Capture of the Caen Canal and Orne River bridges

A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery

Zimbabwean banknotes ranging from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars printed within a one-year period. The magnitude of the currency scalars signifies the extent of the hyperinflation.

Capture of the Caen Canal and Orne River bridges

Gliders scraped to a halt on a French bridge in complete darkness at 0016 on June 6, 1944 — Major John Howard's men were inside the German wire before the garrison heard a sound.

Cave of Altamira

Painted 36,000 years ago on a cave ceiling in northern Spain, the Altamira bison are so anatomically precise that 19th-century archaeologists accused the discoverer of fraud — they simply could not accept the ancients were capable.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapmans bought a complete set of Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings — 80 prints of dismembered soldiers — and painted Ronald McDonald and clown faces over the victims' heads. They called it 'rectification.'

Amiriyah shelter bombing

A US GBU-27 penetrator cooked 408 civilians alive inside a reinforced bunker on February 13, 1991. Charred handprints remain on the walls today. The US still insists it was a military target.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

At 19, aboard a steamship to England, Chandrasekhar calculated that stars above 1.4 solar masses must collapse catastrophically. Arthur Eddington publicly mocked him; 52 years later, the Nobel committee agreed with the teenager.

Coronation of Bokassa I and Catherine

Bokassa's 1977 coronation cost $22 million — roughly one-third of the Central African Republic's annual GDP — including a diamond-encrusted crown, 6,000 bottles of Moët, and a throne shaped like a golden eagle.

1995 Tour de France

In 1995, Casartelli's skull cracked on a roadside concrete block during stage 15; he was dead before the helicopter landed. The race continued. Miguel Induráin won overall in silence.

Irritator

Paleontologists named it 'Irritator' — formally, in the scientific literature — because a fossil smuggler had packed car body filler into the skull to counterfeit a complete specimen.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

At its worst, Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent annually. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend wages before lunch erased the value.