Somebody asked for ‘random fun facts’ – 22 fascinating nuggets of information to refresh your doom-scrolling brain

Do you remember the early days of the internet, when we used it to look things up and learn information, rather than to constantly marinate our minds in anger and misery?

Good times, right? Well, the AskUK subreddit made a brief return to this after user 87catmama posted this:

Can you hit me up with some random, fun facts please? There’s a girl at work who likes to tell me random, fun facts and I like to hear them! I told her I’d find some out to tell her tomorrow, and there’s no-one better to ask than the great British public.

Plenty of people stepped in with some truly fascinating facts that you’ll want to tell people too, like these…

1.

‘Dinosaurs were around for so long that fossils of dinosaurs existed whilst other dinosaurs were alive.’
–beatsshootsandleaves

2.

‘In a similar vein, Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the great pyramid.’
–-Po-Tay-Toes-

3.

‘We are equidistant in time from Three Lions as Three Lions is from the 1966 World Cup.’
–Brickie78

4.

‘Holly leaves are only spiky near the ground. The higher up a holly tree you go, the smoother the leaves will be. It takes a lot of effort to make spiky leaves, so where it doesn’t need to defend itself, it doesn’t make them.’
–lemonsqueezy55

5.

‘The Wild West only lasted for 30 years and was so recent that England had an organised football league for the last seven years of it. So cowboys were around when Everton was winning the league.’
–Fantastic_Picture384

6.

‘Mars is the only planet we know that is inhabited solely by robots.’
–Sarcastic_Clunt

7.

‘My favourite one recently is Nachos. Nachos were so named as Nacho was the nickname of their creator.

‘The fun fact is the ingredient that turns cheese into Nacho cheese is called sodium citrate. This contains Sodium (Na), Carbon (C), Hydrogen (H) and Oxygen (O).

‘So the formula for nacho cheese is NaCHO.’
–lesterbottomley

8.

‘Sharks are older than trees. They’re also older than Saturn’s rings.’
–LilBlueFairyDragon

9.

‘Chinchillas have on average 88 hairs per square millimetre making them the hairiest mammal on the planet.

‘Mr T Nutkins. Really Wild Show. 1980s.’
–4x6x8

10.

‘Ancient Egypt was such a long period of time that the Egyptians researched it themselves.’
–Ok-Task3135

11.

‘I’ve got a good one that I get really excited to tell people who don’t know.

‘Owls don’t say ‘twit twoo’. When you’re hearing ‘twit twoo’ you’re hearing two owls talking to each other – one says twit and the other says twoo.

‘Not sure whether it’s permanently allocated, depending on male/female or whatever but yeah. I like that one.’
–Agitated-Handle-7750

12.

‘Australia is wider than the moon.’
–Houdini23