Sue (dinosaur)

U.S. representative Michael Myers , second from left, holds an envelope containing $50,000 that he just received from undercover FBI agents

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

Sue's skeleton logged gout, healed T. rex bite wounds, and a jawbone rotted through by bacterial infection — a biography of agony written in 67-million-year-old bone.

Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann printed millions of Nazi-era devotional books and Wehrmacht field hymnals during World War II, then commissioned a self-exonerating history in 1998. An independent commission contradicted it in full by 2002.

Abscam

FBI agents dressed as Arab oil sheikhs invited seven U.S. congressmen to a fake Washington townhouse and filmed them pocketing cash bribes — one congressman stuffed $25,000 into his suit pockets on camera and said, 'I'm gonna keep this.'

Tissaphernes

Tissaphernes invited ten thousand Greek mercenary officers to a feast, then had them seized and beheaded mid-meal — stranding the surviving rank-and-file 1,500 miles from home without leadership.

Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape

Recorded in 2005 on an Access Hollywood bus, Trump told host Billy Bush he grabs women 'by the pussy' without asking. Released eleven days before the election, it moved no needle.

John Law's Company

John Law sold France shares in the Louisiana Territory — mostly swamp — by convincing Paris that the Mississippi River ran through mountains of gold. Share prices rose 3,600% then fell to zero in 18 months.

Buhen

Egypt's Buhen fortress, raised around 1860 BCE deep in Nubia, had a dry moat, brick battlements, and loopholed walls for archers — a complete medieval-style defense built 3,200 years before the Middle Ages.

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Published anonymously in Hamburg in 1670, Spinoza's Tractatus argued Scripture was human-authored propaganda. Within a year, four separate European governments banned it; it circulated in disguise as a medical textbook.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling proposed in 1993 that there are five biological sexes — herms, merms, ferms, males, females — and that medicine had collapsed them into two by surgical force on intersex infants.