The Wild

Hundreds of people gathered at London Fields over the weekend of Oct. 17-18 to watch artist Jack Carden and actor Camtholomew the First, in armor and cloaks, charge at each other on rented Lime e-bikes with striped poles, The Standard reports. Videos show one rider knocked off his bike.

Carden had billed it as a "free public joust" and "performance art." Lime responded on Monday: "While we appreciate the medieval spirit, safety must always come first. Lime bikes are designed for getting around the city, not for jousting."

An exotic green bird, possibly a parrot, flew into Terminal 5 at Chicago O'Hare International Airport and perched on passengers' heads and luggage near the Air France check-in line, pecking anyone who tried to catch it, UPI reports. The visit was on Oct. 13, according to the worker who filmed it; the videos spread in the following week.

Paris Elbert, the O'Hare worker who filmed it, told CBS Chicago the bird "chose fight, not flight." A janitor eventually caught it in a shirt and took it to a veterinarian to be checked and scanned for a microchip.

A newly described plant from Peru's Andes has been named Salvia messii after Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi, because its pale blue and white flowers echo Argentina's jersey, Yahoo reports. The species was described in an Oct. 2 study in the journal Phytotaxa by Paúl Gonzáles, Rolando Uría and Jean Capcha-Ramos.

The mint-family shrub grows about five feet tall on rocky slopes at roughly 6,560 to 7,875 feet. It is known from six sites in the Lima and Ica regions, and the study assesses it as endangered, citing wildfires, road building and drought. Populations were first seen in 2009; fieldwork in 2023-2025 confirmed it is a separate species. Guinness World Records has recognized Messi as the soccer player with the most species named after him.

A caiman, a relative of alligators native to Central and South America, escaped in rural Oklahoma in August and was caught in a Cleveland County creek this week, WBAL reports, after residents saw it near homes. Body camera video from the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office shows deputies in waders grabbing it.

"That's all on bodycam, baby!" one deputy said as he held it up for a photo. The animal was returned to its owner.

Brady Rogers, 33, won a seat on the city council in Kelowna, British Columbia, in the Oct. 17 municipal election after a campaign of self-mocking signs such as "How hard could it be?", "Fine. I'll do it" and "Under 60!", Daily Hive and IBTimes UK report. IBTimes says he placed fourth of 37 candidates for eight seats, with more than 12,600 votes.

Rogers, a former robotic automation engineer who runs a downtown shop, told Daily Hive he had conflicted feelings about politics and thought that "genuine tension was a great place to start a campaign." He acknowledged the signs sought attention, saying he wanted it because he has meaningful things to say.

Two fossils from Wyoming's Sundance Formation belong to a new species of belemnite, an extinct squid relative, that lived about 160 million years ago, according to a University of Manchester release on ScienceDaily. The species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, is described in Papers in Palaeontology.

Belemnite fossils are so common in Wyoming that locals call them "squid butts," says coauthor Jessica Lippincott. Most are bullet-shaped, 1 to 2 cm across. This one's internal skeleton is about 10 cm long and 6 cm wide, the thickest known, and the researchers estimate the whole animal reached about 60 cm.

Paleontologist Bill Wahl said the specimen "stuck out like a sore thumb." CT scans linked it to a belemnite family scientists had believed died out millions of years earlier.

A young male southern ground hornbill at Artis Zoo in Amsterdam has received 3D-printed prostheses for both the upper and lower parts of his beak, after both broke, the New York Post and Vice report. The zoo said that as far as is known from the scientific literature, it is the first time a bird has received both.

Utrecht University designed the parts from a CT scan and the broken pieces of his original beak; the prostheses are screwed on and can be removed. "Our biggest concern was that he would become so upset that he would stop eating," the zoo said. Instead, it said, he used the beak the same day and picked up a mouse the next morning.

A farmer in Stevens County, Minnesota, found a circular metal object about 11 feet wide in his cornfield, Gizmodo reports, citing the county sheriff's office. It likely lay there for about six weeks and matches the upper stage of a Zhuque-2E rocket built by the Chinese company LandSpace, which launched Sept. 15 and made an uncontrolled reentry over the upper Midwest.

Authorities said the object poses no danger to the public. Separately, Gizmodo says a roughly 30-foot aluminum plate found on a palm oil plantation in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan this week appeared, according to Indonesia's research agency, to come from another Zhuque-2E launched Oct. 14.

A dusty copy of Herman Wouk's 1978 novel War and Remembrance, due back at the Greater Victoria Public Library's Oak Bay branch on Sept. 1, 1983, came through the return chute in October with no note, the Times Colonist reports. Borrower records are purged for privacy, so no one knows who had it.

"We're very happy that someone had the courage or conscience to bring it back," said Delia Filipescu, the library's coordinator of branch operations. At the old 20-cents-a-day rate the fine would have topped $3,100, but the library dropped fines in 2024 and, she said, recovery of books has gone up since. The library's record is 82 years, for a book borrowed in 1916 and returned in 1998.

Transnet Freight Rail ran a 696-wagon empty train on the Sishen-Saldanha iron ore line on Oct. 17 and 18, reaching the end of the run on Oct. 18 and claiming a world record for freight rail, The Citizen and News24 report. News24 puts its length at about 7.6 km over an 861 km route from the Port of Saldanha to the Northern Cape mines.

Locomotives spread along the train were linked by radio so they pulled and braked as one. According to Guinness World Records, as cited by News24, the previous record was a 7.35 km BHP ore train in Western Australia in 2001. Transnet itself ran a record 660-wagon, 7.2 km train in 1989.