Not Extinct. Secret Star. Blair Mountain.

What do two animals presumed dead for 6,000 years, a star hiding a century-old secret, a cancer prevention breakthrough hiding in plain sight, and one of the largest armed uprisings in American history have in common? They were all hiding in plain sight the whole time. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about things that were hiding in the open.

We cover two marsupials, a long-fingered possum and a glider belonging to a genus entirely new to science, discovered alive in the rainforests of New Guinea despite being presumed extinct for millennia (the indigenous Maybrat and Tambrauw peoples who live there already knew they existed); Betelgeuse B, a companion star that astronomers suspected for decades but couldn't find because Betelgeuse itself, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, was drowning it out; a large-scale Canadian study finding that removing the fallopian tubes during routine pelvic surgery reduces the risk of the most lethal form of ovarian cancer by nearly 80%, a discovery that didn't require a new drug or a new test, just a better understanding of where the disease actually begins; and the August 1921 march of 10,000 armed coal miners 60 miles through West Virginia toward a private army on a ridgeline, the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War, and a pivotal moment in American labor history that almost no one has heard of.

Two animals science wrote off, a star with a secret, a cancer finding hiding in surgical schedules, and a battle that rewrote labor law, all in under six minutes.

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