3. Man-Eating Trees
This one ought to be obvious, really. However, in its defence, the stories of various man-eating trees have their origins in the late 19th century, a time when there was apparently a lot less scientific knowledge to go around. The original story of a man-eating tree discovered in Madagascar, was published in 1874 in the popular New York World publication. In the story, this mother of all carnivorous plants would eat live Human offerings fed to it by the bloodthirsty (and thankfully fictional) Mkodos tribe of cave-dwelling pygmies. ...And lets get one thing straight, these pygmies were not nice people, largely because after they had murdered an innocent woman, they apparently drank the blood and oozing viscera of the victim and then had an indescribably hideous orgy. Lovely. Of course, the entire report was a work of fiction sculpted from the fertile (and, frankly, somewhat perverse) imagination of Edward Spencer, one of the papers regular reporters. The hoax was only uncovered 14 years after the initial publication, by which time the story had done whatever the 19th century equivalent of going viral was and had been accepted as scientific fact by more than a few people. The idea of vicious, man-eating trees (and the nightmarish cannibal pygmies who love them) became so popular that numerous expeditions were even mounted to find the damn things throughout the 19th century. In fact, Chase Salmon Osborn, (who was actually the Governor of Michigan at one point) searched exhaustively for the creature and even wrote a book entitled Madagascar: Land of the Man-Eating Tree, in 1924. In 1932, another expedition was planned, but appears to have been quietly forgotten about before being launched (perhaps somebody clued them in?).and into the 20th century. Still, this popular story gave rise to other tales of man-eating trees around the world that persisted for many, many years. Today, these monster plants live on in our fictions, such as the (far less terrifying) kite-eating tree from Peanuts.