20 Stranger Things That People Took To The Internet To Identify

Heirlooms, secret stash, dangerous unexploded ordinances are just a few common questions that people post in r/whatisthisthing of Reddit. We can never know everything there is to exist and it’s really interesting to see how people of experts in their respective fields help each other in identifying items.

Here are 20 new unusual findings people needed to identify. Can you guess what they are before reading the answers?

My grandfather told us to NOT remove this when renovating.

It is an Aztec calendar.

Small 1″ plastic figurines found buried in backyard.

Hasbro produced a Monopoly mini-game in 2009 called Monopoly: Get Out Of Jail. It looks like these were the game pieces used.

What’s with the extended arms?

It looks like a plantation/planters chair. You’d put your sore swollen legs up on the arms after sitting on a horse all day, like a pregnant woman with her legs up in the same fashion. This is why the back is so sloped as well.

They perfectly fit in each other and seems like there’s some sort of liquid on them.

It’s a herb grinder (mostly for weed).

Found this blue disk in my sour cream chips and reads, “ferrous 25mm BST, cert number 213026B”.

It’s a testing chip. It goes through the metal detectors to ensure they’re working.

No idea what these are as I didn’t order them. Two bearing balls in each glass tube.

I believe those are rattles that you can put inside of fishing lures so they make noise to attract fish.

What’s this inside Walmart’s men restroom?

A diaper dispenser.

Is this a shooting star or something else? UK, 20/07/2020.

Looks like Comet Neowise.

Hiked the Swiss Alps and found this.

This is a “6cm Beleuchtungsgeschoss 87” (6cm illumination round 87), from a 6cm Minenwerfer (6cm Mortar). It’s also missing the distinctive red cap, which means it’s most likely empty.

Found it on the beach and it’s the distinct smell of seaweed.

Codium bursa is a green marine algae of medium size.

AA battery for scale. Metal cubes held together by chain, different shapes on each side.

They are dice for the card game correlian spike which is a poker style game from the Star Wars universe, notably Han Solo keeps these as his lucky charms throughout the Star Wars saga.

Odd yellow liquid filled balls found inside of cigarettes, definitely not menthols, cannot break them with your fingers. Found in the tobacco, not the filter.

Ion-exchange resin beads for filtering out bad stuff, like cyanide, in the smoke.

My grandmas boyfriend talked about finding these while out for walks in water streams. Guerrero, Mexico.

The round ones are spindle whorls or ‘malacates’, used for making thread. The other ones are fragments of figurines. Looks like they were molded. Two of them are anthropomorphic (they represent faces), the third (the one in the upper right corner) could be zoomorphic, although it may also just be an abstract decoration on a broken support of a vessel.

Given to me by my late grandpa when I was young. He was a Hungarian engineer at a coal mine up until the 2000s.

The top right one’s emblem is for the State Makeevka Scientific Research Institute for Safety in the Mining Industry (Russian Wikipedia link, sorry) and the red part on top says 50 years old. Presumably he got this when he worked there for 50 years? It was founded in 1927.

What kinds of fossils are these? Found in the 60s on a farm in Texas.

These are crinoids.

My great grandpa, an Iowa native and WW2 veteran left this behind. Solid metal, has no markings, and weighs a few ounces. Screwdriver for scale.

Those are used in a ceremony when crossing over the equator. So I think your grandfather is what you refer to as a shellback. That is someone who’s been over the equator.

Strange patterns formed from sugar sticking on my plain white plastic spoons.

I think that has something to do with static electricity. The pattern is partly determined by the flowing plastic when it was on its journey through the injection-moulding process.

1 through 300 metal tags found in an old (1920s) ice box. The copper wires are there just to hold the whole stack together.

They look like locker numbers.

Small terra-cotta turtle purchased at a garden center. What’s it meant to be used for?

Looks like a plant stand. You put 3 or 4 under a pot to allow for drainage.

I found this by the coast, in one of the boulders. If you shine a light inside this goes on for quite a bit. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

Those look like limpets. If this is below the high tide line I would bet they’re alive. Maybe a bore hole for blasting that remained intact, with the limpets colonizing it after it fell into the intertidal zone. Fun fact: Limpet teeth are made of iron, and are the strongest biological material on Earth!