Flying Crocs and Stolen Meteorites

Posted by Amanda Kendle Aug 15, 2007

I'm a bit of a lover of odd news, and since my friends all know I'm also a fan of Eastern Europe and Russia, they tend to forward me a big range of interesting news stories. In the last week two really strange stories out of Russia have captured my imagination.

First up, there was the story of the stolen meteorite. In Krasnoyarsk, northern Siberia, they've been keeping a hundred-year-old, three-ton meteorite there for a couple of years. The story of the landing of the meteorite itself is fascinating - back in 1904, it flattened a 2000 square kilometer area of the Siberian forest. But the problem this week was that this massive rock has gone missing: police are looking out for it, but how can you lose a whole meteorite and where could anyone hide it?

Further west of Siberia towards Moscow, the town of Sarov (Nizhny Novgorod province) was the other part of Russia to make unusual headlines recently. It was here that a crocodile fell out of a twelfth-floor flat and fall to the pavement. Perhaps they'd like to make a Russian version of our "raining cats and dogs" phrase, and describe the weather as "raining crocodiles"? It turns out that this particular crocodile had been living in the flat (with its owner) for 15 years, and it was eventually returned there, with just one tooth damaged as a result of its adventure.