In May 1983, two peat workers at Lindow Moss in Cheshire spotted a football-sized lump on a machine and joked that it was a dinosaur egg. Once the peat was cleared, it proved to be a decomposing human head with one eye and some hair. Police first thought it belonged to a woman who had vanished in 1960, and her husband, already in prison, had boasted of burying her in their garden nearby. Radiocarbon dating then showed the skull was nearly 2,000 years old, dating from around 210 AD. The husband confessed to the 1960 murder, but he was convicted on the strength of his confession alone, since the skull could not be linked to his wife.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.