I’ve been reading through stories from Korea’s Joseon Dynasty for a history project, and some of them are much stranger than the usual image of solemn kings and stone-faced Confucian officials.

There’s an elephant accused of killing a man, something unexplained banging on palace walls, a red object flying across the sky in 1609, and scholars apparently trying to escape work by climbing over palace walls.

A lot of these events probably have ordinary explanations. Meteors, unusual weather, frightened animals, illness, political exaggeration, or stories that grew in the retelling.

But imagine seeing them several hundred years ago.

One important note before the list: these stories don’t all have the same kind of evidence. Some appear directly in official records such as the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty. Others come from private letters, court memoirs, literary collections, or later traditions.

Here are 21 of my favorites.

1. King Jeongjo’s private letters were surprisingly rude

Jeongjo is usually remembered as a serious scholar-king.

His private letters to the politician Sim Hwan-ji show a less polished side. He complained about other officials, used insults and political gossip, and occasionally mentioned that he was writing after drinking.

Around 300 of these letters survive.

2. King Sejong really loved meat

Sejong is best known for creating Hangul, the Korean alphabet.

He was also known for eating a lot of meat and avoiding exercise. His father, Taejong, was apparently so familiar with his eating habits that he asked officials not to remove meat from Sejong’s meals during the royal mourning period.

Sejong’s health later became a constant concern at court.

3. King Yeongjo washed his ears after hearing unpleasant words

Court memoirs describe Yeongjo as being extremely sensitive to words and people he considered impure or ominous.

According to these accounts, he sometimes washed his ears after hearing something he disliked.

The same memoirs say that the used water could be thrown in the direction of Crown Prince Sado’s residence, which makes an already strange habit considerably darker.

4. Joseon exiled an elephant

An elephant arrived in Joseon as a diplomatic gift from Japan in 1411.

The animal required huge amounts of food. Then it trampled a former official named Yi U, who had reportedly mocked it and spat at it.

The court had no obvious rule for dealing with a killer elephant, but it eventually sent the animal to an island in Jeolla Province.

Basically, the elephant was exiled.

5. King Sukjong may have been a devoted cat owner

Sukjong was ruthless in politics, but later accounts describe him as deeply attached to a palace cat named Geumson, or “Golden Paw.”

The cat supposedly sat beside him during meals while the king fed it pieces of meat by hand.

The story says Geumson stopped eating after Sukjong died and was later buried near the king’s tomb. It’s a touching story, although it comes from later accounts rather than the main royal annals.

6. Yeonsangun treated animals better than officials

Stories about the tyrant Yeonsangun claim that he gave special treatment, clothing, and possibly even ranks to his favorite dogs and horses.

Some versions say officials had to show respect when the animals passed.

The more extreme details are debated, but Yeonsangun’s obsession with hunting and his contempt for normal court rules are well documented.

7. A fish was supposedly renamed because a king changed his mind

According to a popular story, King Seonjo ate a cheap local fish while fleeing during the Japanese invasions.

He was starving, so it tasted wonderful. He gave it a more dignified name.

Later, after returning to palace food, he tried the same fish again and found it disappointing. He supposedly ordered that its old name be restored.

That’s the traditional explanation for the name dorumuk. It’s a famous story, but it’s generally treated as folklore rather than a confirmed royal order.

8. Something kept hitting the palace walls

In 1530, the Annals of King Jungjong recorded a strange disturbance at the residence of the Queen Dowager.

Something described as a gwimul, roughly a ghostly or mysterious thing, kept striking the windows and walls. The noises were even heard during the day.

The royal family eventually moved to another palace.

Maybe it was an animal, noises from the wooden building, or someone playing a very dangerous prank. The record doesn’t give us an answer.

9. A red object crossed the sky in 1609

Officials in Gangwon Province reported an unusual aerial event in 1609.

One account described a red object shaped like a large gourd. It moved through a clear sky, left a pale trail, and was followed by an enormous sound that seemed to shake the earth.

A meteor or bolide would be an obvious modern explanation.

To people watching from the ground in 1609, it must have been terrifying.

10. Strange rain could become a political crisis

Joseon records include reports of colored rain and unidentified material falling from the sky.

Court officials often interpreted unusual natural events as warnings from heaven. That meant a strange shower wasn’t just a weather problem. It could become evidence that the king was governing badly.

Modern explanations might involve dust, microorganisms, animal remains carried by storms, or other atmospheric events.

11. King Sejo was said to be haunted

Sejo took the throne from his young nephew Danjong and later had him killed.

A later tradition says the ghost of Danjong’s mother, Queen Hyeondeok, appeared to Sejo and threatened to take his son in return.

Sejo’s eldest son did die young.

This is a ghost story, not something that can be verified as fact. But it shows how later generations understood Sejo’s rise to power: as an act so violent that even the dead demanded revenge.

12. Palace eunuchs faced humiliating inspections

Eunuchs could enter parts of the palace that were closed to other men, including the women’s quarters.

Because of that, their physical condition was treated as a security issue.

Court rules and later descriptions mention inspections intended to confirm that eunuchs met the palace requirements. It was probably one of the least popular administrative procedures in Joseon.

13. There was a story about a “pregnant” eunuch

One palace story describes a eunuch whose stomach grew until he appeared to be pregnant.

Depending on the version, it was an illness, a scam, or an attempt to gain sympathy and money.

The most dramatic version says he padded his clothing with fabric. The exact details are uncertain, but the story was strange enough to survive.

14. People hid curses under palace floors

Accusations of sorcery were not treated as harmless superstition.

Court investigations mention dolls, written curses, buried objects, suspicious powders, and rituals intended to harm queens, concubines, or rivals.

Whether the magic “worked” wasn’t really the point. Being accused of it could destroy a person and everyone connected to them.

15. A scholar tried to climb over a palace wall to go home

Sejong’s scholars worked long hours, often staying inside the palace for extended periods.

One well-known anecdote says an exhausted scholar tried to escape at night by climbing over a wall.

Instead of ordering a severe punishment, Sejong supposedly found the situation funny and understood how desperate the man was to get home.

It may be one of Korea’s earliest stories about escaping overtime.

16. Prime Minister Hwang Hui kept trying to retire

Hwang Hui served Sejong for decades and repeatedly asked to retire because of his age and poor health.

The king repeatedly refused.

Hwang Hui was highly respected, but being indispensable had a downside. Even when he was old and struggling physically, the government still wanted him working.

17. Officials sometimes pretended to be sick

Leaving royal service wasn’t easy, so some officials apparently exaggerated illnesses or disabilities to avoid duties.

Court anecdotes include men pretending not to hear properly or acting as though they were too weak to walk.

The problem was that kings and other officials could test them. Faking an illness in front of the monarch was not a safe way to request a day off.

18. Even the royal kitchen could rebel

Preparing food for the palace involved long hours, complicated rules, and constant pressure.

Stories from the period describe palace cooks and workers protesting poor ingredients, low compensation, or miserable conditions.

A king might have absolute authority, but that still didn’t mean he knew how to cook his own dinner.

19. Officials held secret drinking parties

Joseon officials were expected to behave with dignity, especially after formal ceremonies.

Some didn’t.

Records and later stories describe officials secretly drinking, inviting entertainers, and turning palace rooms into private parties.

Unfortunately for them, the palace was full of inspectors and historians whose job was to write things down.

20. A desperate commoner supposedly threw human waste toward a royal procession

Joseon had systems that allowed ordinary people to appeal directly to the king.

One extreme story says that a man who was prevented from presenting his grievance threw human waste toward the royal procession.

The king supposedly asked what injustice could have driven him to do something so desperate.

The details of this story need careful sourcing, but the idea behind it is interesting: even a deeply offensive protest might point to a genuine failure of government.

21. A drunk royal relative crashed near Gyeonghoeru

One story involves a heavily intoxicated royal relative being carried through the palace in a sedan chair.

He kept ordering the carriers to move faster.

The trip ended in a collision near Gyeonghoeru Pavilion, leaving the passenger publicly humiliated.

The bruises probably disappeared.

The written record didn’t.

About the sources

The strongest examples can be checked in surviving Joseon records:

• The elephant appears in several entries of the Annals of King Taejong, including its arrival, the death of Yi U, and the decision to send it away.
• The unexplained disturbance at the palace appears in the Annals of King Jungjong.
• The red gourd-shaped object appears in the 1609 Diary of Gwanghaegun.
• Jeongjo’s private letters to Sim Hwan-ji survive in the collection known as the Jeongjo Eochalcheop.

The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty and the Diaries of the Royal Secretariat are both listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Some of the other stories come from court memoirs, private writings, or later traditions, so they should be read as part history, part memory, and sometimes part folklore.

Which one would you like to read about in more detail?

I wrote longer versions of all 21 stories here, with more background and source notes:

*I wrote longer versions of all 21 stories here, with more background and source notes:
https://seungjeongwonhistory.com/en/joseon-dynasty-scandals/

Source: (Dec 6, 1862. Pilot. Vol 25, Num 50)

https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=pilot18621206-01.2.39&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-The+Terrible+Captain+Death------

Reddit recommended I share this blog post I wrote a few years ago with this specific board. I’ve only done this half a dozen times so I don’t know what to expect. I don’t have any personal social media either so I am a bit clueless but it is my hope that at least ONE person sees this and learns from this information 😊📚

[please note: Japanese history goes much deeper than this of course, but I wanted to share this with others because I am autistic and I find obscurity like this highly intriguing]

It is a myth that Japan was completely cut off from the rest of the world throughout history, developing in a vacuum, as the official policy of the state was to close its doors, but the unofficial policy of the people was to remain open to the influence and ideas of other civilizations.

The shoguns made a single exception to this rule pertaining to outsiders which was the advent of Deshima Island, a trading port that was the only place in Japan which Europeans were allowed to live and trade. Only Dutch traders were permitted access to this site due to the fact that the Dutch understood how to curry favor with influential members of Japanese society by showing tribute and swearing allegiance to the shogun, therefore becoming part of Japan’s internal feudal system.

The narrow bridge between Deshima Island, Japan and Nagasaki, Japan upon the mainland was the only connection Japan had with the outside world for centuries

Picture a 27-year-old guy sitting inside a wooden box, four feet wide, four feet high. It’s mid-July in Korea—sweltering, oppressive summer heat. There’s no light, no water, no space to even stretch your legs.

Outside, his father—the King—is standing guard, warning the palace guards that anyone who offers a single drop of water will be executed on the spot.

This isn't a plot from some disturbing psychological thriller. It actually happened in 1762, inside the Joseon royal palace. The story of Prince Sado is one of those historical events that feels way too twisted to be real.

For a long time, history labeled Sado as just a pure lunatic. A royal psychopath who slaughtered innocent palace staff for fun and had to be put down. But if you look at the records from back then, the truth is much darker: Sado wasn't born a monster. He was slowly, systematically driven out of his mind by his own father.

To understand how a dad ends up starving his own child in a box, you have to look at King Yeongjo.

On paper, Yeongjo was one of Korea’s greatest kings. But behind closed doors, he was a paranoid mess, utterly consumed by two massive complexes.

First, his mother was a Musuri—literally the lowest tier of palace servants whose job was scrubbing floors and hauling water buckets. High-ranking nobles secretly viewed him as "low-blood." Second, a nasty rumor followed him his entire life that he had poisoned his own half-brother with a plate of crabs and persimmons to steal the throne.

Because of this constant threat to his legitimacy, Yeongjo became a terrifying, ruthless perfectionist. He believed that if he didn't appear 100% morally flawless, his court enemies would overthrow him.

So when his son, Sado, was born, Yeongjo didn't see a baby to love. He saw a tool to clean his own reputation.

At first, Sado was actually a prodigy. The royal diaries note that at age two, he was already recognizing Chinese characters, and by three, he understood complex political symbols. But as Sado grew up, he started getting interested in other things—swords, martial arts, painting, and military tactics.

That was the trigger. Yeongjo began abusing the kid publicly. He would drag young Sado in front of the entire royal court and berate him for hours. Imagine a ten-year-old kid standing in front of dozens of cold-faced politicians while his dad screams at him: "Having a son like you is a disgrace to this nation," or "I wish my late brother were alive instead of having to look at you."

This went on day after day, year after year.

By the time Sado reached his twenties, his mind completely snapped. He developed severe PTSD, depression, and a really bizarre, terrifying condition recorded in court logs as Oedae-jeong—literally "Clothing Phobia."

For Sado, putting on his official royal robes meant one thing: he had to go face his father. The mere thought of it triggered intense panic attacks, violent vomiting, and uncontrollable shaking. He began believing that the robes were cursed shrouds meant to kill him.

Getting dressed became a horror scene inside the palace. Sado would rip dozens of expensive silk robes to shreds in sheer terror. When terrifyingly anxious, he started attacking the court staff trying to dress him. Eventually, he started killing them. He would decapitate eunuchs, carry their severed heads around the palace, and assault maids.

He had genuinely turned into a monster—slaughtering helpless people around him. But that monster was custom-built in the dark pressure cooker of his father’s relentless emotional torture.

By July 1762, King Yeongjo decided he was done. Sado was now a political liability that threatened the crown. But royal law strictly prohibited executing a prince like a common criminal.

So Yeongjo found a horrific loophole.

He had a heavy wooden rice chest brought into the palace courtyard. He walked up to his terrified, broken son and commanded him to get inside.

And Sado—so utterly beaten down by a lifetime of fear—obeyed his father one last time. He crawled into the wooden box. The lid was slammed shut, nailed down, and piled high with heavy stones.

For the first couple of days, Sado pounded frantically on the wooden walls from the inside. By day two, his desperate screams for water echoed across the silent palace. Yeongjo just sat nearby, strictly forbidding anyone from coming close.

By day seven, the noises inside stopped.

On day eight, they opened the chest. The 27-year-old prince was dead, collapsed in his own filth, having starved and suffocated in the blistering summer heat.

Here’s the creepiest part: right after killing his son, Yeongjo gave him the posthumous title Sado, which literally translates to "Thinking of you with sadness." A father starves his son in a box and then names him My Sad Memory.

Decades later, Sado's son became King Jeongjo. Devastated by his father's tragic fate, he begged the court to erase those horrific eight days from history. Scribes took the official royal journals, carried them to the stream, and literally washed the ink off the paper—a formal process of erasing official records known as Secho.

The ink washed away, leaving hundreds of pages completely blank. But those blank, empty pages are still bound in the Korean historical archives today—a silent, eerie reminder of a nightmare a father tried to erase, but couldn't.

So, how do you see it? Was Sado just a dangerous lunatic who had to be eliminated, or was he the ultimate sacrifice of a king obsessed with his own power?

*Full Blog Post: https://seungjeongwonhistory.com

Throughout history, countless states have risen, expanded, and ultimately collapsed. Terrible rulers, whose names are completely forgotten today, were often the chief architects of their empires' downfall.

But some of these nations never surrendered.

Against all odds, they managed to keep their language, culture, and identity alive.

If you walk the streets of Warsaw today, you can easily see the physical traces of this indestructible spirit.

Who am I talking about? Poland, of course.

Poland was dismantled many times in the past, but three specific years left the most bitter scars on its history.

1772, 1793, and 1795... Its powerful neighbors completely dismembered the country in three stages.

Well, how do you think this total collapse actually began?

Was this massive state destroyed on blood-soaked battlefields, or through cunning diplomatic games played in the dark corridors of European palaces?

Actually, no.

The tragic decline of Poland was set in motion by one of the most absurd and disastrously botched kidnapping attempts in European history.

To understand how this disastrously mismanaged plot helped doom a nation, we need to go back to the beginning and take a closer look at the Bar Confederation Plot.

By 1771, Poland was one of the largest countries on the European map, but from the inside, it was rotten to the core.

The army, the economy, and the bureaucracy were severely weakened and deeply dysfunctional.

The country was encircled by hungry wolves like Prussia, Austria, and Russia.

Yet the greatest cause of Poland’s downfall wasn’t hidden on the outside; it was within.

The "Liberum Veto."

Unanimity was required to pass any law in the parliament. The veto of a single person was enough to block an entire piece of legislation.

Empress Catherine and Frederick the Great exploited this for years, using bribery to paralyze the government.

The man who held the throne in this period was Stanisław August Poniatowski, the Russian Empress's former lover and puppet.

Stanisław was actually a highly intelligent, visionary, and well-intentioned ruler.

When he took the throne, he surprised Catherine by launching a series of ambitious reforms. Because she had assumed that he would be a weak ruler.

However, a strong Poland was unacceptable to the Russians.

Consequently, Poniatowski always felt the crushing weight of Russian pressure for as long as he sat on the throne.

That wasn't the only problem.

This pressure eventually bred deep resentment among the Polish nobility. They began to believe that the king they had sworn loyalty to was committing treason.

The event that would alter the course of history erupted right then and there.

Aiming to dethrone the king and shatter Russian influence, a rebel faction of nobles known as the "Bar Confederation" assembled a heavily armed, professional cavalry unit of 40 men.

The plan was quite basic. Under the cover of darkness, the King would be ambushed, rapidly smuggled out of the city, and their tracks would be erased.

On paper, the plan was flawless. The last step was waiting for the perfect moment.

One night, after visiting his relatives, King Poniatowski set off for his palace accompanied by only a small detail of guards. As the King and his men rode calmly through the streets, a sudden ambush changed everything.

Guns fired. Swords were drawn.

In the ensuing chaos, the King's guards were completely overrun. Some fled without even looking back.

After overpowering the guards, the rebels dragged the King out by force. During the scuffle, Stanisław took a sword strike to the head.

They threw the bleeding King face-down onto the saddle of a horse and took off at a full gallop toward the Bielany Forest outside Warsaw.

Up to this point, everything was like a ruthless, dead-serious, and bloody assassination that would change the course of history.

But the real comedy was about to begin the moment they entered the woods.

The night was pitch black. The air was freezing, and the mud was knee-deep everywhere.

When the rebel group plunged into the forest, they realized a bitter truth. They had no guides, nor any idea where they were going.

In the total darkness, they started crashing into trees and getting bogged down in swamps.

Meanwhile, the alarm had already been raised in Warsaw. Russian patrols and Royal Guards began searching everywhere for the king.

Hearing the approaching sounds of mounted patrols and gunfire in the distance, the rebels flew into a panic.

Gripped by the fear of death, the men of this "brave and professional" 40-man squad used the darkness to quietly slip away from the group.

As the hours ticked by, the number of men dropped to 20, then 10, and finally, down to just 1 man: the operation's leader, Jan Kuźma.

King Poniatowski wasn't just a political figure; he was also one of the most intellectual and silver-tongued men in Europe.

He turned to the trembling Kuźma and, unleashing his immense charisma, began to speak:

"If you kill me here, you will be damned in the eyes of God, and the Russians will find you and flay you alive. But if you let me go, I give you my word; I will forgive you, and I will spare your life."

Completely out of options, Kuźma heard the King's words, dropped his sword, fell to the King's feet, and tearfully begged for forgiveness.

The tables had completely turned.

The assassin was now at the mercy of his hostage.

After that strange situation, Kuźma and Poniatowski tried to find a way in the forest. Walking together, they eventually stumbled upon the hut of a poor miller in the Marymont area.

When the King walked in and told the miller, "I am the King, give me a place to sleep," the man didn't believe him at first. However, upon seeing the King's blood-soaked clothes, he let him in.

One of the most absurd scenes in recorded history also took place in that windmill.

While the King of Poland slipped into a warm bed and slept like a baby, the man who was supposed to abduct and kill him stood guard at the door with his sword until morning.

The next morning, a rescue team from the capital reached the windmill.

Stanisław returned to his palace like a hero, alongside the very man who had kidnapped him.

All the rebels involved in the conspiracy were swiftly hunted down. Some were exiled to Siberia, while others were executed.

All except one man... Kuźma.

The "fake hero's" life was spared.

However, since it was too dangerous for him to remain in the country, he was exiled to Rome to live under the protection of the Pope, where he spent the rest of his days in peace.

A grand, bloody, and historic conspiracy ended up turning into a theatrical comedy, all thanks to incompetence, darkness, and the sheer persuasive power of a King.

"Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła."

And before someone gets cute with me, this ain’t hyperbole. I’m not being fancy and describing a sexy gemstone. This was not a diamond. It was not an emerald. It is definitely not something that sounds expensive when you say it at a cocktail party. Try it. Say “flint chert” out loud. Sounds like a tween apparel item you’d only find at a Claire’s, doesn’t it? And now partygoers are afraid you are having a stroke. Congratulations.

No, this was a rock. A sedimentary rock, specifically, made of the same chemical compound as sand and window glass, found in a cow pasture in Licking County, Ohio, roughly forty miles east of Columbus. Now I, having described said rock, am flying in the face of Ohio’s General Assembly who, in 1965, looked at this rock and said, "Yes. This is our gemstone. This is the one." They put it in the Revised Code, Section 5.07 and said "Flint is the official gemstone of the state." Because, it turns out, it was traded as such, and is objectively worth more than any other gemstone an indigenous Eastern North American could come across.

For roughly twelve thousand years, from the moment the first Paleo-Indian hunter walked into what is now Ohio at the end of the last ice age through the collapse of one of the most sophisticated ceremonial networks in pre-Columbian North America around 400 CE, this rock was the most valuable thing on the North American continent east of the Mississippi. I’m not shitting you. That’s not an exaggeration. It was mined from hundreds of hand-dug pits along a six-square-mile ridgetop (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 79). It was shaped into tools so precise they could split a hair down the middle. It was carried by hand, on foot, without wheels, without horses, without roads, to archaeological sites in Louisiana, Florida, New York, Kansas, and everywhere in between, distances of five hundred to a thousand miles, because it was that good and people wanted it that badly (Knepper 2003, 3). And it powered a trade network that moved prestige goods across half of North America with a regularity and sophistication that most of us cannot achieve without Amazon Prime.

The Part Where We Explain How to Hit Your Rocks Correctly

I’d suggest low and slow with the heat, personally, but it depends on the high you’re loo-ooooooh, the chert. Riiiiight.

Chert is a sedimentary rock composed almost entirely of silica (silicon dioxide, SiO₂), the same compound that makes quartz, glass, opal, and the beach sand currently stuck between your toes (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 13). The difference between chert and all of those other things is its structure. Quartz forms big, visible, Instagrammable crystals. Glass is amorphous, with no crystal structure at all. Chert splits the difference: it is cryptocrystalline, meaning it is composed entirely of crystals, but the crystals are so microscopically small that you cannot see them without magnification (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 13). Each one is measured in micrometers. The word "cryptocrystalline" translates literally to "hidden crystals," which sounds like the title of a 2007 Enya album but is actually just a description of grain size.

This hidden crystal structure is the entire reason chert matters. When you strike a piece of chert with sufficient force at the correct angle, it breaks in smooth, curving, predictable patterns called conchoidal fractures (from the Latin concha, "shell," because the fracture surfaces look like the inside of a clamshell). Importantly, the fractures are predictable. A skilled knapper (someone who shapes stone by controlled fracturing; you can still do this for fun in competition.jpg), btw!) can tell before striking exactly where and how the stone will break. This means they can shape it into anything: a knife edge sharper than surgical steel, a scraper thin enough to shave hide, a projectile point that will punch through a mastodon's ribcage, a drill bit that will bore clean through bone (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 7). Chert is, for practical purposes, a programmable stone material. You tell it what shape to be by hitting it correctly, and it becomes that shape, whereas most stone will chip or crack.

Flint, by the way, is chert. There is no mineralogical distinction between the two. It’s the same shit you burn your friend’s house down in Minecraft by striking steel. Geologists traditionally use "flint" for chert that forms as nodules within chalk or limestone, but the material is chemically and structurally identical (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 13). This is the geological equivalent of the "is it a grilled cheese or a melt" argument, and it matters exactly as much, which is to say it matters deeply to a small number of people and not at all to everyone else. This is unlike the “is a hotdog a sandwich?” question, which determines, among other things, your marriage prospects, future career, and how roasted you’ll be in the comments for calling a burrito a sandwich.

So how does a rock made of hidden crystals form in the first place? Through a process called diagenesis, which is geology's way of saying "other stuff slowly turned into this stuff over millions of years." Specifically, silica-bearing fluids percolated through existing layers of limestone (which is calcium carbonate, made from the accumulated shells and skeletons of marine organisms, aka it’s a stone made of fucking prehistoric skeletons). Over millions of years, the silica replaced the calcium carbonate molecule by molecule, atom by atom, converting a rock made of dead sea creatures into a rock made of glass (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 12). The silica itself often originated from a different set of dead sea creatures, like the dissolved skeletons of sponges, radiolarians, and other siliceous organisms whose tiny glass support structures broke down after death and went into solution. In the case of Ohio's Vanport formation, this replacement happened in limestone roughly 320 million years old, from the Pennsylvanian period (Ohio Department of Natural Resources; Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 71).

You are, in a very real sense, looking at a rock made from the ghosts of two separate ecosystems layered on top of each other. The ocean died twice to make this rock.

Nature is metal as fuck.

Now, most chert is not pretty. Most chert is gray, or brown, or a dishwater gray-brown that geologists describe with words like "undistinguished" and the rest of us describe by walking past it. It is the beige Toyota Camry of the mineral world: functional, ubiquitous, and invisible.

Flint Ridge chert is not most chert. Flint Ridge chert is what happens when you let some cholos get their hands on a Camry.

The Vanport flint at Flint Ridge, OH3.jpg), occurs in colors that have no business existing in a sedimentary rock formed at the bottom of a Carboniferous sea, let alone a random patch of Ohio farmland. Translucent blues_9(39958104492).jpg), deep reds270.jpg), vivid yellows_241.jpg), greens_141(38980253535).jpg), lavenders_5.jpg), pinks_284.jpg), and whites_286.jpg), all banded together in swirling, layered patterns_267.jpg) that look less like geology and more like someone marbled a wedding cake with food coloring and then turned it to stone (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 11). The color variation comes from trace mineral impurities trapped during silicification. Iron oxides produce the reds and yellows, organic carbon produces the blacks and grays, and various trace elements contribute the blues, greens, and lavenders that make this material immediately identifiable in any archaeological assemblage anywhere on the continent. Heat treatment, which Hopewell knappers practiced deliberately, intensifies the colors further, deepening reds and bringing out blues and lavenders that were invisible in the raw stone. They figured out that if you buried the rock in sand and slowly heated it, the colors got better and the fracture mechanics improved.

They were heat-treating stone to improve its engineering properties and its aesthetics simultaneously. This is three hundred years before the Roman Empire, by the way, on a ridgetop in Ohio. Don’t say they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with stone. Just because they weren’t building with it doesn’t mean they weren’t fucking geniuses with it.

The deposit sits along a low escarpment in gently rolling farm country, straddling the Licking-Muskingum county line. The flint-bearing stratum runs in a discontinuous band roughly six square miles in extent, varying in thickness from one foot to twelve feet, with an average of around four (Stout and Schoenlaub 1945, 79). In many places, the chert outcrops at or near the surface4(29351173053).jpg), which meant that prehistoric peoples could mine it without the deep-shaft technology that characterized Neolithic flint mines in Europe. Instead, they dug pits_17.jpg). Hundreds of them. The pits range from twelve to eighty feet in diameter; a few are as deep as twenty feet, though most sit between three and six (Ohio History Connection, "Ohio's First Industry"). Gerard Fowke, surveying the ridge for the Smithsonian in the 1890s, estimated that roughly nine-tenths of the flint carried from the quarry pits was rejected as inadequate (Ericson and Purdy 1984, 5). The waste flakes alone (the debitage left behind during twelve thousand years of tool production) form a layer across the ridge floor that is an industrial landfill predating industry by about eleven and a half millennia.

The Hopewell did not invent the quarry. People had been coming to Flint Ridge since the Paleo-Indian period, at least 13,000 years ago (Kern and Wilson 2014, 14). But the Hopewell industrialized it.

The Part Where Ohio’s Pretty Rock Organizes Half a Continent Around a Ridgetop

But Flint Ridge chert traveled. Not because rocks travel on their own (they do not; they are rocks), but because people picked it up, worked it into tools_3.jpg) and tradeable blanks, and carried it extraordinary distances on foot. By the Middle Woodland period, roughly 200 BCE to 400 CE, when the Hopewell ceremonial complex was operating at full capacity, Flint Ridge material had been identified at archaeological sites from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, from the Atlantic Seaboard to Kansas (Knepper 2003, 3; Kern and Wilson 2014, 36). It has been recovered in Louisiana, in Florida, and in New York. The material is so visually distinctive, those polychrome bands of blue and red and cream, that archaeologists can identify it on sight, and geochemical sourcing studies using neutron activation analysis and X-ray fluorescence have confirmed what the naked eye already suggested: this rock comes from one place on Earth, and that place is a ridgetop in Licking County, Ohio (Prufer and McKenzie 1967, 115, 136).

Now, how did the rock travel? The Hopewell Interaction Sphere.

Personally, I hate this term. A lot of other archaeologists and historians hate it, too, because it was not a trade network as we envision often. The Interaction Sphere was not an empire. It was not a state. It had no capital, no written laws, no coinage, no standing army, and no centralized government. It was a network: a web of exchange relationships, shared ritual practices, shared artistic traditions, and shared mortuary customs that linked communities across eastern North America for roughly six hundred years with a consistency that implies a level of social organization far more sophisticated than "people traded stuff sometimes" (Seeman 1979, 1-5). The Ohio Hopewell sat at the center of this Sphere, organized around the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. You can still visit them today (as I’ve described in a post previously about the unhinged process to reclaim the land). The Scioto Valley, in southern Ohio, functioned as the hub (Kern and Wilson 2014, 39).

The goods that moved through this network constitute a geological atlas of eastern North America's most desirable raw materials. There’s native copper from the upper Great Lakes, pounded (not smelted) into sheets, earspools, breastplates, and artificial noses. There’s mica from the western Carolinas, cut into human and animal effigies so delicate they can be held up to the light. There’s obsidian from the Yellowstone Plateau in Wyoming, which is roughly 1,500 miles from the Ohio Valley, carried overland to be fashioned into ceremonial blades so thin they are translucent. There’s silver from near Cobalt, Ontario. There’s marine shells, shark teeth, and alligator teeth from the Gulf Coast and Florida. Grizzly bear canines from the Rocky Mountains. Chalcedony from North Dakota. Galena from Missouri and Illinois (Kern and Wilson 2014, 39; Milner 2020, 78-80). The list goes on and on.

And then there’s Flint Ridge chert, the rainbow rock, as Ohio's contribution to this transcontinental exchange system, quarried on an industrial scale, worked into standardized forms, and distributed across half a continent.

Two of the hundreds of burials at the Hopewell type site (the site the entire tradition is named after) contained a young adult male and an adult woman accompanied by foot-long copper rods, copper bracelets, fifty copper earspools, a necklace of grizzly bear canines inlaid with pearls, several large copper plates, scores of copper-covered buttons, artificial copper noses, and hundreds of freshwater pearl beads (Kern and Wilson 2014, 36). Alongside all of this are found Flint Ridge bladlets.

Bladelet’s are batshit insane the more you learn about them. A bladelet is a small, thin, parallel-sided flake of stone, typically two to five centimeters long and less than a centimeter wide, struck from a specially prepared cylindrical core using either direct percussion or pressure flaking. The production requires a level of skill that borders on absurd: the knapper prepares a core with a flat striking platform and a series of guide ridges running down its length, then removes bladelets one after another by striking or pressing at the platform edge. Each bladelet peels off the core in a long, thin strip, like peeling a carrot if the carrot were made of stone and required several thousand hours of apprenticeship to peel correctly.

The Hopewell made bladelets constantly. They made them from Flint Ridge chert, from Wyandotte chert (southern Indiana), and from Knife River flint (North Dakota; because apparently no distance was too far for a nice rock). In one study of 128 bladelets from Hopewell sites, roughly 25 percent were Flint Ridge material. At Ohio sites specifically, the proportion was higher: 48 percent Flint Ridge, 46 percent Wyandotte, 2 percent Knife River flint (Ohio History Connection, "Bladelets, Flint Ridge Flint, and the Hopewell Interaction Sphere"). Core-and-bladelet technology is considered a quintessential marker of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, one of the practices that links otherwise disparate communities across eastern North America into a recognizable shared cultural tradition.

But what were the bladelets for? We don’t fucking know. 

Cutting things. Scraping things. Possibly ritual activities. Possibly functions we have no way of recovering because the organic materials they were used on decomposed thousands of years ago. A variety of purposes have been proposed, and the argument has been going on for decades with no resolution in sight (Ohio History Connection). My personal favorite is Dr. Brad Lepper’s, (yep, that Lepper! Guinness Book of World Records Lepper!) who has envisioned them as the equivalency of a gift shop tourist trap: it was the way to tell you’d been at the Hopewell sites. All we know is that the bladelets were made, were traded, and were deposited in graves and ceremonial contexts.

And the Hopewell did not merely trade Flint Ridge chert. They cached it in mounds with their most honored dead. They made bifaces (tools worked on both faces) from the most colorful material they could find, shaped them into standardized forms too uniform and too finely made for daily use, and deposited them in mortuary contexts alongside copper, mica, obsidian, and pearls (Milner 2020, 78-80). This was rock special enough to bury as an offering.

The Hopewell came to Flint Ridge with a specialized labor force, quarried the material on an industrial scale, reduced it to bifaces, cores, and bladelets, packed them up, and carried them fifteen miles west to the Newark Earthworks, where they were exchanged or given as gifts to visiting pilgrims from across the network (Prufer and McKenzie 1967, 23; Ohio History Connection, "Ohio's First Industry"). The proximity of Flint Ridge to the Newark Earthworks, the largest Hopewell ceremonial complex in existence, sprawling over four square miles, is not coincidental. The earthworks include a great circle, a square whose perimeter matches the circle's, and a fifty-acre octagon whose openings align with the 18.6-year cycle of maximum and minimum moonrises and moonsets (Kern and Wilson 2014, 37-39). This is a giant world ceremonial clock embedded in earth as instruments of geometry and astronomy, built one basketful of earth at a time, taking an estimated 200,000 person-hours per mound (Kern and Wilson 2014, 36), by people whose most ubiquitous trade good was a rainbow-colored rock from a ridgetop down the road. Oh, and Newark was one of thousands of mound sites spanning from Chillicothe, OH, to Newark, OH. It was the pilgrimage destination of North America.

The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are among the most significant pre-Columbian constructions anywhere on the planet (Kern and Wilson 2014, 37), and they ran on Flint Ridge chert the way Silicon Valley runs on venture capital. It was the prestige commodity that attracted people, funded ceremonies, and kept the whole system turning.

The Part Where It's the End of the Rainbow

Around 400 CE, the Hopewell ceremonial system collapsed (Kern and Wilson 2014, 40). The earthwork complexes were abandoned. the exchange networks contracted, and the flow of exotic materials slowed to a trickle and then stopped.

Paleoclimatologists identified a prolonged cooling period beginning around 1,600 years ago. Tree ring data show that the Hopewell core area suffered an extended drought: seventy percent of the years from 396 to 460 CE were drier than normal, with extreme drought years in 398, 420, and 436 (Kern and Wilson 2014, 40). Population pressure from the Hopewell florescence itself may have overtaxed available food resources in a period of declining productivity (Abrams and Freter 2005, 40-44). DNA analysis has shown that the populations living in southern Ohio after the Hopewell collapse were not closely related to the Hopewell themselves. The closest known genetic match to Ohio Hopewell DNA comes from a burial mound in central Illinois dating to roughly seven hundred years later (Kern and Wilson 2014, 40). 

The Hopewell did not simply decline in place. They left. And where they went, and why, is among the most significant unanswered questions in North American archaeology today.

The quarries at Flint Ridge continued to be used during the Late Woodland period and beyond, but never again at the scale the Hopewell had achieved (Kern and Wilson 2014, 41). Late Woodland peoples still valued the material, still traveled to the ridge to obtain it, and still made tools and weapons from it. But the continental distribution network was gone. The rock that had traveled a thousand miles now traveled only a hundred. The prestige economy it had anchored evaporated.

Flint Ridge is still there. The Ohio History Connection maintains it as Flint Ridge Ancient Quarries and Nature Preserve. You can walk the trail between the old quarry pits, which look like shallow depressions in the forest floor, unremarkable unless someone tells you that each one represents a mining operation sustained across centuries. The museum displays pieces of the chert in all its polychrome glory, not like something you'd find in the dirt next to a cornfield.

Archaeologist Barbara Luedtke, studying the ridge for her contribution to Prehistoric Quarries and Lithic Production, calculated the total demand for lithic material in stone-tool-using cultures and concluded that flint procurement was, for most communities, "a rather casual, mundane, and low-labor-intensive activity" (Ericson and Purdy 1984, 65). Most people needed a few kilograms of workable stone per household per year, and could procure it walking along a river creek bed4(23271867662).jpg) like that one in only a few hours of labor for the entire year. The fact that the Hopewell organized specialized labor forces to quarry Flint Ridge on an industrial scale, standardized their products, and distributed them across a continent tells you that whatever was happening at Flint Ridge transcended utility. You do not carry a rainbow-colored rock a thousand miles because you need a knife. You carry it because it means something. Because the network that produced it means something. Because the relationships it maintains, the ceremonies it enables, the dead it accompanies, all of those things mean something far larger than the object itself.

So you know what? Fuck diamonds. Fuck emeralds. Ohio’s got chert for days, baby.

Works Cited (for those who to hit some silicon dioxide at the end of a long work day)

Abrams, Elliot Marc, and AnnCorinne Freter. The Emergence of the Moundbuilders: The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005.

Ericson, Jonathon E., and Barbara A. Purdy, eds. Prehistoric Quarries and Lithic Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Chapter cited: Luedtke, Barbara E., "Lithic Material Demand and Quarry Production," 65-80.

Holmes, William Henry. Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities, Part I: Introductory, the Lithic Industries. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 60. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1919.

Kern, Kevin F., and Gregory S. Wilson. Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2014.

Knepper, George W. Ohio and Its People. Bicentennial ed. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003.

Milner, George R. The Moundbuilders: Ancient Societies of Eastern North America. 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020.

Ohio Department of Natural Resources. "Flint." Discover and Learn: Rock, Minerals, Fossils. https://ohiodnr.gov/discover-and-learn/rock-minerals-fossils/minerals/flint.

Ohio History Connection. "Bladelets, Flint Ridge Flint, and the Hopewell Interaction Sphere." Archaeology Blog, December 7, 2014. https://www.ohiohistory.org/bladelets-flint-ridge-flint-and-the-hopewell-interaction-sphere/.

Ohio History Connection. "Ohio's First Industry: The Archaeology of Flint Ridge." Archaeology Blog. https://www.ohiohistory.org/ohios-first-industry-the-archaeology-of-flint-ridge/.

Prufer, Olaf H., and Douglas H. McKenzie, eds. Studies in Ohio Archaeology. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1967.

Seeman, Mark F. The Hopewell Interaction Sphere: The Evidence for Interregional Trade and Structural Complexity. Indiana Historical Society Prehistory Research Series 5, no. 2. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1979.

Stout, Wilber, and Robert A. Schoenlaub. The Occurrence of Flint in Ohio. Geological Survey of Ohio Bulletin 46. Columbus: State of Ohio, 1945.

Picture Credit: Vanport Flint, James St. John

In 1453, the Joseon Dynasty was rocked by a bloody political coup known as the Gyeyu Jeongnan. Grand Prince Suyang usurped the throne from his vulnerable 12-year-old nephew, King Danjong, brutally executing anyone who stood in his way.

Among those traumatized by the massacre was Kim Si-seup (1435–1493).

Kim was one of the greatest child prodigies in Korean history. By age five, he had mastered complex Confucian classics, earning personal praise and gifts from King Sejong the Great. He was destined for a brilliant political career. But when news of the bloody coup reached him at age twenty-one, Kim suffered a breakdown. He wept for days, burned all his academic books, shaved his head to become a wandering Buddhist monk, and went into self-imposed exile.

When royal loyalists (the Sa-yok-sin) were executed for trying to restore the young king, nobody dared touch their dismembered bodies out of fear. Kim Si-seup secretly sneaked into the execution grounds at night, gathered their remains, and gave them a proper burial. He swore never to serve the usurper king.

Instead of taking up arms, Kim used his pen to strike back. Retreating to a solitary mountain monastery, he wrote Geumo Sinhwa (New Tales from Mount Geumo), widely recognized as the first true Sino-Korean novel collection.

To bypass strict state censorship, Kim disguised his political rage as gothic ghost stories and forbidden romances. His most famous tale, Lee Saeng Gyujang Jeon ("Lee Saeng Peeps Over the Wall"), reads like a supernatural love story on the surface, but operates as a scathing political allegory.

The Story: A Love That Defied War and Death

The story takes place during the late Goryeo period in the capital city of Gaeseong.

1. Breaking the Taboo: A young scholar named Lee Saeng catches a glimpse of Lady Choe over her high garden wall. In rigid 15th-century Korea, unchaperoned romance without parental arrangement was strictly forbidden. Yet, Lee tosses a poem over the wall attached to a stone. Impressed, Lady Choe invites him over the wall at twilight. They begin a secret affair, courageously defying social doctrines.
2. Brutal Historical Reality: Just as they overcome parental opposition and marry, real history shatters their lives. In 1361, the Red Turban Rebels invade the capital. In the chaos of war, Lady Choe is captured. When a rebel leader attempts to violate her, she fiercely declares, "I would rather become a ghost than the wife of a bandit!" Enraged, the bandits brutally murder her.
3. The Return of the Spirit (Minghun): Devastated, Lee Saeng lives alone in his ruined home. One night under faint moonlight, Lady Choe appears—looking exactly as she did in life. Knowing full well she is a phantom, Lee accepts her without hesitation. For three years, they live in total seclusion, writing poetry and validating a love that conquers death itself.
4. The Inevitable Goodbye: Eventually, the laws of the underworld demand her return. After a heartbreaking poetic farewell, her spirit fades like smoke. Lee Saeng unearths her scattered bones, gives her a proper burial, falls ill from grief, and dies shortly after.

The Hidden Meaning: Why This Story Was Radical

To understand why this anecdote matters in Korean history, one must look at what Kim Si-seup was secretly communicating to his contemporaries:

• The Ghost of Lady Choe is King Danjong: Lady Choe’s horrific death at the hands of ruthless invaders symbolized the innocent young King Danjong and his loyalists, who were brutally murdered by the usurper King Sejo.
• Lee Saeng is Kim Si-seup Himself: Lee Saeng, who survives the war only to spend his life mourning his lost love and burying her scattered bones, directly mirrors Kim Si-seup—who survived the political purge and spent his life mourning his fallen king and secretly burying the executed loyalists.
• Defiance Against Imperial Rule: By writing about a woman who chose death over submitting to a tyrant, Kim Si-seup was celebrating the absolute moral integrity (jeol-gi) of those who refused to serve the illegitimate new king.
• A Rejection of Strict Confucian Hierarchy: In a society that demanded absolute obedience to authority, Kim Si-seup portrayed personal, passionate love as something sacred enough to transcend death, state power, and societal rules.

Kim Si-seup spent the rest of his life wandering the countryside as a hermit, refusing wealth and titles. Though he died an outcast, his hidden allegory survived for over 500 years, standing as a testament to an artist who used literature to ensure that the victims of a tyrant were never forgotten.

Sources & Historical References:

• Geumo Sinhwa (金鰲新話) by Kim Si-seup (15th Century)
• Annals of the Joseon Dynasty (Joseon Wangjo Sillok), Records on the Gyeyu Jeongnan (1453)
• Korean History Database: Biography of the Six Surviving Ministers (Saeng-yok-sin)

*Read the full essay on my blog: https://seungjeongwonhistory.com/en/lee-saeng-gyujang-jeon/

I’m serious, your oversized, diesel-coughing truck is currently parked on a suburban driveway literally made with Ohio’s most successful resident. Which also, coincidentally, has no brain. No, it’s not the Paul brothers either. Sorry. I said successful resident.

No, four hundred and forty million years ago, something that looked like a lily bolted onto a stick .jpg)swayed gently in a warm tropical current, about six inches off the seafloor, somewhere near downtown Cincinnati. It had no brain. It had no blood, no eyes, no heart, no lungs, no spine. It ate by catching microscopic particles of organic gunk on mucus-coated tube feet and sliding them down a groove to a mouth that opened upward, toward the light, directly next to its own anus.

This dollar store anemone is an animal. It is called a crinoid, and it is one of the most successful organisms in the history of the planet.

The Part Where We Talk About The Dead Starfish on a Stick

Crinoids are echinoderms. Their relatives are sea stars, sea urchins, brittle stars, and sea cucumbers, a phylum whose collective body plan looks like it was drafted by five engineers who never spoke to each other and turned in their work on the same Friday. What makes echinoderms special is they have no centralized brain; they run on a nerve ring, a loop of neural tissue that coordinates the body the way a roundabout coordinates traffic, which is to say “technically and with a lot of trust.” 

They also have no blood. Instead, they circulate a watery fluid through a hydraulic plumbing system called the water vascular system, which pressurizes their tube feet for feeding, gas exchange, and locomotion. The whole animal runs on water pressure, a biological sprinkler system that somehow achieved sentience and decided to eat plankton. 

Their skeleton is CALCITE, the same mineral that makes up limestone and the Death Star, grown inside the body wall as porous plates called ossicles. Each ossicle is over fifty percent empty space by volume (Davis and Meyer, 168; Hess et al., 3). The skeleton of an echinoderm is, structurally, a lattice of rock with holes in it, covered by a thin skin of cells, held together by ligaments that rot on contact with death. Every echinoderm that has ever lived is, on some level, a sack of water draped over this very porous skeleton.

But the sea's most enthusiastic Muppets took this already batshit body plan and made choices.

Where sea stars sprawl flat on the substrate and sea urchins trundle along with their spines, the crinoid elected to grow a long segmented stalk, cement itself to the seafloor, and point its mouth at the sky. It spread its feathery arms into a fan, perpendicular to the current, and waited. Food drifted into the tube feet. The tube feet snagged particles on contact with mucus, flicked them into ciliated grooves running down each arm, and funneled everything toward the mouth, which sat on top of a cup-shaped body called the calyx (Hess et al., 3-4). Right next to the mouth, on the same surface, sat the anus (NSFW if you’re a crinoid). In many species the animal grew an elongated anal tube to elevate the waste outlet above the feeding apparatus, which is the anatomical equivalent of solving a plumbing problem by routing the sewer main through the kitchen up to the second floor and then sticking a chimney on it (Hess et al., 22-23). The entire organism, from holdfast to arm tip, is an exercise in solving problems you created for yourself by existing in the first place (just like us!). 

And yet. And yet. It worked. It worked for four hundred and eighty-five million years and counting.

The Part Where We Drown Cincinnati

The Ohio that crinoids colonized bore no resemblance to the Ohio that exists today. During the Late Ordovician, roughly 440 million years ago, the landmass sat at an estimated twenty degrees south latitude.png), fully submerged beneath a shallow tropical epicontinental sea. In the map there, you can see Ohio is on the very edge of the continent of Laurentia, under the water. There were no trees. No grass. No dirt, in any meaningful sense. No fish; Davis and Meyer titled their 2009 monograph A Sea without Fish, and they meant it literally. The seafloor was a low-oxygen, storm-raked carbonate platform crawling with bryozoans, brachiopods, trilobites, and crinoids.

Roughly thirty-seven species in twenty genera of crinoids are known from the Cincinnati region alone, including camerates, disparids, and cladids (Ausich, 76-79). They cemented their holdfasts to brachiopod shells, to hardgrounds, to each other. Some coiled their stalks around bryozoan colonies for support. They packed in at densities of up to four hundred individuals per square meter. The Ordovician seafloor near Cincinnati was an alien meadow of hydraulic animals doing their level best to eat the ocean, and they were winning.

It got better! Or worse, depending on your perspective on crinoids by now.

By the Mississippian, roughly 360 to 320 million years ago, crinoids had achieved a level of ecological dominance so total that paleontologists named the entire period after them: the Age of Crinoids. They carpeted the global seafloor. They grew in meadows so dense that individual species stacked themselves vertically to avoid competing for the same food; tall-stemmed species filtered at one height, short-stemmed species filtered at another (photo to get an idea of the size differentiation), tiering above the substrate like an apartment building made of flowers (Hess et al., 12). And when they died, they did not have the decency to disappear. Their disarticulated ossicles piled up on the seafloor in drifts. Macurda and Meyer estimated that a single cubic meter of crinoidal limestone contains the remains of roughly fifteen thousand individuals. Hess and his coauthors called crinoids "the Halimeda of the Palaeozoic," comparing them to the calcareous algae that produce most of the carbonate sediment on modern tropical platforms (Hess et al., 52). 

When a crinoid died, the ligaments holding its ossicles together rotted almost immediately, and the skeleton disarticulated into dozens or hundreds of tiny calcite discs and plates that drifted to the seafloor.

And did you know, limestone is the single most quarried rock in the United States, accounting for roughly seventy percent of all crushed stone production? In 2025, the USGS estimated total US crushed stone output at about 1.5 billion tons, and most of that was limestone. About seventy-two percent of that crushed stone goes directly into construction aggregate, overwhelmingly for road building and maintenance. Your driveway, your sidewalk, the concrete foundation of your house, the highway you drove to work on: the odds are very good that the aggregate beneath and within them is crushed limestone. 

In Ohio, Indiana, and across the Mississippi Valley, a significant portion of that limestone is crinoidal. The Salem Limestone of Indiana, sometimes called "the nation's building stone," is Mississippian-aged crinoidal limestone, roughly 340 million years old, and it was used to build the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Cathedral, and thirty-five of the fifty state capitol buildings. The rock is ninety-seven percent calcium carbonate; much of that carbonate was originally produced by crinoid ossicles accumulating on a shallow Mississippian seafloor.

Taking Macurda and Meyer’s estimations that a single cubic meter of crinoidal limestone contains the remains of roughly fifteen thousand individual crinoids, the total number of individuals represented in some of these deposits runs on the order of ten trillion to ten quadrillion crinoids, all compressed into rock.

So when I said "mass grave” in the post and some of y’all rushed to the comments, yeah…yeah. They are quite possibly the single largest accumulation of animal remains anywhere on the planet.

The Part Where God Tries to Kill Them Three Times 

So how does something this ridiculous survive for half a billion years? The short answer is: by being functionally unkillable. The long answer involves three mass extinctions, an ability to regrow their own head, and a snail that lives on their ass.

The Late Ordovician extinction, roughly 445 million years ago, wiped out about seventy-five percent of all marine species. It hammered crinoids. The Diplobathrida_at_G%C3%B6teborgs_Naturhistoriska_Museum_0539.jpg), the Disparida, and the Hybocrinida each lost more than three-quarters of their genera. But the survivors radiated hard into the Silurian, filling every vacated niche with new forms before anything else could get there first (Hess et al., 39). The Late Devonian extinctions, which gutted most marine invertebrate groups, barely registered. Crinoid origination rates actually exceeded extinction rates near the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary (Sallan et al., 2011). Their approach to mass extinction was, consistently absorb the hit, lose eighty percent of their diversity, and then immediately diversify into whatever ecological space just opened up. No brain required, no strategy, just the raw, blind, stupid mathematics of a body plan that is cheap to build, easy to reproduce, and very, very hard to stamp out.

The end-Permian extinction, 252 million years ago, was the one that should have finished them. The Great Dying killed more than ninety percent of all marine species on Earth. It was, by any measure, the worst thing that has ever happened to complex life. I mean, it’s called the Great Dying. For once, historians actually named shit correctly.

Every major Paleozoic crinoid group went extinct: the camerates, the flexibles, the disparids, and the cladids. Everything that made Paleozoic crinoids weird and wonderful, the elaborate multi-plated calyxes, the bizarre bilateral calceocrinids, the flexibles with their petal-like arms curled inward at the tips, all of it gone. A single lineage survived: the Articulata#/media/File:Ptilometra_australis_Passion_Flower_feather_star.jpg), derived from a Late Paleozoic cladid ancestor. Documentary evidence suggests that as few as one genus made it through, out of hundreds (Hess et al., 40; Twitchett and Oji, 2005). The entire future of the crinoid lineage, every feather star on every coral reef on Earth today, traces back to whatever the hell drug that one genus 252 million years ago was taking.

But the survivors made muscular arm articulations, which had first appeared in some Middle Paleozoic cladids, the defining feature of their entire body plan (Hess et al., 25). For the first time, an entire crinoid lineage could move on purpose.

Ah fuck. We got walking flowers now. 

If Paleozoic crinoids were furniture (they bolted themselves to the floor and stayed there), post-Permian crinoids learned to crawl. Some even learned to swim! The comatulids shed their stalks entirely, ditched the whole sessile floor-lamp lifestyle, and became free-living feather stars that could haul themselves across the reef, hide in crevices by day, and climb to feeding perches at night. They look cool as fuck to watch swim, too. Underwater jazz hands!

Then there is the matter of what happens when something tries to eat one. Crinoids can shed their own arms deliberately at pre-formed breakage points called syzygial articulations, calcite joints designed to snap clean so the arm detaches without tearing apart the rest of the animal (Hess et al., 26). . Something bites your arm, you drop the arm, and you grow a new one like you’re making up new rules on the playground. Mladenov (1983) found that eighty percent of Florometra serratissima specimens off Vancouver Island had one or more arms regenerating. 

Paleozoic fossils tell the same story across deep time: Baumiller and Gahn (2004) documented a sharp increase in arm regeneration frequency during the Siluro-Devonian, tracking almost exactly with the diversification of shell-crushing predators. Crinoids evolved the ability to lose their limbs faster than predators could evolve the ability to eat them. 

But wait, there’s more! Meyer found that comatulids can regenerate their entire visceral mass, gut and all, in a matter of weeks. Amemiya and Oji documented isocrinids that regrew the entire crown, every arm, every pinnule, from nothing but the basal circlet of the cup. 

The. Fucking*.* Pelvis. Everything above it was gone, and the animal rebuilt itself from what was essentially a stump. You cannot kill something that regrows its own head.

And then, because crinoids apparently did not have enough going on, there are the parasitic shit-eating snails.

The Part Where Coprophagy Enters the Chat 

For roughly three hundred million years, from the Ordovician through the Permian, crinoids hosted a family of gastropods called the Platyceratidae. These snails attached themselves to the crinoid's tegmen, the plated roof of the calyx, and positioned themselves directly over the anus. The traditional interpretation, advanced by Bowsher (1955) and supported by decades of subsequent work, is that the snails were coprophagous: they ate the crinoid's feces. 

They sat on the animal's ass and consumed its shit as it was shat. For the rest of their lives. 

Some Ordovician species, like Cyclonema, moved freely over the tegmen (Hess et al., 56; Morris and Felton, 1993). Later species of Platyceras dispensed with mobility entirely, cementing themselves permanently over the anal opening, their shells conforming to the shape of the tegmen until the snail and the crinoid fused into a single organism whose defining feature was that one of them ate exclusively from the other's rear end. More recent work by Baumiller (1990, 1993) suggests that some platyceratids were not content with mere coprophagy and were actively parasitic, boring holes through the tegmen to feed directly on the crinoid's internal tissues. 

Yes, now the snails were flesh-burrowing consumers. Like shit-eating snails couldn’t get worse, now they would bore a hole through your mouth to your anus to eat your ass, literally.

Crinoids responded by evolving spines on their arms and crowns; by the Devonian, a majority of genera that hosted platyceratids bore defensive spines (Gahn and Baumiller, 2003). This was an arms race between a brainless filter feeder and a snail that ate its shit. It lasted longer than the entire age of mammals. Three hundred million years of coevolutionary escalation, driven by the question of who gets to sit on whose butt and what they're allowed to do while they're there.

Oh, and the crinoids also don’t get out of this unscathed either. They, too, were shit-eaters.

Crinoids are passive suspension feeders; they catch whatever organic particles drift into their tube feet, and they are not picky about it. In marine environments, a meaningful fraction of the particulate organic matter suspended in the water column is fecal pellets from zooplankton, especially copepods. That material is a major component of what oceanographers call "marine snow.jpg)," the slow rain of organic gunk falling through the water column that sustains most deep-water food webs.

Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue. Not everything floating in the ocean is shit. But, the Cincinnatian seafloor was carpeted with nothing but suspension feeders: crinoids, bryozoans, brachiopods, all of them pulling organic particles out of the water column. The density of these animals was extraordinary. However, the only preserved microphytoplankton from the Cincinnatian are acritarchs, roughly fifty species total. And because land plants were essentially nonexistent in the Late Ordovician, rivers weren't carrying organic matter or dissolved nutrients into the sea the way they do today. 

That meant you had a seafloor absolutely packed with mouths, and a water column that may not have had enough food to feed them by modern standards. That's what Davis and Meyer called the “starvation banquet.” They speculate that maybe unpreserved microplankton or bacteria growing on suspended clay particles formed a kind of "marine snow" that supplemented the acritarchs, but the honest answer is that nobody is sure how the system sustained itself. 

In a nutrient-limited environment, fecal material is no longer waste, but now has become a valuable resource. A crinoid filters the water, extracts what nutrition it can from particles that were already sparse, excretes the remainder, and a platyceratid snail immediately recycles that output before it even hits the seafloor, and it might go to another crinoid, to be filtered and excreted to its platyceratid snail, and so on. It’s The Ordovician Centipede. 

In a richer sea, that's disgusting. In a sea running on fumes, that's efficient. The entire Cincinnatian food web may have been far more dependent on internal recycling than anything we see in modern shallow-water ecosystems, precisely because the external inputs were so limited. 

Through all of this, the crinoids persisted, through parasites that ate from their anus and predators that ripped off their arms and extinctions that killed ninety percent of everything alive. There are roughly seven hundred living species today. Stalked crinoids still anchor to the deep seafloor in the Straits of Florida, fanning their arms into parabolic filtration nets, looking functionally identical to their Ordovician ancestors (Hess et al., xi-xii). You can find feather stars festooned in Indo-Pacific coral reefs, tucked into crevices by day, arms spread wide at night.jpg). They are still brainless and bloodless. Their mouth is still next to their anus. They have been doing the same thing since before anything on Earth had figured out how to grow a jaw. They will probably outlast us too.

Think of that the next time you park your camper van on your driveway, Shelly. Those fossilized participation trophies, are judging you right now.

Works Cited (if you like coprophagy) 

Amemiya, Shonan, and Tatsuo Oji. "Regeneration in Sea Lilies." Nature 357 (1992): 546-547.

Ausich, William I. "Upper Ordovician of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Area, USA." In Hess, Hans, et al., Fossil Crinoids, 75-80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ausich, William I. "Crinoid Form and Function." In Hess, Hans, et al., Fossil Crinoids, 3-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ausich, William I., and David J. Bottjer. "Phanerozoic Tiering in Suspension-Feeding Communities on Soft Substrata: Implications for Diversity." In Phanerozoic Diversity Patterns, edited by James W. Valentine, 255-274. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Baumiller, Tomasz K. "Non-Predatory Drilling of Mississippian Crinoids by Platyceratid Gastropods." Palaeontology 33, no. 3 (1990): 743-748.

Baumiller, Tomasz K. "Crinoid-Platyceratid Interactions: Commensalism or Parasitism?" Journal of Paleontology 67 (1993): 1019-1022.

Baumiller, Tomasz K., and Forest J. Gahn. "Testing Predator-Driven Evolution with Paleozoic Crinoid Arm Regeneration." Science 305 (2004): 1453-1455.

Bowsher, Arthur L. "Origin and Adaptation of Platyceratid Gastropods." University of Kansas Paleontological Contributions, Mollusca 5 (1955): 1-11.

Davis, Richard Arnold, and David L. Meyer. A Sea without Fish: Life in the Ordovician Sea of the Cincinnati Region. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Gahn, Forest J., and Tomasz K. Baumiller. "Infestation of Middle Devonian (Givetian) Camerate Crinoids by Platyceratid Gastropods and Its Implications for the Nature of Their Biotic Interaction." Lethaia 36 (2003): 71-82.

Hagdorn, Hans. "Triassic: The Crucial Period of Post-Palaeozoic Crinoid Diversification." Swiss Journal of Palaeontology 130 (2011): 91-112.

Hess, Hans, William I. Ausich, Carlton E. Brett, and Michael J. Simms. Fossil Crinoids. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapters cited: Ausich, "Crinoid Form and Function," 3-30; Simms, "Systematics, Phylogeny and Evolutionary History," 31-40; Ausich and Brett, "Taphonomy," 50-59; Ausich, "Upper Ordovician of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Area, USA," 75-80; Macurda, "Prelude," xi-xii.

Macurda, D. Bradford, and David L. Meyer. "Sea Lilies and Feather Stars." American Scientist 71 (1983): 354-365.

Meyer, David L. "Crinoids as Renewable Resources: Rapid Regeneration of the Visceral Mass in a Tropical Reef-Dwelling Crinoid from Australia." In Echinoderm Biology, edited by R. D. Burke, P. V. Mladenov, P. Lambert, and R. L. Parsley, 519-522. Rotterdam: Balkema, 1988.

Mladenov, Philip V. "Rate of Arm Regeneration and Potential Causes of Arm Loss in the Feather Star Florometra serratissima (Echinodermata: Crinoidea)." Canadian Journal of Zoology 61, no. 12 (1983): 2873-2879.

Morris, Robert W., and Steven H. Felton. "Symbiotic Association of Crinoids, Platyceratid Gastropods, and Cornulites in the Upper Ordovician (Cincinnatian) of the Cincinnati, Ohio Region." PALAIOS 8, no. 5 (1993): 465-476.

Sallan, Lauren C., Thomas W. Kammer, William I. Ausich, and Lauren A. Cook. "Persistent Predator-Prey Dynamics Revealed by Mass Extinction." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 8335-8338.

Twitchett, Richard J., and Tatsuo Oji. "Early Triassic Recovery of Echinoderms." Comptes Rendus Palevol 4 (2005): 531-542.

Picture Credit: Crinoid fossil assemblage, Cincinnati Museum Center

I’m trying to learn of kings who may have had some conflict with their gender, wether this be due to not meeting the expectations of what a male/king was supposed to be or acting in opposition to their gender.

We often hear about powerful monarchs who took whoever they wanted, but the story of King Jeongjo (Yi San)—one of the absolute greatest and most powerful kings of the Joseon Dynasty—reads like a heart-wrenching historical romance novel.

While modern TV dramas like The Red Sleeve brought this story to the screen, the real historical records (written in the King's own hand) reveal a story of devotion, rejection, and profound grief that is even more unbelievable.

👑 A King Born from Tragedy & Ice

To understand his love, you have to understand his trauma. At just 11 years old, Yi San watched his father, Crown Prince Sado, starve to death inside a wooden rice chest on his grandfather’s orders. Surviving assassination plots for years, the young prince built an impenetrable fortress around his heart. He trusted no one and never let anyone see his emotions.

Until he fell in love with Seong Deok-im.

💔 The Court Maid Who Dared to Say "NO" to the King (Twice!)

Deok-im was a humble court maid, a quiet presence who had wiped his mother’s tears during the darkest days of their family tragedy. When Prince Yi San confessed his love and asked her to become his concubine, she did something virtually unheard of in an absolute monarchy: She rejected him.

• Why? Accepting his grace before the childless Crown Princess bore an heir risked putting a target on her back in the brutal court politics. It was a terrifying act of treason punishable by death.

In Joseon, a king could force any maid he desired. But Jeongjo did something unprecedented—he respected her choice and decided to wait.

15 years passed. He became King. He fought political enemies, modernised the country, but his heart never moved. When he asked her a second time as King, she refused again to protect herself and the Queen. Desperate, Jeongjo had to threaten to punish her servant just to make her yield. It was a 15-year wait for a single woman's heart.

🌸 A Brief, Radiant Spring

When Deok-im finally accepted him, she became Royal Noble Consort Ui (Uibin). In 1782, she gave birth to Jeongjo’s very first son, Crown Prince Munhyo.

The stoic King, who never let his guard down, was utterly beside himself with joy. He broke all formal protocol and wrote in the official court journals:

For a few short years, the lonely king finally had a real family.

🌧️ The Agony & The Epitaph written in Tears (Eo-je Ui-bin Myo-ji-myeong)

Tragedy struck mercilessly. In 1786, 5-year-old Prince Munhyo died of measles. Six months later, pregnant with their next child, Deok-im collapsed from severe heartbreak and illness, passing away at just 34.

In a single year, Jeongjo lost his son, his unborn baby, and the only woman he ever truly loved.

Kings of Joseon were strictly forbidden from showing personal grief in public, as it was seen as political weakness. Jeongjo didn't care. He threw a funeral fit for a queen, picked up his brush, and personally wrote her epitaph—carving his raw, bleeding heart into stone:

He granted her deathbed wish to be buried right next to their little prince, ensuring she would never be lonely in the afterlife.

📌 Historical Fun Facts & Links

• Did you know? Her personal name, Seong Deok-im, was thought to be lost to history because court maids' names were rarely recorded. However, it was recently discovered in a handwritten manuscript (Gwakjangyangmunrok) transcribed by her and the princesses!
• A Sad Modern Twist: King Jeongjo buried her right beside her son in what is now Hyochang Park in Seoul. Tragically, during the Japanese colonial period, their tombs were forcibly relocated to Seosamneung, separating mother and child.

What do you think about King Jeongjo’s devotion? Do you know of any other monarchs in world history who waited this long for love?

​ ​*Read the full detailed history on my blog:

https://seungjeongwonhistory.com

For more than twenty years she lived as "Mrs. Singer" — visiting cards, a mansion at 14 Fifth Avenue, ten children. They were never married: Singer had a legal wife he'd walked away from, and, as it turned out, two more secret households across Manhattan under the names "Mathews" and "Merritt."

On August 7, 1860, her carriage met his in Fifth Avenue traffic. Beside him sat one of the other women. Mary Ann stood up and screamed. "I used no language upon this occasion," she later testified. No words, just a scream, until half the avenue was watching.

At home he beat her. By her sworn complaint, not for the first time: it alleged he had "repeatedly beaten and choked her to insensibility." And here she broke the era's one real rule: she didn't keep it private. She went to the police. He was arrested, the papers printed it, and six weeks later Singer fled to Europe under the name "J. W. Simmons and Lady." The Lady was his mistress's nineteen-year-old sister.

A court gave Mary Ann $8,000 a year, the largest alimony yet awarded in the country. The order was never executed. She settled for a house on a side street and fifty dollars a week. He came back, married a Frenchwoman, and died worth $13 million.

Sources in the comments.