photo by Jeff Creamer

The Amazon is the most biodiverse tropical rainforest, which 1 in 10 known species in the world call home, including about 2.5 million species of insect. This October, as reported by Neatorama, a group of scientists may have discovered one more: a predatory glow worm. 

The term "glow worm" is a catch-all for the bioluminescent larvae of various insect species, from fireflies to beetles. They are most commonly found in Australia and New Zealand, where they tend to congregate in dark, dank spots like the Waitomo Glowworm Caves and the Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel, dangling strands of sticky mucus to trap smaller insects that are attracted to their glowing bodies. 

But the glow worms in the Peruvian rainforest were found in a dirt wall. They were first spotted a few years ago by wildlife photographer Jeff Creamer, during a nighttime hike in the rainforest in Tambopata. He posted pictures to Reddit, hoping to crowdsource an identification. No one was able to do so successfully, so last month he went back to Peru, bringing along entomologist Aaron Pomerantz and two grad students from the University of Florida to try to learn more about the creatures. 

infographic from PeruNature.com

The team determined that the larvae are indeed predatory: the bugs dig themselves into the dirt with just their heads sticking out, huge mandibles at the ready to chomp whatever happens to wander past. They also determined that the larvae can control whether or not they emit light, glowing more brightly when touched by what they think is a predator, and not glowing at all when they're disturbed. 

Pomerantz theorizes that the larvae glow through the use of Luciferin, the same molecule used by many fireflies, and that they are some species of Elateridae, commonly known as click beetles. There are more than 10,000 species of Elateridae in the world, of which 200 have been observed to display bioluminescence. Pomerantz told Atlas Obscura in an email that these bugs might belong to the tribe Pyrophirini, or else could belong to a previously undiscovered species. Outside of some studies in Brazil, there has not been much research done on this kind of click beetles, so this is an exciting chance to learn more about them.

Here's Pomerantz' account of the team's trip, with plenty of glowy, buggy close-ups.

The Miracle of America Museum in Montana (all photographs by Eliza Berman & Dan Logan)

It would be easy to drive right past the Miracle of America Museum were it not for the rusty orange VW Bug perched on its flat roof. Two billboards on the west side of U.S. Highway 93 implore drivers to make a pit stop in Polson on their way toward northern Montana. But with no explanation for what, exactly, the Miracle of America is, it’s hard to know whether it will be worth the detour.

If you do pull off the highway and walk by the sign announcing “This Is Not a Tourist Trap,” past the piece of paper listing the five dollar cost of admission and a slice of half-eaten lemon meringue pie languishing on the counter, you’ll find the Miracle of America in one of the largest collections of American memorabilia owned by a private individual.

Nestled in the northeast quadrant of Montana's Flathead Reservation, just west of the Flathead National Forest, the museum boasts more than 150,000 relics of American history, from fishing tackle to taxidermy. But a limited advertising budget has kept it off most tourists’ radar. A good day might see 50 visitors, and a bad day, at the height of winter, might see none.

Gil Mangels, who founded the museum in 1981 with his late wife Joanne, wears large round glasses and a name tag. After taking my five dollars, he remarked on the clicking fax machine in the corner of the room. He admits he doesn’t really know how to use it. “Why don’t they make things like they used to make radios?” he asked rhetorically. “Turn it on and off, volume up and down, and that’s it?” The question makes him sound like a Luddite, but that’s not the case at all. In fact, to Mangels, one of the miracles of America is innovation. That, and freedom.

Mangels is a collector, and has been since he was a boy of about four and found a sharp rock on the ground. He showed it to his mother, who told him it was an Indian arrowhead. “You need to save that,” she told him. “And I’ve been saving ever since,” he says, as though he’s told the story more than a few times.

After a stint in the military, Mangels began to see a greater meaning in the objects he collected. “I had the occasion to go behind the Iron Curtain when the wall was still up,” he recalls of his time in Germany. “And I didn’t like the feeling in a Soviet-controlled country. I'd taken my freedom for granted prior to that.” When he and his wife opened the museum years later, this patriotic spirit wove its way through the exhibits.

More than just an appreciation for freedom, Mangels hopes the museum will inspire intergenerational connections. “Artifacts spark memories,” he says, explaining that he’s seen four generations of a family come in, the objects providing concrete starting points for children to learn about their grandparents’ lives. “What's really neat is to see a Vietnam veteran with their child or their grandchildren,” he says. “Whereas before they didn't have that opportunity to bring the subject up, a lot of them will open up with stories and their feelings.”

Mangels might ask if there’s anything that’s of particular interest to you before you make your way through the museum, but the best way to experience it is to take an afternoon and meander, turning right at every intersection. The place has a homemade feel, like a giant collage. Handwritten signs hang next to dioramas that might be more at home at a science fair. The Louvre, this is not.

But a collector’s dream, it is. There are toys, from hundred-year-old dolls, to Lone Ranger figurines, to comic books. There is campaign memorabilia from Hoover to Clinton, WWII propaganda, and army fatigues. Tricycles and bicycles, hearses and tractors, vacuum cleaners and iceboxes and sewing machines. A self-playing Remington offers up ragtime tunes for a quarter.

That the museum is hardly on the map is a travesty and a blessing, depending on your vantage point. It’s a travesty if you’re Mangels, constantly seeking funding to keep your doors open. And it’s a blessing if you’re the kind of traveler who relishes diamonds in the rough and appreciates the lack of queue and crowd. Hopefully, for the sake of Mangels and his grandson, who has agreed to keep the museum going in future decades, the trickle of visitors will increase to a steady stream, and the artifacts will continue conjuring memories.

Because Mangels isn’t in it for the money. When asked if he has any idea of the value of his collection, he shakes his head. He doesn’t know, and he never plans to find out. “When the good lord takes me,” he says, “he can have it.”

All photographs by Eliza Berman and Dan Logan.

Ai Weiwei's "Bloom" installation of porcelain flowers in a bathtub and sink in the Alcatraz hospital (all photographs by the author)

Usually locked and off-limits, the abandoned hospital at Alcatraz is accessible to the public for a brief time. @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, which opened in September and is on view to April 26, 2015, has the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei infiltrating the cells, wards, and rarely-seen buildings with art examining human rights and free expression.

Ai Weiwei has himself been subject to arrest and detention, and is still prohibited from traveling out of China. This means his exhibition on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay is a statement on control that he is blocked from personally seeing. His art in the prison hospital, along with the ordinarily-closed New Industries Building and A Block, has installations that use the windswept history of the "Rock" as a backdrop to ongoing issues of free speech and imprisonment. Faces of 176 prisoners of conscience are formed by LEGO bricks in one space, and a large dragon kite scrawled with quotes from people imprisoned for activism winds through another. 

The hospital opened along with the Alcatraz prison in 1934, although medical facilities on the island date back to the 19th century when it housed an army fort. With an operating room, psychiatric cells, wards with beds, and other resources, a general practitioner and visiting surgeons and specialists gave regular care to the maximum security prisoners, without risking their escape. 

As the FOR-SITE Foundation, which is presenting the Ai Weiwei exhibition, explains in their post about the hospital:

Medical care was one of only four basic rights [along with food, clothing, and shelter] granted to prisoners at the Alcatraz penitentiary. Inmates exercised their right at sick call: every day after lunch, prisoners could line up to ask to be taken to the Hospital upstairs from the Dining Hall. One former officer claimed that as many as 10 percent of inmates would appear in the sick line on a given day, either suffering from genuine illness or hoping for an escape from regular life in the cellblock.

Both Al Capone (wrecked by syphilis) and Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz," spent significant amounts of time in the hospital, but most inmates just got the basics like dental work and only minor surgery. Still, like the rest of the defunct prison, it holds a heavy, isolated feeling to it. Ai Weiwei's installation has porcelain flowers crowding in the hospital sinks and bathtubs, and a recording of Hopi and Buddhist chants filling the psychiatric cells. The delicate interventions are some of the quietest of his exhibition, resonating in a haunting way with the crumbling walls and worn medical equipment of the space. 

The hospital of Alcatraz is open to visitors in conjunction with @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz through April 26, 2015. It is also sometimes part of night tours on the island.

Tony Sarg & an elephant balloon (via printmag.com)

As the procession of bands, balloons, and high-production spectacles makes its annual appearance in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, let's time travel back to the 1920s to the innovative puppeteer who made the inflatable characters part of the American holiday.

The Macy's parade started in 1924, but in 1927 its collaboration with Tony Sarg took things way up a few whimsical notches. Working with fellow puppeteer Bil Baird, a 60-foot balloon dragon, tottering Felix the Cat, hummingbird, and other buoyant wonders made their way down the Manhattan streets, and the crowds went wild.

As Jimmy Stamp wrote at Smithsonian Magazine, these first balloons were inflated with oxygen (although by 1928 they'd switched to helium, often soaring higher than our balloons today). Furthermore, in the early years they were let to ascend at the end of the parade and people got rewards for their retrieval. Stamp explains that ended in 1932 "when a daredevil pilot thought it would be fun to capture the balloons with her biplane and nearly crashed when the rubberized canvas wrapped itself around the plane's wing."

Sarg also worked on the annual Macy's holiday window displays from 1935 to 1942, the year he died of appendicitis. He considered the balloons "giant, upside down marionettes," and saw no limits to what they could do.  Each year of the Macy's parade, he added new fanciful figures, ever more animated like a policeman shaking a nightstick, a 20-foot elephant, and a sea monster. That inflatable sea serpent was eventfully part of a hoax Sarg staged at his home in Nantucket, where in 1937 he had the balloon wash ashore to the delight of the locals and tourists. In 1939, Sarg was a host for the first television broadcast of the parade. 

Melissa Sweet's children's book Balloons Over Broadway playfully tells Sarg's story, and in the video below you can see Sarg's creations in action on the New York streets, where they even had to fit below the elevated train.

Felix the Cat in the 1927 parade (via bennypdrinnon.blogspot)

The "Happy Dragon" balloon from 1927 (via Macy's/Brooklyn News)

The "Nantucket Sea Serpent" (via Movie Morlocks)

The 1930 parade (via businessinsider.com)

Mickey Mouse in the 1934 parade (via trendimages.net)

The 1931 parade (via NY Daily News)

For more on Tony Sarg's balloon work, check out Atlas Obscura's story on the Sea Serpent of Nantucket.

The ghost town of Guerrero Viejo, Mexico (all photographs by the author)

The ruins of Guerrero Viejo perch precariously on the shores of Falcon Reservoir on the Mexico side of the Texas-Mexico border.

In 1953, the residents of this 250-year-old town were forcibly displaced when the United States and Mexico agreed to build a dam on the Rio Grande river in order to supply water to southern Texas and northern Mexico. As the waters rose, most of the city’s residents were relocated to Nuevo Guerrero, some 10 kilometers away.

But not everybody left. As Guerrero Viejo became a ghost town, some residents insisted on staying in the only homes they had ever known, despite being cut off from essential services. They lived in the abandoned town, unwilling to leave the only streets they had known, and the cemetery where their loved ones were buried. (In 1997, the Mexican author Elena Poniatowska chronicled the memories and daily life of the town’s few remaining residents for her brooding, melancholic book Guerrero Viejo.)

By the time I visited in 2004, none of the original inhabitants were still there. Thanks to a long drought, the floodwaters had receded and the town had reemerged as a rough outline of its former self. Cacti sprouted from rooftops, trees grew out of doorways, rubble colonized roads.

A ghost town in more than one sense, Guerrero Viejo had also become also a place of transit, or perhaps, residence, for people who could not be seen. Although it lacks basic infrastructure, its proximity to the US (just across the lake) and shelter (however tenuous) from the elements made it an attractive option for some planning a route across the border. During my visit I saw makeshift altars with fake flowers, as well as abandoned water bottles and clothing. In recent years, Guerrero Viejo has also become a haven for violent drug gangs, who in 2010 killed an American visiting the ruins on jet skis.

In the early 2000s, a group of determined preservationists took on the daunting task of raising funds to restore the town. They partially restored the church — Iglesia Nuestra Señora del Refugio — despite its having been submerged in Falcon Reservoir for nearly 50 years. Although much of the church’s interior had been restored, the rest of the town was clearly giving way to its inevitable fate.

In the past few years, Guerrero Viejo has again begun its tug-of-war with nature as the waters have returned, consuming part of the church. And yet, I understand the compulsion to defy the laws of nature and dedicate so much energy to rehabilitating a town doomed to drown, over and over again. Guerrero Viejo is not one of the wonders of the world. It’s a small town in a part of the world that’s usually ignored, and that was once flooded because it was in the way of a dam. The fact that it was being so carefully rebuilt was a different kind of triumph: of a small group of people who cared enough about the town’s importance to their collective memory to take it back.

I don’t know what Guerrero Viejo looks like today, but I hope one building in particular is still standing — the one where, on a ceiling beam almost 140 years ago, someone carefully etched the phrase “Viva la Republica Mejicana C. Guerrero Viejo Julio 2 de 1875.”

All photographs by the author.

Letchworth Village cemetery in Rockland County, New York (all photographs by the author)

Out of a combination of shame and state bureaucracy, the grave markers for thousands of patients who died in American mental asylums are marked with numbers instead of names, if anything at all. When the institutional style of treatment for the mentally and physically ill was abandoned in the late 20th century, these cemeteries were likewise left to ruin. 

Last week in the New York Times, Dan Barry wrote that some 55,000 patients are estimated to be buried in anonymous graves in New York alone. His story focused on the abandoned Willard State Psychiatric Hospital in Willard, New York, where for three years a group has rallied to get a memorial with names for the around 5,800 people buried in its cemetery. However, old confidentiality laws that allowed anonymity for patients, often at the request of families who were private about having one of their own in an asylum, prevent the sharing of these names. The Willard Cemetery Memorial Project is now working to get families involved, as well recognition for those buried whose presence is recorded knowledge, but because of restrictions cannot be named.

The Willard asylum, which got recent attention when photographer Jon Crispin captured the contents of suitcases found forgotten in a locked attic, is similar to many of these institutions in that it was a closed, self-sufficient place. Unlike the hospitals of the 19th century, these rural asylums were meant to be a more humane option for treatment with plenty of space and recreation. However, overcrowding and mistreatment topped by a struggle with funding ended the system. 

Recently, Atlas Obscura explored another of these cemeteries of numbers at Letchworth Village in Rockland County, New York. Like Willard, the graves are marked with only numbers. However, a large, recently-installed granite monument at the entrance paired with some benches states in bold letters: "Those Who Shall Not Be Forgotten."

On a plaque it lists hundreds of names, some of the estimated 1,000 buried on the grounds. The Letchworth Village cemetery was used from 1917 to 1967, and although there are a few traditional tombstones purchased by families, most all the dead are remembered just with a T-shaped steel cross anchored by cement. 

The Letchworth Village cemetery isn't easy to find. After parking by a small sign on Call Hollow Road a small distance from the sprawling ruins of the abandoned asylum itself, we walked down a gravel road where trash was dumped on either side. As we approached, ribbons and shreds of fabric were knotted around branches hanging above a small creek. Then we were met with the startling sight of the hundreds of metal markers. Some seemed newly repainted silver, but most were rusted and weathered. Some were missing, possibly scrapped or stolen (good luck finding grave number 666).

Aside from the dead leaves from the autumn trees crunching beneath our feet, there was a heavy silence. Letchworth Village, like Willard, was intended to be a place of peace. Instead its patient population, which included many children, ended up subject to abuse and was even used for testing the polio vaccine. And in the forgotten cemetery are the stark numbers that for some of these patients are the only reminder of their existence. 

Below are more photographs from the abandoned Letchworth Village and its cemetery.

Old toy in one of the abandoned Letchworth Village buildings

Dead butterfly in a sink

The asylum's morgue

Pews in the institution's synagogue

Hydrotherapy baths

All photographs by the author.

All photographs by Adam Voorhes from 'Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital' (images courtesy powerHouse Books)

Around 200 brains from a Texas mental asylum were forgotten for over two decades in a storage closet, until a photographer decided to document these morbid remains. Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital, released last month by powerHouse Books, has photographer Adam Voorhes collaborating with journalist Alex Hannaford to finally give these troubled minds a history.

The brain collection from the University of Texas State Mental Hospital — formerly the Texas State Lunatic Asylum — was a coveted anatomical prize when it left the hospital in 1985. At the University of Texas in Austin, the brains suspended in formaldehyde in their glass jars were placed on wooden shelves in an obscure closet of the Animal Resources Center, a move that was meant to be temporary. Instead, there they stayed, known only to a few, as isolated as the patients were in their lives.

Texas State Lunatic Asylum, like other American institutions in the 20th century, was meant to be an escape from the inhumane mental hospitals of the previous era. It devolved into overcrowding and experimental treatments, and its records went missing, leaving only the labels on the jars to identify the patient remains. The specimens were amassed between 1952 and 1983 by the asylum's pathologist Dr. Coleman de Chenar under vague legality for mental health research. Their stark descriptions just give the patient number, disease, and date of death: "Down's syndrome, 02/10/83"; "Hydrocephalus internus, Ex: February 10, 1960."

The abnormal brains were individually photographed by Voorhes, who came upon them in 2011 while borrowing a brain from UT for a Scientific American article. Through his camera's capture, all the rippling details of the brains are sharply exposed, whether it's the web of darkness signaling a hemorrhage, or a curiously unwrinkled surface. Voorhes and Hannaford also delved into university archives, attempting to find out everything they could, including what happened to brains that seemed to have gone missing. This included the vanished brain of Charles Whitman who shot and killed 14 people from the UT Tower in 1966. 

Now with interest in the brains revived,  UT is taking MRI scans to reveal their interiors and make them an engaging resource. Some of the brains will also be put on permanent display at the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas campus. The Texas brains aren't the only collection like this to fall into obscurity — the Cushing Brain Collection at Yale University similarly languished in a basement. And they mirror other fragments left almost anonymously behind by these patients, such as the numbered graves in the obscure cemeteries of these now-abandoned asylums. However, the Texas brains have the potential to be more than a gruesome secret.

As Hannaford writes in Malformed: "Despite the absence of half the specimens and the apathy met in recovery attempts, despite the neglect, missing records and lack of funding to house them properly, the collection of brains at the University of Texas, if made more accessible to interested students and scientists, could hold infinite research possibilities."

Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital by Adam Voorhes and Alex Hannaford is available from powerHouse Books.

Entrance to the Longbridge tunnels (all photographs by the author)

Just below the surface of Longbridge, an area just outside of Birmingham, UK, amidst the various residential redevelopments, lies a series of forgotten tunnels that are now only enjoyed by the odd urban explorer who can find a way in. These otherwise neglected tunnels are one of many, but nonetheless important, relics of Midlands military history.

This network of tunnels was initially built in pre-war 1936. However, they really came into their own during WWII where they allowed for the concealed construction of aircraft engines and other components. By creating these “Shadow Tunnels,” the 10,000 workers employed down there were able to work regardless of the blackout regulations, whilst simultaneously staying well hidden from the Luftwaffe bombers.

Women assembling crankcases for aero engines in the tunnels

After the war, they were used as part of the MG Rover works, as well as a storage facility. Over the years, many rumors have sprung up about other things that have happened down there, as well as a great deal of speculation about a Mini Clubman car that was discovered with only 11 miles on the clock and almost beyond repair, though a Mini enthusiast bought the vehicle and paid to have it legally removed in 2012.

Now as Birmingham and the surrounding area undergoes various redevelopments, the tunnels have been discarded. Yet, as you can see from the pictures below, not a lot has changed over the years (aside from an inch or two of oily water covering the floor). Machinery and equipment still remains, though you need some rather powerful flashlights as absolutely no natural light infiltrates the tunnels.

This was taken just inside the entrance, you can see just how dark it gets as you delve into its depths

Some of the machinery that still remains

All photographs by Ophelia Holt.

Sea caves, natural formations created by wind and water slowly eroding shore cliffs, are found all around the world. Many are geographical anomalies, featuring a unique convergence of natural elements. Most are extremely difficult to access, requiring precise timing, tidal comprehension, and seafaring prowess. These are, of course, often the most magnificent.

Here are 10 of the most stunning sea caves in the world, from Chile to Spain to California.

Neptune's Grotto, Alghero, Italy

photo by Tobias Helfrich / Wikimedia

The entrance to this stalactite cave is about a meter above sea level at the foot of the Capo Caccia cliffs, so it's only accessible when the waters are calm. Only the first few hundred meters of the cave are open to the public, and the only way to enter it by land is to descend the 600+ escala del cabirol, or "goat steps," carved into the cliff wall. Neptune's Grotto is surrounded by many larger and even less accessible marine caves, including  the Nereo Cave, a very popular scuba-diving destination. 

Fingal's Cave, Staffa, Scottland

photo by Graeme Pow / Flickr 

Novelist Sir Walter Scott described Fingal's Cave as "One of the most extraordinary places I ever beheld." Known to the Celts as Uamh-Binn or "The Cave of Melody," one Irish legend explained the existence of both this cave and the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. As both are made of the same neat basalt columns, the legend holds that they were the end pieces of a bridge built by the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill to Scotland where he was to fight Benandonner, his gigantic Scottish rival. The legend is, in effect, geologically correct; both the Giant's Causeway and Fingal's Cave were created by the same ancient lava flow, which may have at one time formed a "bridge" between the two sites. The columns were formed by an enormous mass of hot lava cooling so slowly that, like mud under the hot sun, it cracked into long hexagonal forms.

Grotta Azzurra, Anacapri, Italy

photo by Franco / Flickr

In Roman times, the Blue Grotto was the personal swimming hole of the Emperor Tiberius, and three Roman statues of sea gods were recovered from the ocean floor in the 1960s. The cave was long avoided by locals, because it was said to be inhabited by monsters or evil spirits, but nowadays it is a very popular tourist destination. No swimming is allowed, and visitors may only enter by boat, lying on the bottom to squeak through the 4 x 4 foot cave entrance. Inside, the waters glow an otherworldly blue against the darkness of the cave above.

Apostle Island Sea Caves, Wisconsin, USA

photo by ira_hendricks / Flickr

The Apostle Islands are home to some of the most stunning caves in the world — although they should technically not be called sea caves since they're on Lake Superior. During summer red sandstone can be seen between sapphire lake and the emerald forests at the brink of the cliffs, but in winter these caves truly sparkle. When the lake freezes, the dampness on the cave walls and ceiling ices over, resulting in cave walls covered with millions of delicate icicles. The formations change from chamber to chamber and day to day.

Great Blue Hole, Belize City, Belize

photo by USGS / Wikimedia

Not all sea caves are entered by floating on the water — some have to be reached by diving. The Bahamas are riddled with subsurface caves, also called blue holes — oxygen-less caverns that are among the most inhospitable places in the world. But just across the Caribbean Sea is the largest and most famous underwater sinkhole: Belize's 400-foot-deep Great Blue Hole. This "vertical cave" features stalactites up to 9 feet, several species of tropical fish, and crystal-clear water through which to view them all. Jacques Cousteau declared it one of the ten best diving places in the world. 

Cuevas de Mármol, Chile Chico, Chile

photo by phyxiusone / Flickr

Formed by wave action over the last 6,200 years, Chile's Marble Caves are part of a peninsula made of solid marble jutting into the glacial General Carrera Lake near the small town of Puerto Tranquilo. The block of marble from which the water has carved the striated caves has been estimated to weigh 5 billion tons. Near the Marble Caves are other natural marble formations, including Catedral de Mármol (Marble Cathedral) and Capilla de Mármol (Marble Chapel). The colors of both the lake and the caves changes throughout the year based on the weather. 

Waiahuakua Cave, Kauai, Hawaii

photo by 2kS4 / Flickr

The second-longest sea cave in the world at 1,155 feet, Waiahuaka is also known as the Sacred Water Cave and the Double Door cave. It is along Kauai's Na Pali, accessible only by water. The cave has several unusual features, including a big cathedral room, a white-lit tunnel hallway and a pinkish-red "death rock" in the shape of a hippo, but the most unusual is that a fissure in the ceiling lets in a waterfall course into the cave. At certain times of day during the summer, a beam of light shines through the same hole, illuminating the waterfall like a bolt of lightning.

Playa de las Catedrales, Ribadeo, Spain

photo by Christophe / Flickr

Nearly inaccessible during high tide, Spain's Playa de las Catedrales (Cathedral Beach) becomes a wonderland of cliffs, arches, and sea caves when the tide goes out. Originally called Praia de Augas Santas (Beach of the Holy Waters), the beach was renamed because of these incredible natural formations, some soaring as high as 30 meters, like the ceiling of a cathedral. 

