Ballpark
Puzzle #30 · 19 October 2026
The five questions from that day's Ballpark, each with its answer, the fact behind it and a link to the source. Rather play it first? It is in the archive.
1. How much did a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed Gus sell for at auction in July 2026, a record for any dinosaur?
50.1M US dollars
$50.1 million with fees, at Sotheby's in New York. It beat the $44.6 million paid in 2024 for a Stegosaurus nicknamed Apex. Source
2. How long was the longest noodle ever made, a Guinness World Records title set in China in 2017?
3,084 meters
3,084 m (about 1.9 miles), made in Nanyang, Henan, in October 2017. The single strand weighed 66.1 kg and used 40 kg of bread flour. Source
Image: MNXANL · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped
3. What was the population of Canada in its 2021 census?
37M people
36,991,981, up 5.2% on 2016. Nearly three in four of them lived in one of Canada's 41 large urban centres. Source
Image: Jchmrt · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped
4. How much will the James Webb Space Telescope cost NASA in total, including five years of operations?
9.7B US dollars
$9.7 billion over 24 years, $8.8 billion of it on development. Europe supplied the Ariane 5 launch. Source
Image: Chris Gunn · Public domain
5. What is the men's javelin throw world record?
98 meters
98.48 m by Jan Zelezny in 1996. Nobody has come closer than Johannes Vetter's 97.76 m in 2020. Source
Image: Martin Rulsch, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped