Forgotten Plague. Secret Romance. Baby Universe.
Vanished Family. Classified Doodle. Silent Explosion.
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. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.
What do a family that vanished into the Siberian wilderness, a doodle on hotel stationery, a colony of bacteria, and an explosion missing its own explosion have in common? All four of these stories are true. Only one of them has an ending. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron follows four stories where the obvious answer turns out to be wrong, missing, or classified for 78 years. We cover the Lykov family, Russian Old Believers who fled 250 kilometers into the taiga in 1936 and stayed hidden so long that World War II, the Cold War and the moon landing all happened without them; the Eastern Airlines pilot who sketched a wingless, window-lined object on hotel stationery in 1948, a drawing that stayed buried in Air Force files until this month's fourth PURSUE UAP release; the Baylor researchers who found that genetically identical bacteria split into donors and recipients under antibiotic pressure, passing survival proteins between cells in what amounts to a microscopic mutual aid network; and the deep-space explosion spotted by China's Einstein Probe that matched every signature of a gamma-ray burst except the gamma rays. History, microbiology, astrophysics, declassified government files, all delivered in about five minutes with no jargon and zero apologies. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.
What does a volcano, a thousand-year-old tree, ancient squirrel droppings, and a deep-sea ghost have in common? They're all weirder than anything you'd make up. In this debut episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron digs into four stories that prove the natural world has absolutely no obligation to make sense. And we're here for all of it! We cover the Antarctic volcano that's been scattering gold dust across the ice every single day since 1972 (and why no one's getting rich off it), the legendary Major Oak of Sherwood Forest that survived a millennium of history only to be felled by too much human "help," the Ice Age ground squirrels whose frozen droppings turned out to be a richer genetic archive than bone, and the goblin shark, a 125-million-year-old living fossil that finally let itself be filmed alive for the very first time. Science, history, paleogenomics, volcanology, deep-sea discovery — all delivered in about five minutes with no jargon and zero apologies. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox.