This week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts are here!

557. Sep 21: At 22 km tall, the Martian volcano Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain in the solar system. (Everest is 9 km.) Technically, it is the “tallest known”, but it is hard to imagine another planet having the right conditions to beat it.

558. Sep 22: Galen’s 200 AD anatomy text was based on animal dissections, but was mistakenly thought to be based on human for 1000 yrs. (Galen was clear that his dissections were based on monkeys, but this info was later overlooked.)

559. Sep 23: Mosaics tell 100,000-year-old fish tale.  (via @w_archaeology)

560. Sep 24: The dinosaur “Oviraptor” was named because it was found presumably preying on eggs. They turned out to be its own eggs.

561. Sep 25: Benjamin Franklin: scientist, statesman — and inventor of a musical instrument.  

562. Sep 26: Did a turtle a few days ago, but can’t resist this one: the “bum breathing turtle“! 

563. Sep 27: Via @stevesilberman: Coroner rules Irish pensioner “spontaneously combusted.” Spontaneous combustion (SHC — spontaneous human combustion) has been observed for literally hundreds of years, with some 200 cases cited over the past 300 years.  Nobody seems to know the origin of SHC, or even if it is a single phenomenon responsible for the reported cases.