Fiction can often circulate as fact, with urban myths straying into the public consciousness to be accepted as true – but what about the other way around, when facts sound fake but aren’t?
It’s exactly these instances which have been the hot topic of discussion on Reddit, after user Savage_303 asked their fellows to share a “true fact that sounds incredibly fake”.
Here are nine of the most popular and fact-checked answers, to show that sometimes you really couldn’t make it up.
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The remarkable Dingo Fence was made in the 1880s to aid pest control and runs over 5,600 km (3,480 miles).
Seattle in the US’s North-West corner to Miami in its South-East corner is a 5,345 km (3,321 mile) drive according to Google maps.
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While the Aztec Empire began in 1430, Oxford’s famous university is thought to have been founded as far back as 1096.
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According to Chemistry: The Molecular Science by John W Moore and Conrad Stanitski, this fact is almost right, but not quite.
They say “one teaspoon of water contains about three times as many atoms as the Atlantic Ocean contains teaspoons of water”.
The largest ocean in the world is the Pacific which, along with the Indian, Southern and Arctic oceans, make a total body of water of over four times the size of the Atlantic, the second-largest.
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The number of orders in which 52 cards can be shuffled is worked out as 52 factorial, where you multiply 52 by 51 then 50 and so on until one.
That works out as 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 different permutations – a number so large it is actually highly unlikely you will shuffle the cards in a way that has been done before.
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The platypus and some other species such as carp lost their stomachs in their evolutionary past – instead, their gullet connects directly to their intestines.