Cathedral Cove Sea Cave, Coromandel, New Zealand

photo by Daniel Peckham / Tumblr

Another cave named after European cathedrals, Cathedral Cove holds five sea caves, one of which is among the longest in the world. Cathedral Cove is only accessible for two hours a day, when the tide is at its lowest. It's one of the most popular tourist attractions on the Catlins Coast in southeastern New Zealand. The caves are completely dark, but intrepid (flashlight-wielding) visitors are likely to come across blue penguins and seals in their depths.  

Painted Cave, California, USA

 
photo by Dave Bunnell / Wikimedia

Santa Cruz Island features 77 miles of craggy coastline, including the Painted Cave, one of the largest and deepest in the world. This cave gets its unique colors from the variety of rock types that make up its walls, as well as lichen and algae that adhere to them. The cave is 160 feet high and nearly a quarter mile long, with several inner chambers. An added wonder: in the spring, a waterfall sparkles over the entrance. 

photo by CIA via Elonka.com

"Deception is everywhere," Jim Sanborn told Wired in 2005, during a lengthy interview concerning Kryptos, his cryptographic sculpture on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The main piece, made of copper, granite, quartz, and petrified wood, contains 1,735 letters arranged into four distinct messages, of which three have been deciphered. The fourth, which is only 97 characters long, remains among the world's most famous unsolved codes. For two and a half decades Sanborn has been tossing out misdirections and refusals to comment, along with deterrents like "most of my things are rife with mistakes on purpose." But this November he offered his second official clue to the puzzle's final message. 

This all started back in 1988, during construction of the CIA's New Headquarters Building. A bit of the construction budget had been set aside to commission art "both pleasing to the eye and indicative of the agency’s work." So the CIA Fine Arts Commission (the same group that created the CIA Museum) evaluated proposals, and Sanborn's Kryptos was the clear favorite, symbolizing "the history of cryptography and the significance of intelligence gathering." He received $250,000 for the work, which includes the main statue, a duck pond, a reflecting pool, and several other granite slabs throughout the grounds, some containing morse code and lodestones, others seemingly unmarked. He was given a "crash course" in cryptology by Ed Scheidt, former Chairman of the CIA's Cryptographic Center, who helped him develop the code. But Sanborn says that he "wasn't completely truthful" with Scheidt about the solution. 

There were a few restrictions placed on Sanborn: He had to give the puzzle's solution to then–CIA Director William Webster (though he has since claimed that he did not actually give him the whole answer) and his materials were measured and X-rayed every night by the same team responsible for scanning all the construction materials for bugs. Sanborn acknowledged that this "made it tough" for him, but has still implied (and the deciphered code seems to bear out) that the answer to the Kryptos puzzle may involve something he buried in the CIA courtyard. 

The cypher is understood to include a riddle within a riddle, which will only make sense after all four passages have been solved. And even once the words themselves are determined, that still might not yield an answer, as Sanborn has said that one must be on the CIA grounds to fully solve the riddle — which won't be easy, since the grounds are accessible only for those with "official business."

The new clue is the word CLOCK toward the end of the message, following Sanborn's only other official clue: BERLIN, which he revealed in 2010. This has led to speculation that the key to solving the message may have to do with the Mengenlehreuhr, a German clock built in 1975 that tells time via illuminated colored fields. Of course, this might also be more misdirection. Sanborn has even claimed that he himself no longer remembers the solution to the puzzle, "You read the piece of paper, you burn it, and you forget it," he told Wired. "That's the only way information is kept secret."

'Sade. Attacking the Sun' at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (photograph by Nicolas Krief, all images courtesy Musée d'Orsay)

Encouraged by the turnout at last year’s blockbuster collection of male nudes, Masculine, the Musée d’Orsay has whipped up a guaranteed succès du scandale with its bicentenary tribute to the Marquis de Sade, whose death anniversary was yesterday: December 2, 1814.

The scandal over Sade. Attacking the Sun set in before anyone had a chance to see what’s hanging on the walls, thanks to a racy publicity video on YouTube that many have decried as unbefitting Paris’ most revered masterpiece-repository after the Louvre. In the clip, dozens of naked bodies writhe together to spell out the name Sade, the frequently imprisoned writer, divine debaucher, and one of the dodgiest Frenchman who ever lived, who gave us The 120 Days of Sodom and the term "sadism."

This provocative exhibition traces the impact of Sade’s banned writings through more than two centuries of art and literature. Although rarely so openly acknowledged for sparking a revolution in 19th-century thought, he liberated perceptions and portrayals of our bodies, sexuality, desire, violence and base human instinct.

Powerful stuff, even if most people will just come to the Orsay to point at the naughty bits. I went along with a young French couple and their three-month-old son. Papa didn’t want baby’s first exhibition to be a corrupting force, so he pushed the pram back to the safety of the Impressionists’ wing. Squeamish and prudish visitors may want to follow suit, but let’s head straight into the bowels of the beast.

Man Ray, "Portrait of the Marquis de Sade" (1936) (Art Institute of Chicago, © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP)

The Marquis himself is just a starting point in this wide-ranging exhibition curated by Sade specialist Annie Le Brun. The potency of his words jumps out as us from the walls where some of the juiciest quotations have been scrawled, along with snippets by other French 19th-century authors who seized on the same ideas. There are rare illustrations from banned editions, by André Masson among others, and an astonishing surrealist caricature of Sade by Man Ray. That Paris-dwelling American artist is beloved for his brand of iconic eroticism in black-and-white prints, but certainly less familiar is his explicit fetish photography.

This side of Man Ray is exposed in stark portraits — a naked female model bound in leather straps and dog collar, prostrate on the ground under the inescapable gaze of the lens ("Nu attaché," 1930) — and in a series of six vignettes posing two wooden articulated artist’s mannequins in flagrante (innocently titled "Mr and Mrs Woodman," 1927). This last piece is somewhat less flexible than what you’ll find in the Kama Sutra exhibition running concurrently at the Pinacothèque.

Man Ray, "Nu attaché" (1930) (Centre Pompidou,  © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP)

All a bit tame so far, really. What, no viscera? Our good Marquis mused long and languorously over pain, cruelty, and ferocity as by-products or even complementary states of carnal passion, exhorting us to strip away corporeal limitations as a snake sheds its skin. To inflict pain as much as to endure it, however, one must first understand the body.

To that end, a room of the exhibition is given over to 18th-century specimens of the hyper-detailed wax anatomical figures that fascinated Sade, including some particularly unsettling examples by Honoré Fragonard. Jacques-Fabien Gautier-D’Agoty’s 1754 model dominates the space: a pregnant woman, cut open and splayed out, entrails and fetus ready for inspection. Must have missed that one at Madame Tussaud’s. Rather tongue-in-cheek on the wall (not literally, I should point out) is, as Balzac quipped in 1829: “A man shouldn’t get married without having dissected at least one woman and studied her anatomy.” Meanwhile, a well-chosen Baudelaire observation likens the act of lovemaking to torture or surgery.

Sade’s "no pain, no gain" policy finds expression in images and objects that demand our unflinching voyeurism, and even compliance. One photograph circa 1900 depicts a young woman, legs bound to a chair, receiving from her matronly punisher a brutal nipple-twist with metal pincers. Goya’s most sickening portrayals of so-called inhumane torture, rape, and cannibalism, also get a look-in.

'Sade. Attacking the Sun' at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (photograph by Nicolas Krief)

Everywhere there are reminders of man’s bestial nature, including Picasso’s rarely-exhibited doodles of a reclining nude pleasured by a cunnilingus-trained fish; Klemm’s ink drawing of a woman and leopard grappling in 69, undoubtedly the most lovable exhibit; and Jean Benoît’s 1965 bondage sculpture of the sexually depraved, bloodthirsty bulldog from Isidore Ducasse Lautréamont’s 1869 prose poem Les Chants de Maldoror, decked out in leather, covered in broken-glass spikes and equipped with a life-size human penis.

Tackling religion is a must, since Sade’s stance on the Church was a major factor in why he was always evading imprisonment, reveling in acts of sexual violence as he decried the very belief system that would condemn him for it: “The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.” Within these walls we find scenes of papal rape, cavorting nuns, and a photograph of a female S&M offering strapped to a crucifix... The wrong way round. But for me, the theme is most elegantly summarized in Man Ray’s 1930 photograph Prayer.

The exhibition is a little light on Sapphic content: the penis reigns supreme, especially towards the final rooms, by which time it’s all degenerating into something carnivalesque. Engravings of allegorical penises from the 1760s, titillating female acrobats astride the erect members of her two urinating spotters (Carl Schleich’s "Pièce acrobatique," 1820). Finely wrought pewter phalluses, complete with piston mechanism, marked "providence of widows and nuns," circa 1800. And my personal favourite: penis phenakistiscopes — colored, patterned discs that spin to form an image, for which no imagination required. Reproductions would have sold like hotcakes at the gift shop.

Maybe not a great first-date exhibition, but definitely a conversation starter.

Max Ernst, "Une semaine de bonté ou les Sept Éléments capitaux, le rire du coq," Édition Jeanne Bucher, Paris, 1934 (© Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin)

Charles Amédée Philippe van Loo, "Portrait en buste du jeune marquis de Sade" (1760-1762) (© Photo Thomas Hennocque)

Sade: Attaquer le soleil (Sade. Attacking the Sun) is at the Musée d'Orsay until 25 January, 2015.
Sade fetishists can also see the remarkable 12m-long original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom at a second Paris exhibition dedicated to the saucy writer: Sade, Marquis of Darkness, Prince of Lightat the Institut des Lettreset des Manuscrits.

Winston Churchill's funeral train on January 30, 1965 (via Ben Brooksbank/geograph.org.uk)

The great statesman Winston Churchill's last ride was on board a steam locomotive. January 30, 1965 will mark the 50th anniversary of his funeral in St. Paul's Cathedral, and in honor of the solemn commemoration, the National Railway Museum in England is resurrecting his funeral train. 

As Culture24 reported this week, the train is on track for a completed restoration, having finished the major structural repairs to the baggage van where Churchill's coffin was carried. Richard Pearson, workshop and rail operations manager at Locomotion: the National Railway Museum at Shildon where the van's being restored, stated: "All that remains is the painting back to its original shade of umber and cream by our dedicated team of staff, volunteers and trainees. We anticipate it will be back to its former glory by mid-January."

The South Railway parcel van S2464S had lugged vegetables and mail before the illustrious body of the Prime Minister, but that one day's employment would make it part of British history, as well as the legacy of funeral trains. Alongside the restored van in an exhibition opening on January 30 called Churchill's Final Journey, the Railway Museum will display the No 34501 Winston Churchill engine, the locomotive that pulled the train. They're also crowdsourcing memories from anyone who witnessed the train as it chugged from Waterloo to Hanborough, where Churchill was buried beside his parents. 

The restored coffin van (via National Railway Museum)

When funeral trains debuted, some people thought they were a bit rowdy compared to the horse-drawn hearses. One of the first train services to be exclusively for the dead and their mourners was the London Necropolis Company  — with one of the best logos of all time — which started in 1854 to connect London to Brookwood Cemetery. In the United States, the funeral train got a major boost with the grand spectacle of Abraham Lincoln's railway funeral in 1865. Next year, that funeral train will hit its 150th anniversary, and to commemorate a recreation is planned to ride from Washington, DC to Springfield, Illinois. 

Whether Lenin or FDR, the 20th century saw many of its leaders taking the train to the end of their line, giving a stretch of their countries a final chance to pay their respects with a wave of the hand or doffing of the hat. The practice has mostly gone out of fashion, but just last year the funeral of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, a big train supporter, enlisted a private Amtrak train to transport his mortal remains. 

Below is some footage from Churchill's funeral train, as well as photographs of the restored coffin van and images of other funeral trains from history.

The coffin van in April of 2014 (photograph by Hec Tate/Flickr)

The Winston Churchill engine in 2013 (photograph by Nigel Gibson/Flickr)

The Winston Churchill engine in an archive photograph (via Hugh Llewelyn/Flickr)

Abraham Lincoln's funeral train illustrated in the 1860s (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Diagram of Lincoln's funeral train (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Funeral train for Ulysses S. Grant in 1886 (via SMU Central University Library)

The funeral train for Herbert Hoover in 1964 (via Old Guard Museum)

Mortuary Railway Station in Rookwood Cemetery, Australia in 1865 (via NSW Photographic Collection)

Franklin D. Roosevelt funeral train (via National Archives & Records Administration)

The Amtrak funeral train for Senator Lautenberg in 2013 (photograph by Ryan Stavely/Flickr)

Churchill's Final Journey is on view from January 30 to May 3 at the National Railway Museum in York, England.

Objects of Intrigue is a feature highlighting extraordinary objects from the world's great museums, private collections, historic libraries, and overlooked archives. See more incredible objects here >

Rio San Juan (all photographs by the author)

Mark Twain had one major complaint about his journey from San Francisco to New York in 1866: the sandwiches showed a singular lack of variation. Eschewing a rickety and possibly perilous stagecoach journey across the continent, he had opted to take one of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s steam boats across Lake Nicaragua and along the San Juan river to the Caribbean. Before the Panama Canal opened in 1914, this route through Nicaragua was the most popular Pacific-Atlantic crossing and, if a certain Chinese businessman’s plans work out, it might soon be once again.

Writing for the Alta California newspaper, Mark Twain recorded the “picturesque native girls” and “walls of dense tropical vegetation,” “frolicking monkeys,” “lounging alligators,” and substandard ham sandwiches of his voyage. He followed in the wake of hoards of prospectors who’d rushed, giddy for gold, onto Vanderbilt’s boats since they began plying these waters in 1850.

Judging by Twain’s account in Travels with Mr. Brown, the San Juan hasn’t changed all that much. Its murky brown waters are still home to plenty of wild beasts and hedged in by mysterious forests broken up by enticing watery offshoots. And, although steamboats have been replaced by motorboats, the villages along its banks can still only be reached by water.

At the end of the river is San Juan de Nicaragua, which in Twain’s day was known as Greytown (after the Jamaican Governor Charles Edward Grey), or San Juan del Norte. In the mid-19th century it was home to locals and English, French, Italian, and American sailors and businessmen exporting gold, silver, coffee, sugar, and chocolate. It had a classy hotel catering to the thousands of visitors passing through each year, amongst them Giuseppe Garibaldi and Robert E. Peary, the first north American claimed to reach the North Pole. Nowadays, the only luxury accommodation is at an exclusive fishing lodge hidden in the rainforest, and the only traces of the old residents are their graves.

A canoe’s paddle upriver from San Juan de Nicaragua is the site of the old town, founded by the Spanish in 1539 and marked by a cemetery which wouldn’t look out of place in the Cotswolds. Here lie the remains of Captain Charles Smith, who fell from his ship’s mast in 1859, and nearby, those of his loyal parrot. The town itself has been burned and bombed several times — by the U.S. Navy in 1854 in a dispute over transit rights, and an American helicopter in 1984 during the Nicaraguan Civil War — and was only tentatively re-inhabited in 1991 when the government built a new town down river.

Passed through the hands of the Spanish, British, United States, and Nicaraguan governments over the years, San Juan de Nicaragua is now part of a semi-autonomous region. Some of its residents speak English with a Caribbean lilt, others Spanish; the bakery’s coconut bread sells out quickly and the shop’s ice-cream freezer is only stocked up when a boat from upriver passes by with supplies. It’s home to an army base which keeps an eye on the Costa Rican border and an evangelical church. Historically, this land belongs to the Rama tribe, who still live up the Río Indio and all along Nicaragua’s "Mosquito" coast.

When I met their chief, he was worried about the plans for a new canal; worried about the destruction it would wreak on the rainforest and the river. This isn’t his first disagreement with the Nicaraguan government. During the Civil War, he smuggled children into Costa Rica to protect them, earning his nickname "Coyote," usually given to drug-traffickers. 

San Juan’s been a battleground, literally and ideologically, for years. At a treacherous bend midway along the river is a castle dating from 1675 which would look more at home atop a rocky crag in Scotland than beside the rainforest. It was here, in 1780, that the young Horatio Nelson won an early naval victory. And along here that filibuster William Walker seized control of Vanderbilt’s steamboats during his short-lived spell as self-proclaimed President of Nicaragua in 1855.

As if San Juan hasn’t had a tricky enough time as it is, what with pirates and upstart young naval officers and harsh food critics, it’s soon to be impacted by a new transoceanic crossing. Not that this hasn’t been tried before. In 1893, the Nicaragua Steamship and Navigation Company began dredging the river and laid 20 kilometers of railway tracks alongside their canal, which ran between San Juan del Norte and El Castillo. But by 1929, the company had gone bust, unable to compete with the Panama Canal.

This time round, the Nicaraguan government’s taking matters into its own hands, with the backing of a Chinese billionaire, Wang Jing, who’s promised $40 billion towards construction costs. Maps have been made and hands have shook on a plan to construct a 173-mile-long canal through the rainforest north of the San Juan river, exiting at Bluefields, the main port on the Caribbean sea. The government claims this is just what the country needs to lift it out of poverty, but the effect on the rainforest it will tear through on its way north from Lake Nicaragua is likely to be huge. And I’m sure it won’t help the sandwich situation much either.

All photographs by the author.

Manta ray parking bay (photo by David Sim / Wikimedia)

In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, manta ray populations have plummeted by 56% to 86% in recent years, according to a report by international environmental NGO WildAid. Indonesian authorities have been working to protect manta rays, which are threatened for several reasons: low reproduction rates, frequency of getting caught in fishing nets, and, over the last decade, a strong increase in being hunted. The rays are prized for their gill rakers, tiny filaments that help filter tiny bits of food out of the water, and are believed by many practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine to have many health benefits. 

Earlier this year, Indonesia established the world's biggest manta ray sanctuary: more than 2 million square miles of protected waters. This was based on both conservational and economic impulses —1kg of dried manta gills can fetch about $170 in the marketplace, whereas the government has estimated that a single living ray will generate about $1 million in tourist revenue over its lifetime. And the government is fighting for rays in other ways: Last month, as LiveScience reported, a trafficker was arrested in possession of 227 pounds of gills, in what is so far the largest bust of a manta trader.

Ironically, the gill rakers don't actually seem to be part of Traditional Chinese Medicine at all. Despite claims that the gills, called peng yu sai, can do everything from purifying the blood to increasing fertility to curing chicken pox, the UK nonprofit Manta Trust has reported that no references to the gills appear in the Traditional Chinese Medicine literature or curricula, and interviews with respected practitioners have not yielded evidence to support their use. Even worse, tests done on the gills for sale in markets in Guangzhou, China, where about 99 percent of the world’s gill consumers are located, has found them to contain alarmingly high levels of arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead. 

Hopefully the many educational campaigns around this issue, combined with governmental crackdowns on traders, will help curtail the demand for peng yu sai, in turn decreasing its profitability for traders, and ultimately helping to save these endangered creatures.  

From the Secret Symbolism tour of Green-Wood Cemetery (photo by Steve Acres)

Spread the word - Atlas Obscura is headed to the Midwest to launch a brand new Obscura Society chapter! Sign up here to explore Illinois and Chicago's most curious, wondrous, hidden, and overlooked locations with Atlas Obscura!

We've had an incredible year of events in New York and Los Angeles, curating unique, unusual access experiences ranging from hosting an elaborate cocktail soiree within a historic burial vault to arranging a private viewing within the world's largest telescope and teaching 300 well-coiffed guests how to pick locks. Now, with 2015 on the horizon we've partnered up with Enjoy Illinois to scout out the state's most curious, wondrous, hidden and overlooked locations.  Our list is long and only continues to grow, and we couldn't be more excited! Sign up above to hear about our upcoming events! 

An exclusive Obscura Society outing to the New Years Eve Ball earlier this year (photo by Allison Meier)

We'll be launching February 2015 with a bang! Get ready for a truly earth-shattering debut party in an as of yet undisclosed Chicago location.

Follow the link to sign up for the Illinois Obscura Society mailing list to be amongst the very first to hear about new excursions, adventures and events as they are added to our calendar. In the meantime, feast your eyes upon a small sample of the many wonders and curiosities of Illinois - we're anxious to begin exploring the state with you! Below are a few of the places we are looking forward to visiting! If you have suggestions for Illinois and Chicago places we should organize a trip to, contact megan@atlasobscura.com!

The Cockcroft-Walton Generator at Fermilab (photo by wolfstad.com)

Bahá’í Temple (© Bahá’í International Community)

Cave-in-Rock (photo by Terry Priest)

Inside the Armour Meatpacking Plant (photo by Music Man)

Jackson Park, Chicago, IL (Public Domain photo by tpsdave)

Sign up here to explore Illinois and Chicago's most curious, wondrous, hidden and overlooked locations with Atlas Obscura.

(photo by Tom Quinn Williams, via the Tjipetir Mystery Facebook)

In 2012, Tracey Williams discovered her first Tjipetir block during a beachside stroll in Cornwall, England. "I’ve always been fascinated by chance finds and the stories behind them," she told Atlas Obscura in an email. She took it home and googled "Tjipetir," but found little information and chalked up the big rubbery square as merely a curiosity. But a few weeks later she found another similar block on a different beach. "Finding one was interesting, but finding two was rather odd," she said. And she began researching in earnest. 

Late-19th-century Indonesian gutta-percha plantation (photo via Tropenmuseum / Wikimedia)

It turns out that Tjipetir is a village in Indonesia, as well as the site of a 19th-century plantation for gutta-percha, a rubber-like substance made from tree sap. Gutta-percha had many uses, from hot air balloons to fire hoses, but was most commonly for insulating underwater telegraph cables. It was clear to Tracey that the blocks must be coming ashore from a shipwreck, and that there must be many more. So she set up a Facebook page to see if anyone else had similar finds to report. Soon submissions were coming in from all around the British Isles, as well as France, Denmark, Spain, and the Shetland Islands.

Adam Adamson and Marina with a block they found on the Shetland Isles, photo by Adam Adamson (via the Tjipetir Mystery Facebook)

A strong community developed on the Facebook page, with people sharing stories and trading theories about the origin of the blocks. Tracey spoke with wreck divers, oceanographers, historians, and journalists, and interest in the story grew.  As Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer told the BBC in its story on the mystery last month, it takes flotsam about 25 years to go around the world, so determining the source of the blocks, which may have been afloat for more than a century and gone around the world several times, seemed quite difficult. For some time a popular theory was that the blocks actually came from the Titanic, which had gutta-percha tablets listed on its cargo manifest.

Friederike Wegert and her children with a block they found at Borkum, photo by Friederike Wegert (via the Tjipetir Mystery Facebook)

"It was like a big jigsaw with lots of pieces missing," Tracey explained. But then in late 2013, there was a breakthrough. "Several people started throwing me clues — people who seemed to be in the know. Two different people from two different countries independently sent me information naming the same ship." That was the Miyazaki Maru, a Japanese passenger ship that was sunk by a German submarine while on its way to London in 1927. It seemed that a salvage operation was under way on the wreck, which may have released a large number of blocks into the ocean, accounting for the sudden uptick in their appearance on beaches.

Tracey wasn't the only one who now thought the Miyazaki Maru could be the source of the blocks. The British government's Receiver of Wreck (also called the Coroner of the Seas) was also looking to that ship, and called it the "favored possibility" as the source of the blocks. The ship's location fits the drift pattern the blocks' recovery indicates, and it was carrying hundreds, if not thousands, of gutta-percha planks. Mystery solved — perhaps.

Tracey Williams, photo by Tom Quinn Williams (via the Tjipetir Mystery Facebook)

"There are many questions still to be answered," Tracey stated. "For me, the story is only just beginning." She is interested in learning more about the Miyazaki Maru and the people who died aboard it, and she also thinks there's a good chance that the blocks originated on more than one ship. She's currently at work on a book about the Tjipetir mystery. "I think people love mysteries of the sea," Tracey added. "This story has connected beachcombers and communities across the world. It’s a story about war, shipwrecks, and salvage, and is helping oceanographers who study the patterns of the tides." Tracey is certainly no stranger to sea mysteries — she also runs the Facebook page Lego Lost At Sea, seeking to track the toys that have come ashore since 62 containers washed overboard from the Tokio Express in 1997. 

Because the oceans are vast and so seemingly unknowable, beaches where strange things wash ashore are a great source of fascination for many. This particular mystery may be solved (or it may not), but surely more wonders are waiting in the watery depths to captivate our attention onshore.

Illustration from "The Taxidermist's Guide" (1870) (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Dead kittens sharing tea and crumpets. Dead hamsters playing cricket. Dead rabbits cheating on a math quiz. How did these scenes of morbid yet comical magic come to pass? It was a marriage of fact and fancy: the Victorian passions for whimsical fantasy and natural history came together in one irresistible art form: anthropomorphic taxidermy.

Death and mourning possessed the Victorians, a society inextricably linked to their loyalty to the past. The rituals of expressing grief adhered to stringent rules that were often implemented on an outlandish scale. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria’s period of mourning, which continued until her own death, inspired a whole wave of artistic influence. From electroplating the dead to crafting ornaments from their body parts, Victorians commemorated their loved ones with post-mortem mementos that seem gruesome or downright perverse to our sensitive modern culture.

The practice of taxidermy allowed people to honor their precious pets by stuffing and mounting them for eternity. Preserving dead animals also satisfied scientific curiosity, as well as the desire for protected beauty.

 Early dissection & preservation techniques from 'L'Histoire des Animaux - Zoology' (via Gallica Digital Library)

"Take out the entrails; remove the skin with the greatest possible care...," an illustration from an 1871 crafting publication (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Following the Age of Enlightenment’s scientific boom, natural history was an immensely prevalent interest for the upper classes as well as politically. In the 18th century, the European pioneers of taxidermy used rudimentary formulas to preserve birds for scientific study. Over the next century, taxidermists invented more non-poisonous preservation methods, but the work still lacked artistry, as the specimens retained their stiff little corpselike demeanors.

Crystal Palace from the northeast from 'Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851' (via Wikimedia)

In the 19th century, drastic scientific and technological changes, not to mention evolutionary thought, meant that divine beliefs yielded to fixations on nature, life, and death. The technological advances of the age were showcased in the first world’s fair. The Great Exhibition, also called the Crystal Palace Exhibition, was housed in Hyde Park, London in 1851, headed up by Henry Cole and Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria.

The majestic Crystal Palace, designed by greenhouse engineer to the stars, Sir Joseph Paxton, was a technologically innovative acropolis of iron and glass, the construction of which was made possible by very recent inventions, such as industrial steam engines and electric telegraphs. The exhibition housed 14,000 exhibitors and provided a platform for all nations to flaunt their industrial progress. But the show clearly acted as a public relations device to boost the image of British superiority, which certainly helped secure Prince Albert’s reputation.

Crystal Palace steel engraving of interior during the Great Exhibition (via Wellcome Images)

The exhibit that absolutely enraptured the Victorians was the anthropomorphic taxidermy tableaux created by Hermann Ploucquet (1816-1878), German taxidermist for the Royal Museum in Stuttgart, whose commercial success vitalized his pursuit toward more artistic and natural techniques.

His inventive methods were hewn from an informed scientific mind with a desire to be a fine artist. Each diorama invited the viewer into a miniaturized world, intensified with concentrated emotions, somehow contained and accessible to the curious human gaze.

Ploucquet’s work dazzled Victoria and Albert, as well as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte, and six million other attendees. Though some of his gory displays incurred critics’ contempt, Ploucquet had his finger on the pulse of the art crowd, creating dioramas that mimicked the style of the fashionable paintings and sculptures of the day. The Victorians found the tableaux unequivocally beguiling, and Queen Victoria described them in her diary as “really marvelous.”

Etching from sketches by George Cruikshank of Hermann Ploucquet's "drolleries" in the Great Exhibition of 1851 (via LWL Digital Collections)

1851 photograph of one of Hermann Ploucquet's dioramas (via Pat Morris/University of the West England) 

The fantastical allegorical scenes served to humanize the animals and animalize the human spectators in a delicious hybrid of delight and shame. The little landscapes of critters frozen in the midst of human activities were originally known as grotesques. Ploucquet took the art form to the next level with his dramatic tableaux, including scenes of kittens serenading a piglet, a weasel disciplining a classroom of rabbits, dueling dormice, ice skating hedgehogs, and action scenes portraying Reineke, or Reynard the Fox, a medieval European folk tale made famous by Goethe.

His stuffed animal tableaux were recreated in a book of woodcut illustrations — The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg — published soon after the exhibition. Ploucquet went on to open a private museum filled with wall-to-wall lifelike animal montages.

Walter Potter's "Rabbit School" diorama (via Wikimedia)

Walter Potter (1835-1918), an English inn keeper’s son and possibly the most widely known anthropomorphic taxidermist, went from preserving his own dead birds to creating an unparalleled collection of thousands of stuffed beasts donning human clothing. Potter is believed to have used only previously deceased animals in his creations, donated by a local farm. Ploucquet may have inspired his work, but Potter was a self-taught amateur. He created his art for the purpose enjoyment, based on fantasy and fairy tale rather than technical accuracy and character allegory.

At 19, Potter spent seven years creating his masterpiece, “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin,” which showcased 98 species of birds. In 1861, he opened his private museum in Bramber, Sussex, displaying his intricate dioramas, including a kitten wedding party and a rats’ den being raided by the police. Even the dangerous scenes retained their tenderness and humility. Where Potter lacked in anatomical precision, he dominated in unrivaled detail, from the kittens’ jewelry and frilly knickers to the squirrels’ fancy little brandy decanters.

Rife with affable waggishness, Potter’s tableaux escalated the heights of peculiarity even further with his genetic mutations, such as eight-legged kittens and two-headed lambs. By the end of his life, Potter’s museum held a collection of 10,000 specimens, which remained intact under various ownership until Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosities was auctioned off in 2003 at the Jamaica Inn in Cornwall for over £500,000.

All the more to love! Walter Potter's eight-legged kitten (via Wikimedia)

Ploucquet and Potter gratified the Victorian passion for nature in its anti-naturalistic form. They harnessed a wild bestial power and made it into a kitschy commodity, where whimsy overpowered the morbidity of the situation.

Although Potter’s work has been disseminated into 691 different lots, parts of the collection have been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Liverpool Museum, and Sir Peter Blake’s exhibition at the London Museum of Everything.

Learn taxidermy by mail advertisement from 1886 (via Internet Archive Book Images)

Curatorial associate & behavioral ecologist Christine Johnson displays specimens from the American Museum of Natural History's Invertebrate Zoology collection (courtesy AMNH)

Visitors to New York's American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) only see a fraction of its 33 million specimens, and often don't realize in addition to displaying dinosaurs and taxidermy dioramas, it's an incredibly active research institution. To give the public a look at this invisible side of the museum, AMNH launched an online video series called Shelf Life last month.

The first episode — "33 Million Things" — is an introduction to some of the staff, spaces, and incredible specimens (some not even physical objects like genomic data and astrophysical visualizations) at AMNH. Much of the museum's research is focused on invertebrate zoology (over 90% of animals are, after all, spineless), along with vertebrates, physical sciences, anthropology, paleontology, and other sciences of life on Earth. The next edition of Shelf Life on "Turtles and Taxonomy" is out later this month, so we asked Senior New Media Specialist Erin Chapman who produced the series a few questions about this hidden world of research operating everyday through the work of over 200 scientists. 

Why was this a series the museum needed?

Last year, AMNH received an amazing collection of 540,000 marine fossils (ammonites! trilobites! sharks!) that in one fell swoop pushed us over the mark of having 33,000,000 specimens and artifacts. Sure, it’s just a number, but it gave us a chance to sort of step back and have a collective “WHOA” moment.

This is one of the largest and most important research collections in the world. There are 33 million things here. The scope and scale is just phenomenal, and while the museum has gorgeous galleries and fantastic exhibitions, visitors only get to see a tiny fraction of our collection. And just as importantly, visitors rarely get the chance to interact with all the incredible folks who are doing active science here. The curators, collection staff, and researchers love the museum collections and are really excited to be able to share their work and the stories behind the specimens. So, one video wasn’t going to cut it — there’s way, way, way too much science and history to fit into a YouTube-friendly five minutes. Honestly, we’d probably need 33,000,000 videos to do the collection justice, but creating Shelf Life seemed like a good first step.

Drawer in the Invertebrate Zoology collection at the American Museum of Natural History (courtesy AMNH)

Hippopotamus skulls in the museum's Mammalogy collection (courtesy AMNH)

How do you choose which research areas are covered?

Like a lot of folks who work here, I’ve been in love with natural history museums from a really young age. So, in some ways, I’ve been thinking about this series since I was a dorky kid at museum summer camp with paleontologists pinned up over my bed. Now that I work at AMNH, getting to go into the collections and talk with the scientists is my childhood dream come true. I’m constantly asking them questions about their research and the collections, and certain subjects consistently rise to the top. Those themes ended up being the big picture ideas that we wanted to build the series around. Things like specimen prep — how and why do you prepare a specimen (be it biological or geological) in a particular way; taxonomy — how are collections arranged; technology — how do things like advanced imaging techniques provide new insights; and preservation — why do we need to keep these things around for so long.

We’ll be telling stories from every scientific division in the museum, using a particular narrative as a lens for exploring a collections theme. For example, early next year, we’ll be using the discovery of the olinguito — the newest species in the order Carnivora, and super cute, to boot — to examine the concept of holotypes. Holotypes are the individual specimens used in the original description of a species and they’re incredibly important scientific treasures.

Do you have any favorite discoveries from working on the series?

Right now, I’m nuts about the coelacanth. We’re featuring the museum’s five coelacanth specimens in our January episode about specimen prep. I first found out about the story when Radford Arrindell, who works in our Ichthyology collection, was walking me through the clearing and staining process. This is a gorgeous method of preparation where the specimen itself is made transparent and the bones and cartilage are stained pink and blue, respectively. I asked what would happen if you left the specimen in its enzyme bath too long and Rad was like, “Not good.” I said, “So, I guess you wouldn’t risk this with something like a coelacanth” (which is an incredibly rare fish), but I was wrong. Rad proceeded to show me our cleared and stained coelacanth embryo, which, needless to say, is amazing.

I was hooked (no fish pun intended). Turns out, in addition to an adult male and female, we have three embryonic coelacanths, each prepared in a different method. The story of the pups’ discovery (yup, the babies are called pups) is really awesome — tune in January 15th for the video — and I’ve been non-stop researching coelacanths. I found some fantastic stuff in the museum’s archives, including the libretto to a three-part operetta written by a researcher in the 1960s and entitled, “A Coelacanth’s Lament.” Sample lyric: “I stroked her denticulate scales to and fro whisp’ring ‘fossil, sweet fossil, dear fossil.’”

Watch the first episode of Shelf Life below:

The next episode of Shelf Life — "Turtles and Taxonomy" — will be released December 15. 

Abandoned Futuro House in Royse City, Texas (photograph by Steve Rainwater/Flickr)

Last month an Atlas Obscura user submitted a curious building that appeared like a forgotten alien crash site. The UFO-shaped house in Royse City, Texas, sits alone in an overgrown field, a vision of some solitary failed retrofuture dream. Which is why when we shared it online, we were surprised when so many people responded with their UFO house sightings around the world. 

The Futuro House was designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the late 1960s. Made of new materials like plastic and manufactured to be portable and adaptable to diverse terrain with its raised legs, the capsule house was imagined as a ski chalet with a quick heating system. You entered through a hatch to an elliptical space with a bedroom, bathroom, fireplace, and living room. Suuronen soon saw its potential beyond the slopes, and through the Futuro Corporation built the lightweight houses as a prefabricated, compact housing solution adaptable for any corner of the globe. 

Due to its unusual space age-influenced design, and the oil crisis of 1973 that made plastic expensive, under 100 of the houses were made. Around 60 of those survive, and they've dispersed all over the globe like a covert invasion of extraterrestrials that got canceled decades ago. Some look new, such as one in gleaming yellow on top of the WeeGee exhibition center outside of Helsinki, or another recently restored as a study space at the University of Canberra in Australia. Others are anomalies in the urban landscape, including one in Tampa, Florida, that's a strip club VIP room, while at Pink Elephant Antique Mall in Livingston, Illinois, a battered model mingles with other kitsch from the past like a Twistee Treat shack and a Muffler Man. 

The Futuro House in Pensacola Beach, Florida, which survived Hurricane Ivan (photograph by Ken Ratcliff/Flickr)

The site TheFuturoHouse.com carefully maps the whereabouts of the world's remaining Suuronen UFOs, from New Zealand to Greece. You can also cruise by them on Street View through Google Sightseeing's round up of the saucers. And while you can't buy one for $14,000 like when they were made, the houses do periodically turn up for sale — one appeared on eBay this May.

Matti Suuronen wasn't the only architect to attempt UFO-style living — there were also the Sanjhih UFO houses in Taiwan built in 1978, unfortunately now demolished. But there is something enduringly endearing about the homes, and there's definitely room now in our current housing situation for houses that can be quickly built in varying topography. It's easy to imagine them touching down on top of New York City's apartment buildings as additional living space, or braving the rugged landscape of Antarctica as research bases (there are in fact similar structures in use by the Australian Antarctica Division).

Through December 14, you can visit a freshly restored 1972 Futuro House adopted by artist Craig Barnes on top of Matt's Gallery in London. But to really go back in time, check out the 1971 footage below from when the Futuro House was a brand new vision for futuristic living. 

Örebro, Sweden (photograph by Sebastian F of Sw. Wiki/Wikimedia)

Warrington, New Zealand (photograph by Peter Dowden/Wikimedia)

Outerbanks, North Carolina (photograph by Elizabeth/Flickr)

New Zealand (photograph by Adam Fletcher/Flickr)

Conjoined Futuro Houses in Germantown, Ohio (photograph by Rob Lambert/Flickr)

Berlin, Germany (photograph by Georg Slickers/Wikimedia)

The first Moon Tree, planted in 1975 by George Vitas of the US Forest Service in Washington Square Park, Philadelphia (via Forest History Society)

A tree near you may be secretly extraordinary. On the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, 500 seeds rode aboard the command module, orbiting the moon 34 times in the care of astronaut Stuart Roosa. When the seeds returned to Earth and germinated, they were distributed across the country and even gifted further afield, like one sent to the Emperor of Japan.

These "Moon Trees" were planted between 1975 and 1976 as part of the United States bicentennial celebrations. The sycamores, loblolly pines, sweetgums, redwoods, and Douglas firs flourished just like other trees, despite their experience out of gravity. However, after the fanfare, the extraterrestrial origin story for many of the trees was forgotten.

Some were given commemorative plaques that wore down with age, but most just became local, obscure oddities. No official list was kept of where the trees were planted. Then in 2011, coordinated by NASA scientist Dave Williams, a search was launched to track down surviving Moon Trees. Partly it was to mark the anniversary of the Apollo 14 moon mission, but also it was a tribute to astronaut Roosa, who had worked for the Forest Service before his space exploration as a smokejumper who parachuted into wildfires. The tree project was a collaboration between NASA and the Forest Service.

Roosa took the little seeds on his flight in a small metal container kept in his personal kit, where nestled in the module they orbited while Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell walked the moon below. The Moon Tree emblem (at left courtesy of NASA) showed green branches against the lunar surface with an astronaut standing by.

NASA now has a list of over 50 living Moon Trees on its site, and is still looking for more. One is in Monterey, California, in Friendly Plaza, another sycamore is on the front lawn of the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis. A pine was lost to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, but the first Moon Tree planted still grows in Philadelphia's Washington Square Park. The trees might look like ordinary arbors, but they're significant reminders of the intrepid spirit of NASA's missions to the moon.

Moon Tree in the International Forest of Friendship, Atchison, Kansas (photograph by Morgan Schwartz/Flickr)

Moon Tree in the International Forest of Friendship, Atchison, Kansas (photograph by Morgan Schwartz/Flickr)

Moon Tree in the International Forest of Friendship, Atchison, Kansas (photograph by Morgan Schwartz/Flickr)

Douglas fir Moon Tree in Wilson Park, Salem, Oregon (photograph by Travel Salem/Flickr)

Douglas fir Moon Tree in Wilson Park, Salem, Oregon (photograph by Travel Salem/Flickr)

Moon Tree in Holliston, Massachusetts (photograph by Garrett Coakley/Flickr)

Moon Tree in Holliston, Massachusetts (photograph by Garrett Coakley/Flickr)

Moon Tree at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (photograph by John Stockton/Flickr)

Kennedy Space Center (photograph by Shannon Moore/Flickr)

Moon Tree in Washington Square, Philadelphia (photograph by George100/Wikimedia)

Washington Square, Philadelpia (photograph by George100/Wikimedia)

Moon Tree in Monterey, California (photograph by Martin Schmidt)

Moon Tree in Monterey, California (photograph by Martin Schmidt)

An Earth Day planting for a second generation Moon Tree by NASA in 2009 (via NASA HQ Photo)