Despite its name, the Bengal cat was created in the United States: breeder Jean Mill crossed a wild Asian leopard cat with a house cat in 1963 and founded the breed in California in the 1980s. 'Bengal' comes from the leopard cat's scientific name.
📍 Inland Australia
Wild budgies live across the dry interior of Australia, and every wild one is green and yellow. The blue, white and yellow pets are colour forms bred in captivity, where budgies have been raised since the 1850s.
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📍 Coastal mountains of southeast Brazil
The Christmas cactus is no desert plant: its wild Schlumbergera ancestors grow on trees and rocks in the misty coastal mountains of southeast Brazil, where they're called flor de maio, 'May flower', as they bloom in the southern autumn.
📍 Eastern Cape & KwaZulu-Natal coast, South Africa
Bird-of-paradise flowers grow wild along South Africa's eastern coast, where sunbirds perching on the blue petals get pollen dusted onto their feet. Joseph Banks named the plant after Queen Charlotte, Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
📍 Maritime Canada & Maine
Not Alpine at all: toboggan reached English in 1829 through Canadian French tabagane, from an Algonquian word for a sled, such as Mi'kmaq topaghan. These flat wooden sleds hauled loads across the snow.
📍 Buffalo, New York, USA
Named after Buffalo, New York, not the animal. The Anchor Bar says co-owner Teressa Bellissimo first tossed fried wings in hot sauce there in 1964, though local chef John Young said he was frying wings in Buffalo from 1961.
📍 Hawthorne, New Jersey, USA
Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 in a garage in Hawthorne, New Jersey, by engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes. They were trying to make textured wallpaper; when that flopped, they tried greenhouse insulation before it found its calling as packaging.