Most important discoveries were made by dedicated people of singular mind and purpose, tirelessly exhausting themselves and their resources to achieve a clearly defined goal. Then there are others made by people with vague agendas who, by luck or circumstance, trip over major finds like a fat kid at a roller rink. This article is about that second type.

8 A New Species

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If you shop on eBay, you know it as a mystery emporium of untold wonders. If you sell stuff there, you know it as the best place to snicker "suckers" under your breath while duping idiots. One of these two perspectives has to give, and usually it's the hopes and dreams of the guy who just bought what he thought was an ancient Egyptian artifact and that was in fact a piece of spearmint gum that had been stuck to the bottom of a middle school desk for the past five years.

BBC News

"It's either a bug trapped in amber or a scab covered with resin."

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But occasionally the tables are turned, and it's the purchaser using his advanced weirdness to screw over the seller. It turns out that all you need is a strange enough hobby and an advanced understanding of science. For instance, in 2008 an entomologist in London named Dr. Richard Harrington bought an amber sample from Lithuania for about $30 dollars. He was interested in seeing what was inside because he'd worked with a "team of people involved in monitoring and forecasting aphids," while the seller was presumably interested in buying lunch because some nerdy dipshit collects dirty, dried tree sap.

The Telegraph

"Jurassic Park was such a blessing to my industry."

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When the amber arrived, Harrington cracked it open to find an unknown species of aphid 40 to 50 million years old, at which point his pleated slacks erupted with a boner the size of Sir Richard Attenborough's cane in Jurassic Park. Grateful to the auction website for his scientific discovery, he tried to name the aphid Mindarus ebayi after eBay. Fortunately, because of his fellow scientists' outrage at the suggestion, he just named it Mindarus harringtoni after himself.