Ostriches have the largest eyes of any land animal.
Each ostrich eye is about 5 cm across — bigger than its brain. The sharp vision helps it spot predators across open savanna.
HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Sources · November 2, 2026
Every claim from this day’s challenge, with its verdict, explanation and sources.
Round 1
Carrots were originally purple.
Early domesticated carrots were purple and yellow; orange ones were growing in Europe by the early 1500s. The popular story that Dutch growers bred them orange to honor William of Orange is doubtful.
Henry Ford invented the automobile.
Karl Benz built the first practical gasoline-powered car in 1885 and patented it in 1886. Ford's breakthrough came later: the affordable Model T (1908) and the moving assembly line (1913).
Round 2
Play-Doh started out as a wallpaper cleaner.
Kutol Products sold the putty to wipe coal soot off wallpaper. When homes switched to cleaner heating, sales collapsed — so the company rebranded it as a children's toy in the 1950s.
The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on Earth.
Only in a dive: its gravity-powered stoop tops 300 km/h, but in level flight it is far slower — different measurements crown different champions.
Knights locked their wives in chastity belts before going to war.
There's no reliable evidence that medieval chastity belts were actually used. Most surviving examples are now considered later fakes or novelty items, and early references were satirical.
Round 3
NASA accidentally erased the original Apollo 11 moonwalk tapes.
The original slow-scan tapes were most likely erased and reused sometime in the 1970s or early '80s; only broadcast copies of the footage survive.
Your brain is mostly fat.
By dry weight it is ~60% lipids — essential fatty acids that insulate nerve fibers so electrical signals can fire.
The Sahara Desert is mostly sand dunes.
Sand dunes cover only about a quarter of the Sahara. Most of it is rocky plateaus, gravel plains, mountains and dry basins.