned that.” He kept his childhood toys and a Skrepnick painting of a Dimetrodon.

Evans has overseen the collection since its arrival.

“When I was first hearing about dinosaur art, I was a little skeptical, I expected it to be like black velvet Elvis paintings,” says Evans. But soon, Evans’ doubts evaporated, as he says that paleontologists and paleoartists have a symbiotic relationship. Art is often the best way to excite the public about a new discovery.

 “Artists really rely on the scientist for guidance and technical experience but at the same time paleontologists are really in need of skillful illustrators that research new discoveries,” says Evans. “And it’s really often difficult for people to see fossils and relate to them as once living organisms, so art is great at communicating this across age, education and language barriers.”

The Lanzendorf Collection contains over 500 pieces and the museum doesn’t display it all at once, favoring themed exhibitions that are rotated out. Currently on display are unusual dinosaurs with flamboyant ornaments, such as Dracorex Hogwartsia (named for Harry Potter villain Draco Malfoy), an upright carnivore that looks like it’s wearing a football helmet studded in horns.

Evans can’t pinpoint an exact favorite in the collection, but he says he’s fond of the Trcic pieces. He does some fantastic very detailed work, there’s kind of a grace and fluidity to the dinosaurs and the sculptures,” says Evans. 

Lystrosaurus by Gary Staab (Photo: Courtesy The Children's Museum of Indianapolis)

The museum continues to grow the collection, adding artworks that reflect the changing field of paleontology. Adding more artwork featuring feathered dinosaurs is a priority, according to Evans. There are other dinosaur art collections out there (the Smithsonian maintains a historical paleoart collection) but Evans is not aware of any that exist on such a grand scale.

 Lanzendorf does miss his dinosaurs, but his legacy in the paleoart world is cemented. Once a year the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology awards the John J. Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize to artists in three different categories. And Lanzendorf has moved onto a new passion: Asian art. Sparked by the Mongolia trip, he now shares the same one bedroom apartment with an array of art gathered from India, Thailand, Mongolia, China and other countries. A 400-pound gilded bronze Buddha from the early 1700s resides in his living room where dinosaurs once ruled.

Lanzendorf also shares the apartment with his dog, Rafael Nadal, named for the highly ranked Spanish tennis player. Rafael is a Grand Basset Griffon Vendeen, a French breed that resembles a shaggy basset hound mashed up with a terrier. Popular in France, the dogs are rare in the United States.

“I’ve always liked unusual things,” says Lanzendorf, who still works four days a week as a hairstylist. 

Brachiosaurus by Donna Braginetz (Photo: Courtesy The Children's Museum of Indianapolis)

He once bred endangered parrots, sharing his apartment with ten of the birds. In the ‘80s he raised award-winning show cats, including Dr. Pepper, a Grand Champion Himalayan with snow-white fur and shocking blue eyes. 

For now, Lanzendorf is content to amass more items for his Asian art collection. But he plans to graduate from that, too.

“I think I might go into dog art,” he says. “It’s become very popular in galleries on Madison Avenue.”

Beryl Markham in New York, after flying across the Atlantic. (Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library/ Leslie Jones Collection) 

This is the fourth part in a five-part series about early female explorers. Previous installments can be found here.

Growing up in Kenya, then a part of British East Africa, aviator Beryl Markham’s life was one of firsts. At age 18, she was the first woman in Africa to get a racehorse trainer’s license. At 29, she became Africa’s first female professional pilot, and five years later, on September 4, 1936, she broke the world record as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. 

Born in 1902, Markham grew up in a bush hut in the Kenyan highlands while her pioneer father struggled to build a successful farm after her mother went back to England—an intense occupation for anyone, let alone a retired army general-turned-horse trainer with no real farming experience. With little spare time to spend with his young daughter, Beryl had little formal education and spent much of her childhood speaking Swahili, Nandi, and Masai, and learning to spear hunt with the local Nandi Murani tribe. 

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know—that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it,” she later wrote. 

Following a disastrous drought, Markham’s father moved to Peru in 1919. Beryl stayed behind, wed a man twice her age, and started to train racehorses. She was no tomboy—six feet tall and innately glamorous, a contemporary described Markham as “a magnificent creature... like watching a beautiful golden lioness when she walked across the room.” She was known to use her femininity to her advantage, bewitching men so that they didn’t begrudge her intrusion into traditionally male métiers like horse-training and aviation.

Markham would have three marriages, all disastrous (each one of her husbands divorced her on the grounds of infidelity) and gave birth to a son in London when she was 27. Within weeks of this life event, she was having an affair with Prince Henry at Buckingham Palace. The Windsors were not amused, and the queen extended a £15,000 annuity on the condition that Beryl leave England at once. She accepted the terms, returned to East Africa, and left her son with her in-laws.

(Photo: Tekniska Museet/Flickr)

Back in East Africa, Markham trained to become a pilot. This was the era of truly great aviators: just a few decades after the Wright brothers first took flight, and a time when to fly was to be guided only by the compass, the wind, and the stars. And Africa was still unchartered territory, with aviation maps that left much to be desired. 

“You’d likely see that the bulk of the terrain you were about to fly over was bluntly marked ‘UNSURVEYED,’” Markham wrote, and so pilots wouldn’t know until the last minute whether they were about to land in mud, desert, or jungle. 

As a commercial pilot, delivering mail and medicine to settlers in remote mining towns across East Africa, Beryl was very often her own aircraft engineer when things went wrong. Flying tens of thousands of miles, to Khartoum and Cairo, Tripoli and Tunis, Cagliari and Cannes, she had no beams or beacons, no radio, and rarely even the light of a village to guide her on those long night flights across the desert. 

Five years after she got her pilot’s license, Beryl decided to fly solo from England to North America, becoming the first ever woman to fly this course alone. (Amelia Earhart, flying in 1932, was the first woman to cross the Atlantic by herself.) Flying across 2,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean, through wind and rain on a brutal September night, this was a truly dangerous mission—to misjudge course by a few degrees would see Beryl ending up dead in the water rather than arriving to the fanfare awaiting her in New York City. 

