10: Tear Drinking Butterflies One of the weirdest mysteries of the jungle
has to do with none other than butterflies.
That’s right, these peaceful creatures hold their own secrets!
Just recently, scientists doing research in the Amazon jungle discovered flocks of colorful
butterflies swarming around turtles.
At first, the researchers didn't quite understand what they were witnessing.
The butterflies were literally enveloping the turtles as if they were trying to eat
them.
After some closer scrutiny, the researchers realized that the butterflies were actually
taking turns drinking the turtle’s tears!
In particular, butterflies seem to crave the tears from the yellow-spotted river turtles
in the western part of the Amazon rainforest.
According to Phil Torres with the Tambopata Research Center in Peru, the butterflies probably
like to drink turtle tears, not because they are sadistic monsters, but because the liquid
teardrops contain sodium.
Sodium is an extremely important mineral not found in abundance in the Amazon.
Turtles absorb plenty of sodium thanks to their carnivorous diet, eating small critters.
But herbivores like butterflies have a hard time finding it.
It's a critical mineral that butterflies need to thrive.
When they can't get enough on their own, they find turtles and drink their tears, slurping
the sodium right from the turtle’s eyes!
But perhaps the weirdest part about this is that the phenomenon has only been witnessed
in this one part of the Amazon jungle.
Researchers who specialize in turtles have never witnessed the behavior in any other
part of the world!
9: Tomb of a Mayan Prince The tomb of a Mayan prince has been found
hidden deep in the jungles of Mexico, near the border with Guatemala.
Excavators recently uncovered the remains of Mayan royalty hidden deep inside an ancient
complex in the forgotten city of Uxul.
The prince was between the age of 20 and 25 when he perished, with researchers finding
him lying on his back with his arms neatly folded over his chest, almost perfectly fossilized.
His tomb was hiding about five feet (1.5m) beneath the floor of a ruined building in
the old city.
Along with the prince’s body, researchers discovered pieces of ceramics and a curiously
painted plate covering the prince’s skull.
One of these pieces of ceramics was even covered in hieroglyphics.
Researchers were quick to decode the old Mayan writing, which said: “This is the drinking
vessel of the young prince.”
In other words, he was buried with his own personal cup.
But just who exactly was this mysterious prince?
To find out, scientists need to look closer at the ancient city of Uxul.
This place is located very deep in the jungle, in such a remote area that researchers only
have access to it for about two months out of the year.
The rest of the time, it's too rainy and dangerous for them to do any research.
The tomb was likely built in the year 711 AD, less than a century before the ancient
city was abruptly abandoned.
Researchers haven't been able to identify the prince, but he likely had ties to the
Calakmul Dynasty, the last rulers of Uxul.
8: Ancient Cave Monster Researchers have uncovered what they say could
be the oldest animal drawing in the world.
It was discovered inside a cave in the middle of the jungle in Borneo, which is in Southeast
Asia.
It's a small island in Indonesia.
Within the mysterious cave, researchers discovered hundreds of hand motifs painted in reddish
orange paint, with some of them dating back all the way to 52,000 years ago.
But the hand motifs are only part of the story.
In the local language, the cave is called Lubang Jeriji Saleh, and it’s more of a
subterranean labyrinth than an ordinary cave system.
Sketched on one of the walls, researchers found paintings of strange creatures that
they say kind of look like cows, only a little freakier.
The largest of the creature paintings is at least seven feet (2.1m) across and dates back
40,000 years.
According to National Geographic, that would make this the earliest figurative cave painting
of an animal ever identified by scientists.
Scientists haven’t been unable to identify what the creature may have been.
It was likely some kind of prehistoric bovine that has since gone extinct, they just don’t
know which one.
Nonetheless, so far as we know, this painting was the first time a human being dipped their
fingers in paint and decided to draw a representation of a living creature.
7: Mysterious Boat Wreckage There is a mysterious boat wreck at Blind
Bight in Victoria, Australia, and nobody is entirely sure where it came from.
