Life is weird and there are a lot of facts out there that sound too unbelievable to be true.
Did you know, for instance, that a day on Venus is longer than a year? Or that some animals are born pregnant?
These aren't to be confused with the plenty of hoaxes out there, or widely held beliefs that turn out to be wrong. Using threads from Reddit and previously published articles onBuzzFeed, Business Insider, and elsewhere on the web, here are 29 facts that sound so weird, you might think they're fake.
About 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today.
About 108.2 billion people have ever been born in the history of the world, according to the Population Reference Bureau. And about 7.442 billion are alive today. Do the math, and you'll see just how crazy population growth can be.
A chicken lived without a head for 18 months.
Chicken brains are concentrated at the back of the skull, and there isn't much to begin with anyway. For that reason, a decapitated chicken can survive for quite a while, living off just its nerve endings.
Mike the Headless Chicken is perhaps the most famous example. Its owner, a farmer named Lloyd Olsen, chopped his head off in 1945, but the chicken just didn't die. So the family kept him around and dropped food and water directly into his esophagus. It finally gave out after 18 months and considerable media attention.
There's a species of shark that can live for around 500 years.
The Greenland Shark has the longest lifespan of all known vertebrates, living an average of 272 years, and some of them can live to be around 500 years old.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider