Fifteen-year-old Owen Burnham was walking along a Gambian beach in 1983 when he came upon a group of villagers cutting up a carcass. He says it measured about 15 feet long, with a 4.5-foot head and a beak containing 80 conical teeth. The villagers eventually sold the head to a tourist and buried the body.

Burnham’s story is a little fishy — he took extensive measurements but didn’t think to take a photo or save a sample. And now no one can find the body.

Maybe “Gambo” was a living dinosaur; maybe it was a mangled whale; maybe it never existed. At this point the only person who can shed any light is the tourist … and he’s not talking.

Ted Hustead was kind of a nut for self-promotion. When he bought a drugstore in tiny Wall, South Dakota, in 1931, he figured he could attract customers through advertising.

Maybe he overcompensated a little. There are now 500 miles of Wall Drug billboards on Interstate 90, stretching all the way to Minnesota at an annual cost of $400,000, plus signs at the North and South Poles, the Paris Metro, and the Taj Mahal. The photo above was taken somewhere in Africa in the 1950s.

The signs may be eyesores, but they’re scaring off the competition — the little pharmacy is still the only one within 500 square miles.

If you ever invent a time machine, be sure to head back to the Time Traveler Convention held at MIT on May 7, 2005. (If you’re coming from the far future, MIT was at 42.360007° N, 71.087870° W.)

The convention was covered on the front page of the New York Times, so presumably it’ll be well attended … eventually.

An optical illusion. The long lines are parallel.

A photographer from Country Life Magazine reportedly took this picture while shooting a feature on Raynham Hall, a Norfolk country house, on Sept. 19, 1936. The “ghost” has become known as the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall because of the brocade dress she wears.

No one’s seen her since.

An optical illusion. The square’s sides are straight.

When sunlight is refracted through ice crystals in cirrus clouds, it sometimes produces this rare phenomenon, known as a circumhorizontal arc.

It happens only when the sun is high in the sky, so there’s no pot of gold.

(Thanks, Mysticwolf.)

The Fugate family of rural Kentucky has an odd trait — since the early 1800s, some members of the family have been blue.

Not depressed — literally blue. The family share a genetic blood disorder that has left generations of Fugates with blue-hued skin.

The family’s inbreeding has diminished with time, and today’s members are mostly pink, but a blue Fugate was reported as recently as 1975. Somebody should write a song.