The area around Blind Bight is a mangrove jungle, a swampy flatland of mud, ocean currents,
and a whole lot of lost treasure.
The shipwreck seems completely out of place because it's literally in the middle of a
huge patch of mangroves, quite far from where the ocean is.
It's not that the ocean is an impossible distance away, but it is far enough that it doesn't
make a lot of sense that a boat could have ended up in the middle of the trees.
The best guess places the ship as being made some time in the 1900s.
Almost all of it has already decayed, with not much left now except parts of its wooden
hull.
Whatever the ship had been carrying is long gone, as well as the crew that got the thing
abandoned there in the first place.
It's kind of a local mystery, and so stuck in the middle of the mangroves that the only
way to physically see it is from above.
And seeing as this is Australia, if you tried to make it to the shipwreck on foot, you would
probably be eaten by the local crocodiles or dingos.
Either that, or accidentally washed out to sea to be eaten by the sharks.
Is this the kind of adventure you’d like to go on?
Let us know in the comments down below and if you’re liking this video, be sure to
hit the thumbs up and subscribe buttons if you haven’t already!
:) 6: Lost Jungle Cities
As explorers chart out more and more of the deep jungle in Central and South America,
more and more strange discoveries crop up all over the place, and now archaeologists
have discovered a pair of mysterious lost cities in the jungle of Mexico.
These cities were once dominated by the Mayan people.
They include pyramids, temples, the remains of monstrous palaces, a ball court where the
Maya used to play a primitive version of basketball that ended in human sacrifice, as well as
other incredible stone monuments.
Oddly enough, one of the ancient cities was found several decades ago, only to be lost
when archaeologists could never relocate it.
The other city is an entirely new discovery, never before seen by modern human eyes.
The leader of the expedition to find these jungle cities is named Ivan Sprajc from the
Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
He explained that his team managed to locate the cities thanks to aerial photographs of
the forest area in the Campeche state.
They noticed anomalies in the thick vegetation, sent in archaeologists to investigate, and
were shocked to see legitimate ancient ruins.
The cities date back to between 600 and 1000 AD, which wasn't even that long ago if you
think about it.
They look ancient, but these incredible places were built around 50 generations of people
ago.
One of the coolest features found at the entirely new city is a temple pyramid that towers 65
feet (20m) above the floor of the jungle.
However, it's in rough shape.
Trees are literally growing through the brick sides of the pyramid, with the whole city
basically being eaten by the jungle.
5: Ancient War Wreckage In the jungles of the Pacific Islands, there
is so much war wreckage abandoned and rusting that it would take a lifetime to document
it all.
During the Pacific War that raged between the Imperial Japanese Army and the United
States of America back during World War Two, thousands of warships, planes, and tanks were
destroyed.
Most of them were left in the Pacific.
Many of them are still stranded in the jungle today, like a US Navy transport vessel that
has gotten washed up in the Solomon Islands, its stern crashed through the trees at the
border of the jungle.
Then there's the Japanese A6M Zero fighter that was recently found crashed in the middle
of an unoccupied jungle on Guadalcanal Island.
At Tokyo Bay in the Nggela Islands, there is yet another sunken vessel that’s become
a part of the forest, a Japanese Imperial Navy destroyer that was taken down by US forces.
No matter where you go across that massive stretch of ocean dotted with beautiful islands,
the jungles of the South Pacific are basically graveyards for war vehicles from World War
Two.
The local Islanders swim at their beaches with wrecked Japanese warships, while kids
scramble over rusted military tanks left behind in the dense foliage.
4: The Amazon Monster There may or may not be a giant monster lurking
in the Amazon jungle.
Almost every native tribe in the jungles of South America has a story relating to the
creature that they call the Mapinguary.
This translates to English as “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast.”
But what’s truly remarkable is the fact that people who claim to have seen the monster
in the jungle, even if these people are from different tribes and have never met one another,
have described the exact same thing.
The accounts are so consistent and so widespread that some scientists are starting to organize
expeditions deep into unexplored terrain in an attempt to track down the mysterious Mapinguary.
