Interesting to note that Google Trends showed a spike for searches for “oubliettes” yesterday. I guess it’s not a word which the young audience encounter every day.

[There is an etymological footnote here (courtesy of Wikipedia): dungeon comes from the French donjon, referring to the tower of a castle. Somehow the English meaning of this changed to mean an underground cell, or the French oubliette.]

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Science question from this week’s episode: Did the spiny-backed ponysaurus have a cutie mark?

A question to which we may never know the answer as such information is not preserved in fossils. If ponies really are the only creatures to have cutie marks, then at what point in their evolution did they appear? What is the origin of ponykind anyway?

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