Minister ate biscuits meant for Queen’s corgis

The Queen has owned more than 30 corgis over the course of her reign — (Image credit: Getty)

A government minister who visited the Queen accidentally ate biscuits meant for the monarch’s corgis, reported the Daily Mail. Alan Johnson, the former Labour health secretary, admitted to mistakenly munching on the dog food following a meal at Windsor Castle in 2008. His “amusing gaffe” was revealed in Queen Of Our Times: The Life Of Elizabeth II, a new book by royal biographer Robert Hardman, which is published today.

World’s largest potato is not a potato

A New Zealand couple who believed they had dug up the world’s largest potato “have had their dreams turned to mash” after Guinness World Records wrote to them to say that scientific testing had found it wasn’t a potato but a tuber, reported The Guardian. “We can’t say we don’t believe you, because we gave them the DNA stuff,” said Colin Craig-Brown, who first hit the tuber with a hoe last August when gardening with his wife.

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Dodo may be brought back to life

The dodo could be brought back from extinction after an entire genome of the bird was sequenced for the first time, said The Daily Telegraph. Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that her group would soon publish the complete DNA of a specimen in the Natural History Museum of Copenhagen. The flightless 3ft-tall bird was wiped out in the 17th-century, just 100 years after it was first discovered on the island of Mauritius.