This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Time moves differently for everything on the planet.

It's all relative.

A whole lifetime for a fly is a moment for a human.

And a whole lifetime for a human is a brief blink from the perspective of geologic time. These are the sorts of facts that

we learn in grade school, but only gain weights the longer we live. And what of the living

beings that fall between human and geologic time? Tortoises that live for hundreds of years,

the Greenland shark, quietly prowling the ocean for centuries, towering trees deep within

rainforests, how do we measure ourselves next to them? To do so is probably a futile effort,

but is one that leads a person to some truly fascinating discoveries about how in sync the

natural world is and how various species can fall out of sync throughout the

millennia. For example, we all understand the evolutionary advantage of fruits, right? When an animal

eats a fruit, it inadvertently winds up spreading the seeds of that tree that produced the fruit.

But what does one do with the fruit that no animals eat? Biologists have found

many examples of these across the globe, from the Kentucky coffee tree to the honey locusts and certain

strains of persimmon. There are fruits that are too large for most animal species to eat practically.

So why do they exist? A particularly extreme example exists in the Osage Orange, a sturdy softball-sized fruit that produces

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