Who said mouse traps had to be new in order to be effective at what they were made to do?
Museum staff from the United Kingdom’s Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) were surprised when they discovered a 155-year-old mouse trap had successfully captured a mouse.
Dubbed the “Perpetual Mouse Trap” and patented in1861 by British company Colin Pullinger & Sons, the mouse trap is larger and more complex than any mouse trap you could pick up at the dollar store these days.
Interestingly, the 155-year-old mouse trap didn’t have any kind of bait inside of it – instead, the mouse must have just been unaware of what it was getting into when it accidentally set off the trap.
"There appears to be a dead mouse in this mousetrap which is not described as being there on the database,” the museum curator said in an email to other museum staff on the day of the findings.
It’s believed that the mouse got itself into the mousetrap and was unable to escape during some construction that was going on in the museum.
Right now, the museum appears to be trying to decide what to do with the remains – whether they’ll be disposing of the corpse, or having it taxidermied so that it’ll last years to come and can become a part of the mouse trap display.
Source: MERL