Manhattan would have to wait. 21 hours in, Beryl’s fuel tank vents iced over, her engine died, and she had to make a terrifying crash landing in Nova Scotia. Her flight record for the journey jokingly read: ”Atlantic flight. Abingdon, England, to a nameless swamp—nonstop.”

(Photo: Agence de presse Meurisse‏ (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons; Courtesy Open Road Media)

Markham’s memoir, West with the Night, was published in 1942, at the height of World War II. Disappearing under a torrent of war news, the book about her harrowing flight across the Atlantic sold only modestly. At the time, she was living in the U.S. and writing short stories about growing up in East Africa and her romances for publications like Ladies' Home Journal. These were later collected in the book, The Splendid Outcast. 

In the early 1950s Beryl moved back to Kenya and made a name for herself as one of the continent’s most successful racehorse trainers. In her later years, she lived a very humble life in Nairobi; after decades spent on chasing excitement on all corners of the globe she had run out of money. “A life has to move or it stagnates,” she once wrote.

Markham’s literary output was all but forgotten until a California publisher reissued West with the Night in 1983, thanks to a complimentary albeit personally unflattering mention of it in a recently released collection of Ernest Hemingway’s letters:

“Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night?” Hemingway wrote. “She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

The book was re-released more than forty years after its initial publication date, this time to great fanfare, and became a surprise U.S. bestseller.

Three years later, Beryl Markham died in genteel squalor near the grounds of the Nairobi racecourse. She was still training racehorses at the age of 83.  

Lick my face or I eat your brains. (Photo: Bernard McManus on Flickr)

From the ghoulish pants made of human flesh to the unsettling "tilberi", an object made of a person's rib that looks like a monstrous parasite, historic Iceland’s magical rituals are frankly a bit insane. But why? And where does Icelandic sorcery even come from? To find out, we spoke with Sigurður Atlason, Manager of the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft.

And that is how we learned the basics of creating an Icelandic revenge zombie.

Atlason, who goes by the nickname “Siggy,” is an expert on the history and performance of Icelandic sorcery. As Atlason explains, much of Iceland’s folkloric magical practices date back centuries, with roots in pagan ritual that dates back even further. Around 1000 CE, the population of Iceland was quite small, but in addition to the Nordic settlers who brought their pagan beliefs to the country with them, there were also a number of Christian settlers hailing from Ireland, Scotland, and elsewhere. Atlason says that in order to avoid a religious civil war, the country’s parliament decreed that Christianity would be the official religion, but the citizens would be allowed to practice their Nordic beliefs in private, and for themselves.

Through the centuries, the belief in what we now call magic and sorcery persisted. Arcane rituals and “hidden people” (or “elves”) became an important part of local folklore and tradition, seeping into the symbology and the names of landmarks all across the country. Some of it even mixed with the imposed Christian beliefs, creating a hybrid religion.

An Icelandic sigil drawn on what I hope isn't skin. (Photo: Bernard McManus on Flickr)

This faith-filled potpourri persisted until until the 17th century, when the Christian reformation found its way to Iceland. The church decided to introduce the concept of “magic” as we know it today in order to marginalize the pagan practices. What was once the realm of traditional belief and historic folklore was now the work of sorcerers and witches. As they ever have, the ruling Christian church now had an excuse to bring the hammer down on Iceland’s pagan past. Men and women suspected of sorcery were burnt at the stake in witch hunts that inverted the common victims of superstitious persecution along gender lines. The beliefs of the old world were pushed from the daylight, but never quite extinguished.

Even today, this tension between pagan and Christian belief continues. Atlason references the installation of a guardian elf statue (elf culture is alive and well in modern day Iceland) at the mouth of a recently dug tunnel. Christian protesters still came out to lodge their complaints at the blasphemous magical creature.

Despite all of the conflict surrounding Icelandic magic in the 17th century, many of the rituals and invocations that evolved over centuries of hard living in the often inhospitable wilds of Iceland, still survive. There are the previously mentioned necropants, a magic pair of leggings made of the skin of a dead friend that would endlessly manifest riches after a coin stolen from a widow was place in the scrotum; and the summoning of the tilberi, which only a woman could perform by stealing a dead man’s rib, hiding it in her bosom, sneaking it meals of church wine, and wrapping it in grey sheep’s wool, after which the resulting double-headed worm creature would steal massive amounts of goat’s milk to make butter with. Atlason stressed that these rituals were obviously never truly performed, but acted more like folktales, giving the citizens of early Iceland the one thing magic truly created, which was hope.

Dear lord. Behold the tilberi. (Photo: Bernard McManus on Flickr)

We asked Atlason if there were any other elaborate rituals like the tilberi or the necropants, but he said that they are both quite unique in the pantheon of Icelandic magic. However then he told us about the process of raising a person from the dead.

In the country’s pagan beliefs the spirits of departed friends and relatives were apparently fairly common, but were not sources of malevolence, but raising a body from the dead was a whole other can of worms.

[In order to wake up a dead person] you have to shout out some poetry, some invocations, over the grave. And walk around the church graveyard. And spit on the grave. It can be quite nasty. It is the words or the language that [are] most important to get correct in order to get them up. And it’s very dangerous because of course, once you get the dead man up, he’s nine times stronger than he was in life. So you would never chose a very strong fisherman or farmer, you would choose a teenager or some guy who is not very strong.

You have to fight a little bit with him once he gets up. You have to manage to put your head in front of his and lick up all the liquid that streams out of his nose and mouth, and actually clean him with your own tongue. That’s how you tame him. After that you can just tell him whatever he has to do.

Once you send him on a person you dislike or is your enemy, [the zombie] is not only following him until his life is over, but he also follows the next seven generations. So it’s a big revenge.

In addition to these elaborate rituals and spells, there survive countless sigils and poetic invocations that Atlason says are filled with “swearing” (although it was not clear if this meant offensive words or devotional ones.) The goal of all these rituals, though, is shared: to create hope.  All it takes is tongue-cleaning an angry zombie, or wearing a dead friend’s magic scrotum.

Join us at the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft on Obscura Day where a sorcerer will be performing a traditional invocation for all gathered!

The stolen bear (Photo: Denver Police Department)

In the Skyline Park, in downtown Denver, there’s a mini-golf course, designed to resemble “a mini-Downtown Denver complete with iconic landmarks.” Those include the Historic D&F Clocktower, Denver Union Station, and the city’s iconic, 40-foot-tall Blue Bear. But over the weekend, the mini version of the Blue Bear was stolen.

Local news outlets are reporting that the thieves knocked down the fence at the park and absconded with the bear.

The larger version of the bear first came to Denver a decade ago, in 2005. And, originally, it was not supposed to be blue.

“The bear was going to reflect the colors of Colorado, with sandstone colors and things like that,” its creator, the artist Lawrence Argent, told Visit Denver. “But a printout of the design came back blue by mistake, and I thought that was much more exciting.”

Police are asking for any information related to the theft of the miniature version. And to anyone else who desires their very own mini Blue Bear…there is one 8-inch version available for sale. It’s just $19.99, and you can obtain it without involving the police, in any way.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com

 
This one is just to make you jealous while you're at work. (Photo: Kyle Pearce on Flickr)

Happy summer everyone! It's getting hot out, so let's shed some layers and find a pool to chill out in. But why settle for your overcrowded municipal swimming hole when there are a number of weird and wonderful places to beat the heat all around the world. Some of the world's coolest pools are more accessible than others (and as with all things, some are easier to visit if you are super rich), but each of them make summer a bit more wonderful. 

1. MARINA BAY SANDS ROOFTOP POOL
Singapore

Night swimming. (Photo: green_kermit on Flickr)

The highest pool of its size in the world, the infinity pool on the top of Singapore's Marina Bay Sands hotel is a marvelous architectural achievement for those who aren't afraid of heights. The long pool is held on the lip of a boat-like structure that is perched on top of the three sky scraping buildings of the hotel. The pool is over 650 feet in the air, allowing visitors an unparalleled view of the city that is not for the faint of heart. Never before has a pool been created that seems more ready for a Mission Impossible-style action sequence.    

The pool is in that weird boat perched atop the buildings. (Photo: edwin.11 on Flickr)

Get a tan a few inches from the sun. (Photo: Joan Campderrós-i-Canas on Flickr)

2. STARKENBERGER BEER POOLS
Tarrenz, Austria

I'm drunk just from looking at this. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Located in Austria's Starkenbeger brewery (where else?), a 700-year-old castle that has been converted to a wonderland for beer aficionados, the beer pools allow lager-lovers a chance to live out a drunken fantasy. After the old fermentation tanks in the castle basement were no longer needed, thanks to advances in brewing technology, the brewery turned the seven metal tubs into spa pools filled with beer. Generally hot beer. Before you think that this is a place where alcoholics go to die, keep in mind that the sudsy waters of the tubs are diluted a bit, and drinking the bathing brew is strongly discouraged. However, drinking the beers they will bring you is highly encouraged.    

Bask in the beauty of classical forms. (Photo: Starkenberger) 

3. GOLD ENERGY POOL
Lhasa, China

You ain't nothin' but a goldswimmer. (Photo: St. Regis Lhasa Hotel)

Perched atop a scenic hill in Chinese Tibet is the St. Regis Lhasa Resort, a decadent vacation destination that is home to the world's only gold-plated pool. Known as the Gold Energy Pool, this elegant relaxation is pool is covered in thousands of little gold tiles to create the sensation of stepping into a bath of pure luxury. As the website explicitly points out, children are allowed in the pool with supervision, but that the pool is for meditation and relaxation, not horseplay. Which is unfortunate since it looks not unlike something from an Indiana Jones adventure.  

4. AQUA DOME
Langenfeld, Austria

The future of swimming today! (Photo: peter boer on Flickr)

Unthawed natural mineral water fills the ultra-modern pools at this spa in the Tyrolean Alps. Nestled in a lush Austrian valley like a hidden alien enclave, the Aqua Dome spa features futuristic pools that are fed by the run off from the melting mountain ice. There are undulating in-ground pools, but more arrestingly are the elevated bowl pools that are meant to heighten the feeling of weightlessness for swimmers. They are each filled with different mineral waters such as a water heavy in sulfur and one that is natural briny. The architecture looks distinctly like something from the future, but the supposed health benefits from the mineral-rich pools are purely old world.  

For all our Star Trek fans out there, this is likely what the pleasure planet Risa looks like. (Photo: VAMED AG on Wikipedia)

5. WORLD'S LARGEST SWIMMING POOL
Valpairiso, Chile

Who wants to do laps?! (Photo: Crystal Lagoons on Wikipedia)

The largest swimming pool in the world is located at Chile's San Alfonso del Mar Resort and looks almost as though they simply cordoned off a part of the ocean. The giant pool is over 3,000 feet long and holds over 66 million gallons of water in a lengthy beachside strip of resort luxury. Due to its massive size, a whole new filtration and cleaning system had to be invented just to keep it from getting gross. A sophisticated pumping and filtration system constantly injects processed sea water into the pool while simultaneously cleaning the old pool water and shunting it back out to sea, likely in a cleaner state than when it entered the pool. This may be the only pool in the world where one could get stranded in the middle and just wait for the tide to bring them back in. 

The world's biggest sunset. Kind of. (Photo: Kyle Pearce on Flickr)

6. YUNESSUN SPA RESORT
Hakone, Japan

Wine time! (Photo: Yunessun.com)

Not unlike the beer pools above, this Japanese spa lets swimmers take a dive into the drink of their choice. The Yunessun Spa Resort is almost more theme park than spa, but nonetheless, they are devoted to relaxation, albeit in some pretty weird ways. Ever wanted to just chill out with a glass of wine after work? Well how about swimming around in a pool filled with the stuff. Would you like a relaxing cup of green tea? Here you can dive into a giant basin of it and take a shower beneath the oversize kettle spout. Miss living on ramen as a starving student (adult)? The Yunessun Spa has you covered with a big, brothy ramen pool. Again, the liquids in these pools are not meant for drinking, but hey, you live in a giant cup of coffee once.   

Green tea time! (Photo: Yunessun.com)

Time to wake up (in the coffee pool)! (Photo: Yunessun.com)

7. VENETIAN POOL
Coral Gables, Florida

Now that is some fresh water. (Photo: Lima Pix on Flickr)

This Florida pool might not have the architectural bombast of some of the more elaborate resort pools on this list, but not only is it the only pool to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but also it is the largest freshwater pool in the world. Built in 1924, the swimming hole was created in what was once a quarry. The site was given a Venetian-inspired makeover, and has since been welcoming swimmers for almost a century. Amazingly, due to the natural freshwater source of the waters, they are filtered via natural processes, and the entire body of water in the pool is replaced daily. So in a sense, you never swim in the pool twice.     

Florida looks pretty refreshing from here. (Photo: Matt Kieffer on Flickr)

8. SELJAVALLALAUG
Skogar, Iceland

Maybe the world's most beautiful pool. (Photo: Rosino on Flickr)

Hidden behind a half-hour hike across a verdant field of Icelandic volcano ash, and nestled in a little hill valley, the pool known as Seljavallalaug, is maybe the most beautiful swimming pool in the world. This small but historic rectangle of natural spring water was built in 1923 to give local fishing communities a place to practice swimming. The secluded swimming hole survives to the present day in much the same state as when it was built, kept up by volunteers alone. It is also possible that this may be the oldest swimming pool in the entire country, although this is not verified. While this is not the pool for those looking to relax with constantly flowing cocktails and pampering, it exists halfway between man-made and natural, allowing swimmers here to feel the same. 

Who needs luxury when you have volcanic fields? (Photo: BiT on Flickr)

Garnet, MO is for sale.(Photo: David J Laporte/Flickr)

Every once in awhile, a close look at real estate listings turns up something odd: not merely a house, not merely land, but an entire town, sometimes a long-abandoned ghost village. The listings arouse primal desires reminiscent of childhood Monopoly games. You can own the houses, the streets, the banks, the taverns, the land, everything you can see. Perhaps it can become a commune, a tourist destination, or just a bizarre vacation home. But money alone might not guarantee the purchase of your dream town. 

“It’s romantic, but it's difficult,” says John Lovelace, a realtor specializing in some of British Columbia's most unusual properties. “People have this idea that they can get away from it all, go paint up there, fix it up and you're set for life. The reality is that it's very very difficult.”

Whole towns for sale occupy lots of different legal positions, based on their history and what exactly is for sale. Each town has its own story, a totally unique path that brought it to the point of sale. 

Often, when we talk about a “town for sale,” the phrase is more figurative than literal. Johnsonville, a town in Connecticut, recently attracted attention when it went up for auction, and later for a normal sale. A group of people on Twitter, loosely led by a Chicago-based writer and programmer named Dan Sinker, began trying to pool their money via Google spreadsheet and purchase the town back in April. Johnsonville is perhaps the least remote ghost town currently on the market, only about 30 miles from Hartford. It is beautiful, with airy but derelict colonial homes, including 19th-century barns, churches, and houses. It seems impossibly idyllic, a town that exists in our imagination as a perfect New England hamlet rather than a place you can buy.

There’s a reason for that.

Johnsonville. (Photo: Rick Harris/Flickr)

Meagan Williams of RM Bradley, the real estate company that worked on Johnsonville the last time it was listed, in 2013, explained via email that nothing about Johnsonville is as it seems. The town of Johnsonville never really looked like this; it was an old mill town, but the way it looks now has no relation to any part of its history. “It is just a parcel of land within Moodus, Connecticut that is made up of buildings that look like an old town,” she writes. “The current owner collected old taverns, post offices, general stores and had them moved to his property. None of the buildings are currently in use.” 

Johnsonville was originally one of the twine-producing capitals of the world, back in the mid-19th century when an American town could produce something like twine in bulk. Like most of the other manufacturing centers in New England—New Bedford, the former whaling capital of the world, comes to mind—production eventually declined and much of the town, including a general store, was abandoned. In 1960, Raymond Schmitt, the CEO of AGC Corporation, an aerospace firm, purchased the "town," really just a plot of land surrounding the old twine mill. But Schmitt wanted Johnsonville to look even more like a Victorian center of commerce, so he actually imported buildings, sometimes across state lines, to the town. That gorgeous Victorian stable? Yeah, that's not a Johnsonville original. It was trucked over a few decades ago from Massachusetts.

Johnsonville isn’t a ghost town. It’s an abandoned theme park. Its current listing price is $2.4 million.

For true ghost towns, you have to look westward. Swett, South Dakota is an unincorporated town about two hours by car from Rapid City. Swett’s current population is two, but it was never bustling; At its peak, in the 1940s, it had a population of 40. Currently the town consists of little more than a bar, a workshop, a few trailers, and a single house, all on 6.16 acres of prairie near the Nebraska border. “As the only watering hole in a 2-mile radius, the Swett Tavern is still the de facto gathering place for a small army of local cowboys and wheat-growers,” writes Daniel Simmons-Ritchie of the Rapid City Journal. Swett is a classic western ghost town: the Swett Tavern, to most of the country, looks more like a movie set than a bar.  

But venturing further west, and north, leads to the most interesting ghost town of all. Northern Canada’s vast expanses of land are essentially empty of sizable towns, but they aren’t empty of natural resources. John Lovelace has worked in several places across British Columbia and neighboring provinces that he classifies as “single economic-use towns.” These were essentially company towns. 

Henry River Mill Village (Photo: Steve Goodwin/Flickr)

“Until about 1980, in resource extraction in this country, what they used to do was they'd create these towns and put in an infrastructure. They would have schools, and shopping centers, and bars, and everything else,” says Lovelace. The conglomerate finds some natural resource—for a long time it was gold, then uranium to sell to bomb-hungry Americans--and builds the mine or other extraction center. Then they’d construct some houses, some roads, and start moving people out to work in the mines. The province would then step in and introduce the utilities and institutions, like electric, gas, septic systems, hospitals, and schools. The miners typically, though not always, rented their homes from the company, which meant that many of these towns really were single-owner towns.  

They were built quickly, but weren't meant to be temporary. Nobody knew if the natural resources would run out, or when, and some towns grew to over 5,000 people. And then, inevitably, the resource would peter out, and the miners would move onto the next project. The mining companies would try to unload the towns to anyone who’d buy them, but without a population or any particular reason to be there, the towns quickly died.

Uranium City, a spectacularly-named town in northern Saskatchewan, was one of the biggest. “There's uranium all over the world but the Americans needed stable supplies, so they ended up going to the Canadians and saying 'we'll give you a premium for this for 20 or 30 years, so we can build up our nuclear stockpiles,'” saysLovelace. With that kind of contract, Uranium City thrived until 1982, boasting an airport and even a local newspaper, The Uranium Times. But when the mines shut down in 1982, the city was abandoned as quickly as any other and sold off in pieces. Today it has about 201 residents. “The bears are roaming the streets now,” says Lovelace.

Garryowen (Photo: Andrew Filer/Flickr)

Lovelace recently completed the sale of a smaller town: Bradian, British Columbia. Bradian was originally a gold mining town with  22 homes, power and phone lines, and, says Lovelace, “really mild winters and beautiful summers, a coastal climate.” It’s about an hour drive from Whistler, one of the best ski resorts in the world—at least in the summertime, when crossing the treacherous Hurley Pass is easiest. (In the winter, it’s more like six and a half hours.) It reached its peak in the 1930s, but panic struck in 1971, when President Richard Nixon cancelled the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold. Suddenly no longer pegged to the dollar, gold prices plummeted, and the town collapsed. Thousands of residents left.

A few attempts were made to convert Bradian into a retirement community. Canadians, lacking hot-weather retirement spots like Florida and Arizona, often retire to the province with the mildest weather, British Columbia. The mining company, which owned the entire town, immediately sold Bradian to a developer. But Bradian proved too expensive and just a touch too isolated to make into the next Vancouver Island, and so was sold after the 1981 economic crash to a family who used it as a vacation spot. That family decided to unload it last year.

When trying to sell Bradian, Lovelace fielded dozens of serious inquiries from buyers; its proximity to both Whistler and Vancouver (the latter only four hours away), its many still-standing houses, and that it’s already on the electrical and phone grid makes it one of the most desirable ghost towns in all of Canada. But Lovelace was blunt about the condition of the town, which needs far more than a fresh coat of paint. “There's a reason why we live in cities!" he says. "There's a romance about [Bradian], but I tell people the same thing: know what you're getting involved with."

The town is not an easy fixer-upper, but earlier this year, Bradian was sold to a group of Chinese developers for around a million dollars.

Bradian. (Photo: Shaundd/CC BY-SA 3.0)

A foraminifera, maybe. (Image: Courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs)

Last month, a ship called the Okeanos Explorer traveled to the waters just off the coast of Puerto Rico and Virgin Island, and sent its remote-operating vehicles down into the crevasses of the Caribbean Basin. These trenches cut far down into the deep sea: at times, the ROV reached three times the depth of the Grand Canyon, but the Puerto Rico Trench itself is even bigger—we could "hide something like 50 Grand Canyons in this big hole," one team member says.

And in that deep, dark crevass, the team found a wealth of strange sea creatures. "A lot of the animals we saw were really unfamiliar to experts back on shore," Andrea Quattrini, a science co-lead on the project, told Quartz. For awhile, the team could not identify the delicate creature above; now they believe it's a formainifera—a single-celled creature with a shell.

They also found creatures like this seastar, which hadn't been seen by humans for 130 years…

Laetmaster spectabilis, last seen by humans 130 years ago. (Image: Courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs.)

And this fish, which, as far as humans knew, had no business being in this area of the ocean:

This jellynose fish was not known to hang out in this part of the ocean. (Image: Courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Océano Profundo 2015: Exploring Puerto Rico’s Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs)

And much, much more.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.

Detail from Mare Undarum, Lunar Map (Image: Courtesy of UChicago Press) 

Mapmaking may now be a more popular activity than in any other time in history—every time a person looks for directions online, a new, customized map is born. Just a century or so ago, none of the mapmaking tools we now take for granted existed, and a new book The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the 20th Century, released this month by UChicago Press, traces the incredible advances in the last century that made possible the map-obsessed world of today.

In the 20th century, “there was an explosion of mapping,” says Mark Monmonier, the geology professor who edited the new volume. Cartographers could see the world from above—first from airplanes, then from space. And maps went electric: old maps were converted into digital form, satellites captured topographical data digitally, and born-digital maps became increasingly interactive. “The electronic transition definitely the 20th century more than anything else,” Monmonier says.

The encyclopedic History contains a wealth of rich illustration: We’ve pulled out seven maps that only could have been made in the 20th century—and a bonus map from the 21st that shows how far cartography has already progressed in contemporary times.

1909

Travel Time in Days from Berlin at the Start of the Twentieth Century (Image: Courtesy of UChicago Press)

In 1909, traveling far from home still meant traveling over land or getting on a ship. This maps shows how long it would take to travel any place in the world from Berlin. The most remote place in the world, from a European perspective, was still the center of Africa. Timbuktu, in the continent’s west, is just on the edge of what was then accessible. But, as Monmonier points out, the map also show the impact of the Suez Canal: “There’s that red arm branching out towards the southeast,” he points out—an indication that the canal made a whole new part of the world accessible.

1944

Europe from the East (Image: Richard Harris Eden/Courtesy of UChicago Press)

Richard Edes Harrison made maps for Fortune and Life magazines. “He had an atlas that came out during World War II that tried to expand, for people in the United States, the impression of the distances involved,” explains Monmonier. Americans would have been familiar with the standard map of Europe, with north at the top. But if you look east at Europe, from the perspective of the Soviet Union, England seems much further away.

1950

Anticommunist Polar Project Map (Image: Robert M. Chapin/Courtesy of UChicago Press)

Once the Cold War settled in, though, magazines tried to emphasize how close the United States and the Soviet Union actually were. This map, from Time, “emphasizes the fact that North America is not as far from the Soviet Union, as you might think,” Monmonier says.

1950

A Factual & Pictorial Map of World Freedom (Image: Ernest Dudley Chase/Courtesy of UChicago Press)

Maps were sometimes used as propaganda tools. Mapping “World Freedom,” in this instance, meant painting Russia red. The map was meant to honor the creation of the United Nations.

1976

Lunar Landing Site Map (Image: Courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/UChicago Press)

"There were 19th century maps of the Moon, because Moon isn’t that far away,” says Monmonier. But this one has much more accurate impression of the lunar surface. And it reflects the new age of exploration, in which, like 14th and 15th century explorers, astronauts would travel to unknown parts and plant a flag. This maps documents the landing sites for the USSR’s Luna missions, from 1956 to 1976, and the American Apollo and Surveyor missions, spanning the years from 1966 to 1972.

1978

Detail from Mare Undarum, Lunar Map (Image: Courtesy of UChicago Press)

Even on the moon, the U.S. was quite concerned with Communist activity. Making this detailed map required data from satellites circling the moon. “That imagery allows you to draw the contour lines,” Monmonier says. “The same technology was used by the US when overflying the Soviet Union and making maps so we could understand what was going on there.”

1998

Map of Washington, D.C. area using the 1998 TIGER data set (Image: Courtesy of UChicago Press)

This born-digital map came from the Census Bureau’s TIGER data set—which was a key tool for the birth of web-based mapmaking. 

2015

(Photo: Map data © 2015 Google)

Today’s digital maps incorporate features that were hardly dreamed of at the beginning of the 20th century—satellite imagery, interactivity, customization. We use these tools, routinely, without even thinking about it. Google Maps can tell you exactly how long it will take to get from Berlin to Timbuktu — by car, it’s an 88 hour drive. Or there’s a 9 hour flight to from Berlin to Mali's capital, Bamako. Add on the 14 hour drive north, and you can make the journey in less that 24 hours.

Islamabad. Not pictured: runny noses, teary eyes of locals. (Photo: Ahmed Sajjad Zaidi/Flickr)

Springtime can mean many things, but for allergy sufferers, it's the season of sneezing and some cities are definitely worse than others.  In the United States, it's Southern locations—Louisville, Memphis, Oklahoma City and Jackson, Mississippi—where, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, the most innocent-looking of normal trees dump the most pollen into the air and thence into the noses, eyes, and respiratory system of unsuspecting human beings.

But American cities have nothing on Islamabad, which is not just the capital of Pakistan but reputedly "the allergy capital of the world."

In Islamabad, the spring pollen season is so terrible that people simply try to leave the city, if they can. If they can't, they try to stay inside. One woman told Saad Khan, a freelance reporter in the city, that she has to sleep upright in her chair, because otherwise she stops breathing.

A high pollen count is measured in the thousands of grains per cubic meter of air—records in the U.S. tend to be below 10,000. In Islamabad, the record is closer to 45,000. And there's just one type of tree that's primarily responsible for this outpour—one that the city's planner introduced, on purpose, to Islamabad: the paper mulberry.

Islamabad is one of those mid–20th century cities that was planned essentially from scratch. After Ayub Khan staged a military coup and took power in Pakistan in 1958, the new government decided to create a metropolis that would be "a capital city only, without a non-official civilian population located in it and pulling the central administration in different directions." A Greek planner, Costantinos Doxiadis, was enlisted to design it, and a powerful development corporation created to build and manage it.

As the city was built up, through the 1960s, its creators were looking for a way to make it more pleasant, quickly. Part of the plan was to have extensive green areas, throughout, but in 1966, when the first government functionaries moved in, it was still dry and relatively tree-less. The development authority chose the paper mulberry, native to eastern Asia, as the tree that would seed the city. It was pretty enough, and, more importantly, it grew fast. 

In the late 1960s, helicopters flew over Islamabad, scattering paper mulberry seeds across the city. The trees took. Not only that, over the next decade, they took over, outcompeting the native plant life. 

In the 1990s, public health authorities in Pakistan starting investigating the source of the increasingly terrible allergies that plagued people in the city. And they hit upon a culprit: the paper mulberry. About 45 percent of allergic patients in this city were sensitive to the tree's pollen, the Pakistan Medical Research Council found. (In some states in the U.S., it's considered an invasive species.)

The paper mulberry trees are not the sole source of Islamabad's sniffles—other sources of air pollution, like dust and smoke, could be partially to blame. But the trees have a bad enough reputation that, over the past decade or so, the development authority has intermittently made some efforts to tear them out. In 2009, a judge actually ordered the authority to have them all gone within three years. But tens of thousands of tree remain, and Islamabad is still full of miserable, sneezing people come spring—this past March, the pollen count hit 35,000.

