Teachers are sharing their students' wildest excuses that actually turned out to be true

As the information age morphs into the misinformation age, it's hard to know what to believe anymore. Falsehoods are referred to as "alternative facts," established institutional knowledge as "an agenda" and there's so much spin on political narratives that objective truth gets lost in a dizzying stream of senseless word vomit.

It's wise to be skeptical when propaganda abounds, especially when a "fact" looks fake on its face. But in reality, sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, as evidenced by a Reddit thread in which someone asked for facts that sound fake but are actually true and people delivered.

It's true. Giphy

Of course, as expected, not all of the responses actually constitute fact. But some fact-checking reveals that a whole bunch of them are true, and they are wild.

Here are 15 true facts that seem totally made up, with links to solid sources that back up their veracity:

"Bananas are berries and strawberries aren’t."

TRUE: Botanically speaking, there are all kinds of things that are berries that we don't realize are berries, and vice versa.

"There is a fish with the scientific name Boops boops."

TRUE: That's not a nickname, either. The actual scientific name of the fish is Boops boops. The common name is bogue.The most delightful thing ever.

"The chainsaw was originally invented to deliver babies."

TRUE: Yep. I know. So disturbing. I won't go into detail, but if you're curious, here's the whole gruesome history.

"Radio Shack sued a regional auto parts chain Auto Shack for infringing on their name. Auto Shack changed their name to AutoZone. Years later, Radio Shack created a section called POWERZONE so AutoZone sued them for infringing on their name."

TRUE: And the fact that there was more than a decade in between the lawsuits just makes it all the more petty. The lawsuits were technically between the Tandy Corporation (the parent company of Radio Shack) and AutoZone (which started out as Auto Shack). The first trademark infringement action was brought by Tandy against Auto Shack in 1985 and was settled in 1987 with Auto Shack changing its name to AutoZone. The action brought by AutoZone over Radio Shack's POWERZONE name ended in summary judgment in 2001 and unsuccessfully appealed in 2004. AutoZone may not have been successful in its legal action, but Radio Shack wasn't successful in holding onto its business, so who really won in this battle?

"Woolly mammoths were still alive when the Egyptian pyramids were being built."

TRUE: This one kicks of a few wild ancient Egypt facts. We often think of wooly mammoths as caveman days creatures, which they were. But they lived on Earth for a looooong time, dying out around 4,000 years ago (so approximately 2,000 B.C.). The Egyptian pyramids were built roughly between 2700 B.C. and 1500 B.C., so yep, wooly mammoths overlapped right in there.

To be fair, it was a pretty small band of mammoths that managed to stay alive on an island for thousands of years after their peers had kicked it, but still. They were there.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

"Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than the building of the Pyramids of Giza."

TRUE: The Pyramids of Giza were built between 2575 and 2465 B.CB.C. Cleopatra lived from 69 to 30 B.C. The first iPhone came out in 2007. The math checks out.

"There would be a lot more ancient Egyptian mummies around if the Victorians didn’t turn most of them into paint or eat them."

Ew, but TRUE: Sorry about this one. Victorian artists did grind up mummies to make paint—in fact, the pigment created from them was literally called "mummy brown." And as far as eating the mummies goes, yep, they did that, too. For medicinal reasons, apparently. They crumbled Egyptian mummies into drinkable tinctures to help stop internal bleeding.

Oh, and just for a bonus fun fact, they also used to have mummy-unwrapping parties.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

"Pokemon has made more money than Harry Potter, Marvel, the Beatles, and Taylor swift combined. Pokemon is the highest grossing IP of all time and it isn’t even remotely close. Pokemon is many $10B’s ahead of second place."

TRUE: Pokemon has been around since 1997 and in that time has earned a whopping $103.6 billion in total retail sales, with a cool $12 billion of that coming from 2024 alone. For reference, the Harry Potter franchise has made somewhere just north of $25 billion between all of the books, movies, and merchandise. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has made around $31 billion since 2008. The Beatles and Taylor Swift are estimated to have accumulated a net worth somewhere in the $1 to $2 billion range, so yes, Pokemon has left them in the dust, even all combined. As far as being $10Bs ahead of second place, it might depend on what you technically consider an IP (intellectual property). Regardless, Pokemon is raking in the dough.

"The U.S. Appalachian Mountains and the Scottish Highlands are the same mountain range, torn asunder by plate tectonics. The ancient mountains are older than sharks, themselves older than the Rings of Saturn, and knew a world before trees."

TRUE (mostly): The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest mountains in the world, dating some 1 billion years back in Earth's history, before sharks and trees. When the Pangaea supercontinent split, what is now the Appalachians and the Scottish Highlands parted ways.

The only part of this claim that's iffy is the Rings of Saturn part. Scientists thought they were only around 400 million years old, but now they think they might be off by several billion years.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

"Up until a few months ago, John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, had a living grandson."

TRUE: As the rest of the response explains, "John Tyler was born in 1790 and took office in 1841 when he assumed the presidency upon William Henry Harrison's death; he had 8 children with his first wife and 7 with his second, the youngest being born in 1860 when he was 70, making him the US president who fathered the most children.

His son Lyon had a child when he was 75 years old, in 1928; Tyler's grandson Harrison Ruffin Tyler, was living in Virginia until his passing on May 25th, 2025. The difference from John Tyler's birth to Harrison Tyler's death was a span of 235 years."

That's a lot of genealogical math, but it's legit. The grandson of the 10th U.S. president, John Tyler, died in May of 2025 at the age of 96. Totally bonkers.

Did you know there were two Dennis the Menaces? Giphy

"There are two comic strips called Dennis the Menace - one from the UK, one from the US. They have nothing to do with each other and were developed entirely separately from each other - but they both premiered on the same day (March 12 1951)."

TRUE: Yep. Smithsonian magazine calls the U.K. version the "evil British twin" of the U.S. comic character, a truly "sinister counterpart" to the lovable little rascal we Americans know as Dennis. It's just a super weird coincidence that they came out at exactly the same time.

"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words."

TRUE: Delightfully verified by Merriam-Webster.

"Michelin stars are given out by the Michelin tire company. It was a marketing ploy, designed to get people to drive further, and to wear down their tyres. Now it is seen as one of the highest endorsements in the cooking world."

TRUE: Yep, the coveted Michelin stars that tell us how fine a dining establishment is come right from the Michelin tire company. Kind of makes them feel a lot less fancy, doesn't it?

This Michelin? Really? Giphy

"You can fit all the other planets in the solar system between the earth and the moon."

TRUE: Even NASA says so. (Though the use the phrase "just about fit," but close enough.)

"The majority of the Canadian population lives south of Seattle."

TRUE: Literally south. When you see it on a map, it's pretty clear. It's not some kind of map magic, either. It's just that the vast majority of Canada's population lives in the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, and Québec City, which all sit below the 49th parallel and south of Seattle.

This is not an exhaustive list of facts that sound made up but are actually true, but hopefully you've had your mind blown enough for one article. Isn't reality a hoot?