Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Time moves differently for everything on the planet.

It's all relative.

A whole lifetime for a fly is a moment for a human, and a whole lifetime for a human is a brief blink from the perspective of geologic time.

These are the sorts of facts that we learn in grade school, but only gain weight the longer we live.

And what of the living beings that fall between human and geologic time.

Tortoises that live for hundreds of years, the greenland shark quietly prowling the ocean for centuries, Towering trees deep within rainforests.

How do we measure ourselves next to them?

To do so is probably a feudal effort, but is one that leads a person to some truly fascinating discoveries about how in sync the natural world is and how various species can fall out of sync throughout the millennia.

For example, we all understand the evolutionary advantage of fruits, right When an animal eats of fruits, it inadvertently winds up spreading the seeds of that tree that produce to the fruit.

But what does one do with the fruit that no animals eat?

Biologists have found many examples of these across the globe, from the Kentucky coffee tree to the honeylocust and certain strains of per simon.

There are fruits that are too large for most animal species to eat practically, so why do they exist?

A particularly extreme example exists in the osage orange, a sturdy, softball sized fruit that produces a strange latex when cut open.

These fruit tend to just drop to the forest floor and rot there without any animal to come and eat them.

So why do they exist?

The answer, according to many biologists, lies in the distant past of this planet, the age of the megafauna.

Now, megafauna are exactly what they sound like, huge animals, wooly mammoths, ground sloths, and many ancestors of creatures that we can see in nature today.

Creatures like these would have been able to eat the osage orange and spread its seeds, but the vast majority of megafauna have gone extinct, leaving the trees they used to feed on behind.

Take away the mammoths or the giant sloths that would have spread them wide.

The only way for the fruit to travel now is downriver and slopes, which severely limits the spread of these trees throughout the Americas.

They survive, for sure, but they no longer travel like they once did.

The osage orange is an example of what's known as an evolutionary anachronism.

It's a relatively new concept, with its earliest proposals coming in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and the best examples happen to be plants with particularly inedible fruits due to what we know about seed dispersal.

However, there have been several proposals to list certain animals on the list too, animals that had to adapt their natural ways of feeding in order to make up for a missing evolutionary partner.

Take, for example, the Helactoplurus giganteus, the largest dung beetle in Matagascar.

This creature seems to entirely depend on human feces to survive, even though their existence on the island of Madagascar predates animal arrival.

It's been proposed that maybe they once use giant lemur feces for the same purpose.

Also on Madagascar, some smaller lemur species still display weariness toward birds of prey, training their young to hide themselves from the sky, even though no currently living bird in Madagascar is large enough to prey on a lemur.

None of these animal examples have been proved definitively.

After all, how do you measure the behavior of species that no longer exist?

The educated guesses of biologists, though, continue to try and fill in the blanks of natural history.

Nature, in its complex web of relationships, can inadvertently preserve memory of something, even if it's unclear what that something originally was.

It seems that we carry our evolutionary anachronisms with us, and that's what allows us to study evolution, even though its progress is measured in generations rather than moments.

As a famous scientist once said, life finds a way.

Pompey Mansfield surveyed the scene in front of him.

Dozens of men and women gathered on his North Boston property that late spring afternoon in celebration of their most anticipated event of the year, election Day.

It was a time when families and individuals, both enslaved and free, came together on the official Massachusetts election day for their own referendum.

The group would vote for and crown a king who would provide wisdom and insight to the black community during his reign.

Families and friends relaxed on blankets overlooking the sunlit river.

But despite the joyful scene, Pompey was anything but relaxed.

His chest swelled with pride and nerves.

This year's picnic was unlike any other.

For its host, it was the most important one yet.

Pompey, like most of the people gathered on his property that day, had been trafficked across the Atlantic and brought to New England as an enslaved person.

Born in West Africa in the early eighteenth century, he had been sold to a wealthy mill owner in Lynn, Massachusetts as a young man.

In seventeen forty five, he married an enslaved woman named Phyllis from the nearby town of Reading.

In seventeen fifty eight, following the death of that mill owner, Pompey began working as a clovier.

No surviving records document how long it took to purchase his own freedom, but by seventeen sixty two he had earned enough to purchase a small property ten miles outside of Boston.

There he built a stone house by hand for him and his wife, and eventually Pompey and Phyllis joined a group of black Americans who had begun celebrating an event called Black Picnic approximately twenty years prior to seventeen forty one.

This act of unity was a rebellion against their circumstances and an assertion of civil rights.

More than two hundred years before black Americans secured the right to vote in general elections.

Those gathered at Pompey's property knew that their ideas and opinions mattered, even if the colonial government said otherwise.

For many, pompey story represented an ideal future, a free man who worked hard to provide for himself and his family, he owned property, supported nearby black communities by helping others assert their personhood, and after years of attention the Black Election Day celebrations in other parts of Massachusetts, he had offered to host the event at his home.

Just before sunset, a hush fell over the crowd.

It was time to announce the new king.

Pompey fought to keep his hands at his side, his face impassive.

His wife Phyllis, placed a hand over her husband's pounding heart.

Pompey squeezed his eyes tight shut, and then they announced his name.

After decades of degradation, hard work, and dehumanization, he'd regained the dignity and respect that were taken from him by slavery.

For years, Pompey had told people that he came from a line of West African royalty.

Now, in spite of his trafficking and enslavement, his peers had recognized him as a leader.

Moreover, they chosen him to be theirs.

Throughout his year as king, Pompey continued his work empowering black families and individuals.

He settled disputes, lent an understanding ear, and offered whiz to anyone who asked.

By all accounts, Pompey was an esteemed leader and venerated in the years both before and after his reign.

Today, Black Election Day is still celebrated in Salem, Massachusetts, every year.

Now held on the third Saturday in July, the event still resembles those first gatherings in many ways, with people from all over Massachusetts coming together to assert their civil rights.

Nowadays, the picnic is much bigger and is accompanied by a parade.

Instead of electing a monarch, community awards are given for advocacy, wisdom, and outstanding citizenship.

We may never know for certain whether Pompey came from African royalty, but in Massachusetts there is no question that he was and always will be, a king.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot org.

The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com.

And until next time, stay curious.