Interesting Facts - Page 208

The Isle of Man TT is an annual motorcycle racing event that takes place over thirteen days each spring. Since the first event in 1907, 156 racers have died, an average of more than one per year. Six racers died in 2022 alone.

For 700 years, people from Catalonia were banned from entering the Mount Athos monastic community in Greece. This was because of the actions of the Catalan Company, a notorious band of mercenaries who rampaged through the area in the early 1300s. The ban was finally overturned in 2005.

Creme Puff was the oldest cat who ever lived, dying in 2005 at age 38. Her owner kept her entertained by building a theater in his garage which played nature documentaries.

Chimpanzees have much better short term visual memory than humans.

Homo floresiensis was a species of hominid that lived on Flores Island, Indonesia from roughly 1 million years ago until the arrival of modern humans about 50,000 years ago. Standing a little over 1 meter tall, this species is theorized to have evolved from Homo erectus. Over the course of thousands of years, it shrunk to a much smaller size, particularly its brain, which shrank by more than 50% to the size of a chimpanzee's.