More strange tales of toys.
SEA MONKEYS
What are they? The magical, mystical Sea Monkey’s scientific name is Artemia nyos. It’s a close relative of the tiny brine shrimp and is a true freak of nature. This shrimp is born with one eye—but by the time it reaches adulthood, it grows two more. Three eyes! It also breathes through its feet.
Just Add Water
But the Sea Monkey is most famous for its seeming ability to come back from the dead. In 1957 an amateur naturalist named Harold von Braunhut noticed something weird about the tiny brine shrimp: It creates a protective cyst (kind of like an egg) that helps it survive without water. In this stage, it uses no energy and appears dead. When water is reintroduced, it springs back to life.
Three years later, von Braunhut began marketing little packets of brine shrimp eggs as Instant Life. He sold them through ads on the backs of comic books. Readers—mostly kids—would buy a package, add water, and voilà, Instant Life!
In 1962 Instant Life was renamed Sea Monkeys. Von Braunhut claimed their long tails made them look like monkeys (they don’t). He also claimed they could perform tricks and be trained to race each other (they can’t). Still, there must be something appealing about them because people have been buying sea monkeys for more than 45 years.
PET ROCKS
One day in 1975, Gary Dahl was hanging out with his friends when the conversation turned to pets. Dahl didn’t have a dog or a cat. He didn’t have a bird or a fish either. According to him, real pets were too messy, too time-consuming, and too expensive. So, just for fun, he told his friends that he had a “pet rock.” He said, “It’s the perfect pet. Always behaves. Never makes a mess. And doesn’t require food or water.”
His friends loved the idea so much, Dahl was inspired. He spent the next two weeks writing a Pet Rock manual. Then he went to a building supply store and found the most uniform and inexpensive rock he could find—the Rosarita Beach stone from Baja, Mexico. (He paid a penny apiece.)
Dahl packaged his pet rocks with the manuals inside a cardboard box designed to look like a pet carrying case. Within six months, he had sold three tons of Rosarita Beach stone bundled in pet-carrying boxes for $3.95 each. More than five million pet rock owners “paper-trained” their rocks, taught them how to “roll over and play dead,” and eventually faced the inevitable “pet burial”—in the backyard. And Gary Dahl? He laughed all the way to the bank.
Fill 'er up: Apples, avocados, melons, radishes, and raisins can all give you gas.