As of right now, not a single photograph has been taken of the monster and no respectable
scientist has confirmed its existence.
But that doesn't mean it's not real.
David Oren, a local researcher, believes the legend of the Mapinguary comes from a very
real beast that was last seen thousands of years ago by the ancestors of today’s tribespeople.
He says the Mapinguary was probably a giant ground sloth.
Giant ground sloth used to live all through the Amazon jungle until just recently, and
stories of the incredible creatures were probably passed down to the newest generations of people.
Each time they see something spooky in the jungle, they think it’s a Mapinguary.
The creature is said to be seven feet (2.1m) tall with a giant mouth in the middle of its
belly, which it uses to eat people!
Do you think it’s real?
Why or why not?
3: Giant Stone Head About 50 years ago, a giant stone head was
discovered in the jungles of Guatemala.
It has been boggling scientists ever since.
The issue with the giant stone head is that all the experts agree it appears to depict
a Caucasian person, not an indigenous person from Central America.
In fact, whoever the stone head was modeled after has no familiar features with any of
the locals.
It looks like a white man, which doesn’t make any sense because the head was carved
hundreds of years before white people ever made it to what is now Guatemala.
If we follow logic, the ancient people who lived here, probably part of the Olmec civilization,
must have come into contact with Europeans before Christopher Columbus discovered the
New world.
This is a massive mystery that has never been unraveled.
One of the biggest issues is that just years after the giant stone head was discovered
in the 1950s, it was blown to pieces, completely destroyed, by local revolutionaries.
When the archaeologists went back to gather more information, they found that revolutionaries
had used the thing as target practice.
Because the artifact itself is destroyed, there is absolutely no way to properly date
it or to find out any more pertinent information about the mysterious statue.
2: A Sick Whale The body of a humpback whale was found in
the middle of the jungle in Brazil.
How it got there is a bit of a mystery.
It wasn't exactly in the heart of the Amazon or anything, but it was 50 feet (15m) inland
from the ocean, found near the shores of the Amazon River.
The humpback whale was only a juvenile, no more than 26 feet (8m) long.
Adult humpback whales can grow over twice that size.
For this reason, experts say the whale was probably about a year old when it died.
As for how the young whale got stranded in the jungle, experts say it may have gotten
sick and then lost.
Humpback whales are completely foreign to this region, according to wildlife biologist
Alex Zerbini.
Alex believes the animal was probably a North Atlantic humpback, whales that breed in tropical
waters in the Caribbean, normally off the coast of Venezuela.
It's possible that after the whale got sick, it became disoriented.
Once disoriented, enormous tidal waves of up to 23 feet (7m), caused by the full moon,
pulled the whale into the shore.
The waves then tossed its body 50 feet (15m) from the water to where it was found rotting
in the jungle.
1: City Under the Jungle Archaeologists have uncovered yet another
ancient settlement, a totally secret city built by the Incan Empire deep in the Peruvian
jungle.
Some experts believe the city could contain a lost treasure that has yet to be found.
The city is located deep in the undergrowth of the jungle, about a two-day hike from the
city of Cusco.
Archaeologists say the city’s name is Choquequirao, a city so well-hidden that it almost escaped
the destruction brought by the Spanish when they began bulldozing the Incan Empire in
the 1500s – but not quite.
The Spanish eventually tracked the city down and after the last Incan was obliterated,
Choquequirao was abandoned and forgotten until archaeologists just now discovered it once
more.
They've only excavated about 30% of the site so far, uncovering canals, ruins of buildings,
and crumbling monuments.
The archaeologists say the city has been so horribly enveloped by the jungle that trying
to study it will take a long time.
Still, there is the potential to find treasure.
Since this was one of the last holdouts of the Incan Empire, and in such an inhospitable
region, the Spanish may not have plundered it completely.
There still could be treasures hiding underneath the broken stone and tree roots.
What do you think is hiding in the Amazon jungle?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments and thank you for watching!
Be sure to hit the subscribe button and come back again for another awesome video!
See you next time!
Bye! :)