Utahraptor

A column of Bulgarian Comitadjis captured during WWI in Thessaloniki .

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

Utahraptor weighed as much as a grizzly bear and carried a 9-inch hooked claw on each foot — the weapon that made Jurassic Park's Velociraptors look like the timid cousins they actually were.

Komitadji

Komitadji fighters waged war on two fronts at once — killing Ottomans by day, settling scores with rival Bulgarian or Macedonian bands by night. A single mountain pass could change hands three times in one season.

BioShock

Rapture sank two miles beneath the Atlantic — an entire Art Deco civilization of neon, jazz, and crumbling marble, built to prove Ayn Rand's objectivism and destroyed by its own logic before a single player arrives.

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.

Jeanne Calment

At 13, Jeanne Calment sold colored pencils to Vincent van Gogh in her father's shop. She died 122 years later — the oldest verified human — having outlived him by a full century.

Apollo Global Management

Leon Black founded Apollo after being effectively pushed out of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990. The SEC barred him from the securities industry — then watched the firm he built grow to manage $600 billion. Bars, it turns out, are negotiable.

The History of Sexuality

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' — three volumes published before AIDS killed him — argued the Victorian era didn't repress sex; it invented an entirely new way to talk, confess, and be made by it.

Murray Sanders

Colonel Murray Sanders arrived in Japan with a briefcase and left with a deal: Ishii's plague data for full immunity. The exchange happened before any other Allied officer knew it was on the table.

Pompey

Caesar's own son-in-law and political patron, Pompey was beheaded in a rowboat off Egypt by a former Roman officer named Septimius. His severed head was presented to Caesar, who reportedly wept.