It's raining tadpoles
Residents of a Japanese town got a bit of a shock when tadpoles fell from the sky.
Hundreds of the little critters fell to their deaths.
Even stranger was, apart from the weird precipitation, the weather was described as 'fine' at the time - no rain, no gusty gales.
Incidents of raining animals - usually fish or frogs - have been recorded throughout history and are believed to be caused when strong winds traveling across water pick up some creatures for a ride.
Sometimes the animals are brought down to ground alive, sometimes frozen in ice, and sometimes, very wrongly, ripped apart.
In 1859 thousands of fishes rained down on Glamorgan, Wales, and locals were able to release many back into the water.
Frogs were dropped on Greece back in 1981. The interesting thing here was the frogs were from North Africa.
Other animals who have been scooped up into the air include small crocodiles, lizards and, in one terrifying incident, the remains of a cow.
Much more acceptable was the occurrence in 1940 when nearly 1,000 16th Century coins fell during a storm in Russia, while a group of English children on their way to school must have thought it was Easter and Christmas rolled into one when pennies started falling from the heavens over a Bristol village in 1957.
Weird Science Factoid: The Giant South African Earthworm can grow up to 22ft long and one inch thick. You don't want to see one of those dropped from the sky.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
