FF26 - One of these Things is Not Like the Other Mystery Cache

Welcome to the FF26 Primer Series, Cowpoke!

Now listen up, this here cache is NOT at the posted coordinates. You’re dealin’ with a sneaky, tricky, ppossibly evil puzzle from Pasha88, which means you'll need to wrangle that brain o’ yours and solve a riddle before you can ride out to the final hidey-hole.

This year, we’re rustlin’ up some caches nice and early—just like y’all asked—so you’ve got plenty of time to lasso those answers and find them hidden Easter Eggs before you mosey on over to Brant County. 

You’ll find this series scattered ‘cross Brantford and Brant County, offerin’ a spread of difficulty and terrain ratings for every kind of cacher, from greenhorns to seasoned trail hands. These caches stand alone—no particular order needed—so you can ride your own trail.

Some hides’ll be quick park-and-grabs, while others might have you saddlin’ up for a longer trek or some tool-totin’ adventures (think kayaks, boots, ladders, and flashlights). Be sure to check them descriptions and attributes before you gallop in—don’t go chasin’ trouble outside your comfort zone.

The cache itself a large peanut butter jar loaded with swag and a logbook. Be sure to bring your trusty writin’ iron (pen or pencil) to mark your name, then put it back just the way you found it. Stealth will be handy here as this can be a very busy spot at times.

Wishin' you good tidin's when searchin' here - you're gunna need it! 

Now for the Puzzle:

1. Tardigrades have four pairs of legs, and some species can suspend their metabolism almost completely through cryptobiosis.
2. In 1967, St. Paul, Alberta, opened what the town describes as the world’s first UFO landing pad, during Canada’s centennial year.
3. Only two craters on Deimos currently have official names: Swift and Voltaire, named for writers who imagined Martian moons before they were actually discovered.
4. Margarine was illegal in Canada beginning in 1886; the prohibition was temporarily lifted from 1917 to 1923 before being finally ended in 1948.
5. Opabinia, a roughly 508-million-year-old Burgess Shale animal so bizarre its reconstruction reportedly made a scientific audience laugh, had five eyes and a claw-like proboscis.
6. During early research on Anomalocaris, fossils belonging to the same animal were separately identified as a shrimp-like creature, a jellyfish and a sea cucumber before scientists realized the pieces belonged together.
7. A complete 450-million-year-old armoured worm fossil found in downtown Ottawa was, at the time it was announced, one of only eight complete plumulitid machaeridian specimens known anywhere in the world.
8. In 897, the corpse of Pope Formosus was exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and subjected to an ecclesiastical trial now known as the Cadaver Synod.
9. Audubon once pranked fellow naturalist Constantine Rafinesque by inventing nine fake “wild rats,” some of which Rafinesque later described in scientific publications as if they were real animals.
10. The average adult yellow bullhead catfish has more than 200,000 taste buds, including taste receptors distributed over its body and barbels.
11. Only five living species of monotremes remain, and they are the only surviving mammals that lay eggs.
12. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna was known scientifically from a single 1961 specimen before trail cameras photographed the species again more than 60 years later—on the final memory card checked by the expedition.
13. The scaly-foot snail that lives around deep-sea hydrothermal vents has a heart occupying about four percent of its body volume, enormous by animal standards.
14. Female spotted hyenas possess an elongated clitoris through which they urinate, mate and give birth; the anatomy contributed to centuries-old myths that hyenas were hermaphrodites or could change sex.
15. Octopuses have zero bones, yet can solve problems, manipulate objects and squeeze their soft bodies through remarkably small openings.
16. In Manitoba in 1928, beer parlours were forbidden from offering food, dancing, singing, musical instruments, gambling or games; even standing while drinking was prohibited.
17. During the Royal Ontario Museum’s first Burgess Shale expedition in 1975, the crew collected more than 8,000 fossils over eight weeks, despite being prohibited from excavating the famous Walcott Quarry itself.
18. Hallucigenia was once reconstructed both backwards and upside down: its defensive spines were mistaken for legs, its actual legs for tentacles, and its head for its tail.
19. A frozen wood frog can reach a state in which breathing stops and its heartbeat becomes undetectable—effectively zero detectable beats per minute—while much of its body water freezes.
20. Phobos orbits Mars so quickly that, from the Martian surface, it appears to rise in the west and set in the east, opposite the apparent daily motion of most celestial objects.
21. Scientists dissecting female snakes identified a reproductive organ consisting of two separate hemiclitores, overturning earlier assumptions that female snakes lacked a clitoris.
22. In Toronto, Sunday recreation laws were strict enough that from 1912 to 1961, tobogganing in High Park on Sundays was prohibited and police were reportedly posted on the hills to enforce the ban.
23. The Burgess Shale arthropod Leanchoilia superlata possessed four small eyes arranged as two pairs beneath its head shield, a feature difficult to see in normally preserved specimens.
24. Siphusauctum gregarium, a 507-million-year-old Burgess Shale animal shaped rather like a tulip on a stalk, is known from more than 1,100 specimens at one locality, yet scientists still cannot confidently place it in a modern animal phylum.
25. Under Manitoba’s 1928 liquor rules, a hotel wishing to serve both men and women could be required to maintain two separate beer parlours, with separate entrances and no internal communication between them.
26. Canada’s Currency Act says that a payment made using $2 coins is legal tender only up to $40, even if every coin itself is perfectly genuine Canadian currency.
27. Stickney, the huge crater on Mars’s moon Phobos, is approximately nine kilometres wide and takes up an enormous portion of the moon’s surface.
28. Asaph Hall discovered Deimos first in August 1877 and found Phobos six nights later, after his wife had encouraged him not to abandon the search.
29. In 1931, eight leaders of the Communist Party of Canada were convicted under Section 98 of the Criminal Code, legislation that was later repealed.
30. The ancient Burgess Shale animal Anomalocaris canadensis was among the largest known Cambrian animals, with some specimens approaching one metre long.
31. Petrolia, Ontario’s 2009 noise bylaw lists a $250 set fine for yelling, shouting, whistling or making other noise for the purpose of selling or advertising.
32. The first documented official Groom of the Stool dates to 1497; part of the job involved overseeing the king’s toilet arrangements and monitoring his bowel movements for discussion with royal physicians.
33. In 1928 Manitoba opened what its liquor authority describes as the province’s only women’s beer parlour at Winnipeg Beach—and shut it down within hours because it lacked the required licence.
34. British Columbia beer parlours historically segregated customers by sex, and some surviving buildings still retain architectural evidence of separate entrances once used for men and for “ladies and escorts.”
35. A roughly 450-million-year-old soft-bodied fossil discovered in Ontario had a head shield with feather-like spines and extraordinarily long, stilt-like limbs, despite having no mineralized hard parts at all.
36. Exactly one of these statements is false.
37. During later Burgess Shale work, Royal Ontario Museum crews discovered that decades-old newspapers originally used to pack fossils were still preserved inside a block of ice at Walcott’s old quarry.
38. A 305-million-year-old fossil harvestman revealed that some ancient relatives of modern daddy-longlegs possessed extra lateral eyes that living harvestmen no longer have.
39. The first UFO landing pad in St. Paul, Alberta, was formally opened on June 3, 1967, and the town was declared Canada’s “Centennial Capital” during the ceremony.
40. One Burgess Shale fossil animal, Mosura, was nicknamed the “sea-moth” and formally named after Mothra; it had three eyes, spiny grasping claws and a circular, tooth-lined mouth likened to a pencil sharpener.

Cinch up your saddle and get ready, partner— FF26 is fixin’ to be one wild geocachin’ roundup!

This cache was placed for GCB7799 – Fall Fest 2026 by a proud member of: