In 1844, Sir David Brewster discovered an iron nail in a block of stone in Scotland’s Kingoodie Quarry. The nail was embedded in a Cretaceous block from the Mesozoic era; in 1985, the British Geological Survey dated the bed at between 360 and 408 million years old.

An iron nail has no business in the Mesozoic era, and no ordinary nail could avoid oxidation for more than 400 million years.

So how’d it get there? No one knows.

In 1973, over Ivory Coast, an aircraft collided with a Ruppell’s griffon, a kind of vulture.

It had been flying at 37,000 feet — that’s seven miles high.

Dioniso Pulido must have angered the gods.

On Feb. 20, 1943, the Mexican farmer watched a volcanic fissure open in the middle of his cornfield. Within 24 hours the cone was 50 meters high; within a week it was twice that. By August his whole town was buried in lava and ash.

The new volcano, called Paricutin, eventually grew to be 10,000 feet high, and it didn’t go quiet until 1952.

And the gods got their due. No one died in the eruption — but three people were killed by associated lightning strikes.

This iron pillar, part of a complex of monuments in Delhi, India, has stood for 1,600 years without rusting, despite harsh weather.

Metallurgists think it’s protected by a thin layer of “misawite”, a compound of iron, oxygen and hydrogen, that formed shortly after it was made.