Forgotten Plague. Secret Romance. Baby Universe.

What do a pandemic that erased itself from memory, bull sharks with a decade-long romance, a dime-sized fossil mislabeled for decades, and a dying star that might be giving birth to a new universe have in common? All four had been misread, mislabeled, or forgotten . . . . until they weren't.

In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories where the conventional explanation falls apart. Encephalitis lethargica — the "sleepy sickness" that spread alongside the Spanish Flu, left survivors trapped inside their own bodies, and then simply vanished, cause still unknown. Bull sharks in Fiji returning to the same breeding partners across multiple seasons, sometimes a decade apart, in a population too small to feel safe about. A hatchling embolomere hiding on an Illinois fossil collector's shelf for years, mislabeled as a baby lamprey, that turned out to be 310 million years old and proof that early tetrapods may have skipped the aquatic childhood phase entirely. And a graduate student's master's thesis that opened a serious scientific conversation about whether a collapsing star might birth a tiny universe instead of a black hole.

Strange medicine, hidden shark families, a fossil that rewrote vertebrate history, and cosmology born from a homework assignment, all in about eight minutes.

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