Paper mulberry—it looks so innocent. (Image: Curtis' Botanical Magazine)

Arcosanti (Photo: Cody/Flickr)

Down a dirt road, about an hour from Phoenix, Paolo Soleri’s vision of a sustainable city rises out of the desert. Five thousand people were supposed to live here, in a dense, concrete city that was meant, the Chicago Tribune wrote, to be “more permanent than the pyramids.” Construction began in 1970—and continues to this day, forty-five years later. The result, Arcosanti, is the work of more than 7,000 volunteers. 

Soleri, who died in 2013, built this city to realize his vision of arcology—a city that combined architecture and ecology to form one dense, sustainable living system. Arcosanti was designed to pack humans tight enough together that the land around could stay open and unbuilt; passive cooling and smart water treatment systems minimized the resources the people here need to survive.

The residential population has never reached close to 5,000, but there is a small community of people who have settled in Arcosanti. Some stay for a few months; some stay for years. Atlas Obscura talked to a few of them about why they came to Arcosanti and what life in Soleri's dream city is like.

Arcosanti (Photo: Cody/Flickr)

Scott Riley
Designer, writer
Age: 62
Time at Arcosanti: 15 years, this time around

Riley on a trip to Sarajevo. (Photo: Courtesy of Scott Riley)

What was your first impression of Arcosanti?
I was raised in Arizona, I went to college in California. I knew about Soleri. My first visit to the site was in 1970, actually. It was a little more like being on Mars. It was more nomadic than it is now, and it was rife with 70s energy. And very happening.

It’s a real hands on place. It’s an enactment of sorts. It’s a play that’s being enacted in some way. It’s kind of intentional, kind of not.

If it's a play, what’s your role?
My role has changed a lot. When I first came here, I was much more of an observer. I participated, but I was under the radar. Which is actually a pretty fun place to be.

It’s always fun to be under the radar. People can get all kinds of things accomplished. Van Gogh was under the radar, and he was one of the most famous artists of all time. Pollack had to disappear to Long Island to do his work. You hear musicians who duck the radar at some point. Accomplishments happens at both levels. So, it’s a symbiotic relationship. You need the people above the radar to manage stuff.

Sometimes I’ll tell people — there’s this whole question about who’s in charge. My role now is above the radar, but a lot of it just has to do with making sure the designs get done and the materials are purchased so the people who show up in the morning have something to do. So who’s in charge? Me or them?

What’s a favorite memory?
This friend of mine, he liked very hot Korean food. He called it No Mercy, that’s how hot he’d cook it. At one point, he was going to go to Burning Man, but it turned out he couldn’t go. I gave him the idea—let’s have a Burning Tongue dinner instead.

We ended up having 25 people. You had to bring a dish. There were no bystanders allowed. We had a No Mercy table and a Little Mercy table. We had it out in the middle of the amphitheater with tables around. That kind of thing, it comes out of — sometimes here you can do little adjustments and then have a bigger impact. All we had to do was suggest it, and it’s like you’re tapping into the energy.

What’s your favorite spot in the whole community?
You know the tourists — everyone sees the top of the mesa, which is very beautiful. But the property works its way along the Agua Fria— it’s an old ranch—and the riparian area can be very magical. My favorite season is definitely the monsoon season. We get these terrific storms and rain and thunder. Combine a monsoon storm with walking around afterward, and the water’s moving around, and lots of birds and great horned owls, and bobcats and deer that come up in the early morning in the winter...

Arcosanti (Photo: Cody/Flickr) 

Erin O'Loughlin
Artist
Age: 26
Time at Arcosanti: 2 years

(Photo: Courtesy of Erin O'Loughlin)

What was your first impression of Arcosanti?
It’s sort of like a small little company town. You work for your 8 hour day, and you’re finished work. Instead of getting in the car and driving home, you can walk back to your apartment or find friends and hang out in community room. Then in a few hours, you go to the cafe and see everyone on site and have a meal together, instead of needing to be by yourself in your own apartment and need to get in a car to see people.

Before I came here, I was living at home to save some money. My job happened to be right by my house. It’s such a change — there’s always something to do, people to talk to or interact with.

How has it changed while you’ve been there?
When I first got here, it was more populated than it is right now. Lately it seems to be more people leaving and not so many coming in. It makes the community smaller. and I wish the community was larger than it is.

We have some events there are hundreds of people, and there are faces you don’t know. Spaces like the cafe and amphitheater are really full. It's refreshing to see them so used and full of people and full of life. I would love to see the full Arcosanti 5,000 vision be a real thing. it would be a different type of vibe. Right now it feels like a small town where you know everyone’s name and everyone’ business.

What’s your favorite spot in the whole community?
I really love the ceramic apse, my work space. It’s a multi-use space, and it’s perfectly designed for what it’s meant to be. You can flip it around and use it for amphitheater, too. It was the first performance space at Arcosanti. And people used to live in the back space we use for the bells. It's a really diverse space.

Anything else?
I feel like some people have a really negative view of Arcosanti, that it’s a bunch of bums who don’t do anything and are smoking a lot of whatever and drinking, and it’s so not true. I feel like my most productive years have been here.

Soleri bells  (Photo: Kellee Gunderson/Flickr)

Lorenzo Mastino
Urban planner
Age: 28
Time at Arcosanti: 11 months

(Photo: Courtesy of Lorenzo Mastino) 

What was your first impression of Arcosanti?
I’m from Rome, and I’ve lived in big cities all my life. This was the first time I would live in a place with less than a million people. Here’s we’re 65, 70. So it was a big difference.

What are the most rewarding parts of living there?
My job is mainly drafting, modeling and producing the documents that will go to the construction team. Since we’re not that many—our construction crew varies between 3 to 5 or 6 people—sometimes there aren’t enough people. After I design something and do the drafts, I go out and work with them. In no other place, in my job position, would I be able to do that. It’s relaxing. I like doing what I do, but to be able to use my hands and make what I figured in my head, it’s very healing.

What do you tell people about Arcosanti?
With my friends, we have this thing called the Adventure Club, we try every week to go on an adventure. It might sound silly. Sometimes it’s just going hiking and finding spots we’ve never seen before. Sometimes it’s trying to throw clay or do something we’ve never done before. The idea is to live the place and explore the materials we have in different ways. One of the rules is: Don’t hold back.

What spot do you like best?
In the Minds garden, there is a spot where right now we have a fireplace. It’s a little campfire spot that we can use. The overlook from there, looking north, it’s amazing. We have a hammock there. I often go there and read at sunset. You can’t see the freeway. It’s very quiet.

One of the mesas nearby (Photo: Dave Pape/Flickr) 

Colleen Reckow
Holistic health coach, artist
Age: 31
Time at Arcosanti: Seven and a half years

(Photo: Courtesy of Colleen Reckow) 

What was your first impression of Arcosanti?
We live on this dirt road. It’s really bumpy—it’s like this mini-journey in itself to get here. It’s a little disorienting at first, because it’s complex. One of the founding principles of the philosophy here is complexity. It’s kind of magical.

What are the most rewarding parts of living there?
As a person, I’ve had a big transformation. I’m very different than I was when I came. I feel very open. I’m not so concerned about people’s opinions of me. I have more confidence, and it feels fantastic.

That’s one of the goals of our founder. In creating the Arcology, one of his principles was personal transformation. He believed that if we leave in more closely knit community, we’ll become better citizens. We’re living so closely, we have to resolve our differences.

What’s your favorite spot in the whole community?
We have this little grassy spot in front on my house, it was like our own little lawn space. I’ve always been drawn to it, even when I first came here, I would sit and read books there. Now I play with my son there. It’s not exactly out of the way—it's right near the cafe, near the entry.

Arcosanti (Photo: Jon Hurd/Flickr) 

Visit Arcosanti with us on Obscura Day—we'll have special, guided access to the planning office, current construction, and the Arcosanti Archives Department, where we'll view several of Soleri’s original drawings.

It is pretty beautiful! (Photo: ZooKeys)

Christian Lukhaup named this creature "beautiful"—Cherax pulcher, the beautiful aquatic crayfish. He first saw the cotton candy-colored crayfish in  a photo, more than 10 years ago, the Washington Post reports. He first found it in pet shops, being sold in places like Japan and Europe, sometimes as the Hoa Creek crayfish. 

Finding it in its natural habitat, though, was much harder. 

"If you look at the map, you don't find the name of creeks on the map," he told the Post. "It's not easy to find."

But eventually, he was able to confirm that it lives, as he reports in ZooKeys, in "Hoa Creek, close to the village Teminabuan in the southern-central part of the Kepala Burung (Vogelkop) Peninsula, West Papua, Indonesia."

It's three to four inches long—about the length of a finger—and besides being beautiful, it's apparently very tasty.

Bonus FOUND: A Marine helicopter that went missing in Nepal, quadruple quasars, and a British footballer's 1889 contract.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.

At the Bhagavad Gita Museum, one of the India's greatest stories—700 lines of the Mahabharata in which Arjuna and Krishna discuss their values and ideals—is retold by a series of talking clay robots. As unusual as that might be, it's only one of the many odd ways that the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita have been reimagined—as a comic book, a board game and a golf movie.

For centuries, these stories were retold in formal religious settings, as in the bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat in Siem Riep, Cambodia.

A battle scene from the Mahabharata. (Photo: PhotoDharma/Flickr)

Angkor's art focuses on the dramatic scenes, like the battle of Kurukshetra, where two royal families go to war against each other. But Arjuna and Krishna are there, too, in the midst of the battle.

And it's not a huge leap to imagine these scenes in comic books…

Grant Morrison's 18 Days (Image: Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

In 2010, Grant Morrison, one of DC comics' top writers, teamed up with the artist Mukesh Singh to turn the story into 18 Days.

Grant Morrison's 18 Days. (Image: Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

There were plans to turn the story into a video game (although they don't seem to have ever made it to fruition), but there is a Mahabharata board game. 

Peter Brook, the British producer and director, turned the story into a nine-hour play...which became a 1989 miniseries.

And, more recently, Chindu Sreedharan, a professor in England, retold the story on Twitter. (His adaptation is now also a book.)

That was all Krishna needed. Whipping the chariot around with amazing speed, he presented Arjuna a clear shot of his quarry. #TwitterFiction

— Chindu Sreedharan (@epicretold) December 17, 2014

There's a Bollywood film, of course.

Disney's planning on making its own live-action version. And there's already a slick animated adaption—Arjun: The Warrior Prince.

But perhaps the most strangest and surprising retelling of the Bhagavad Gita is a movie about golf.

That's The Legend of Bagger Vance. The book, by Steven Pressfield, pays more obvious tribute to its inspiration. But here's one pretty obvious clue: the golfer's name is Rannulph Junuh…That's R. Junuh...as in Arjuna. That makes Will Smith's character the stand-in for Krishna. It's not exactly a traditional treatment—and probably not the best one either. The movie only scored 43 percent on Rotten Tomatoes—which means that the Bhagavad Gita museum's talking clay robots might actually be a better and more entertaining bet.

Join us at the Bhagavad Gita Museum on Obscura Day. We promise it'll be better than The Legend of Bagger Vance.

(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)

Most American children grow up with frozen pizzas and popsicles in the freezer. But when artist Christopher Marley opened his childhood icebox in Oregon, he was often confronted with colorful species of rare birds. This was because his aviarist father bred all manners of unusual feathered fauna, from Australian parrots to great blue turacos. and couldn’t bear to part with them when they died.

Today, Marley makes surprisingly beautiful mosaics that combine the preserved bodies of  various creatures—reptiles, birds, insects, and marine life—with items like orchids, minerals, and rubies. His latest book, Biophilia, sees these natural specimens arranged in lovely and symmetrical designs.  

(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)

(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)

(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)

(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)

(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)(Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)

Biophilia was published in April 2015 by Abrams. (Photo: © 2015 Christopher Marley)