Weird BUT true

Dig this: A steam shovel hidden in a Michigan lake for nearly a century has been dragged to the surface.

The historic steam-powered relic that last ran when Calvin Coolidge was president was excavated from Wixom Lake by determined local Mike Oberloier and a team of volunteers.

“My hopes and dreams are to make it dig again,” Oberloier told reporters.

A Connecticut art museum is hoping to break a record for the world’s largest abstract painting.

The 9-by-20-foot Jackson Pollock-like splatter painting created Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art Westport — by kids under the direction of local artist Trace Burroughs — awaits official recognition from Guinness World Records authenticators.

A 200-pound pet tortoise escaped in Alabama — but not for long.

The 60-year-old African spurred tortoise named Sparkplug fled its Sardis City pen for a nearby road, owner Ty Harris said. A motorist, thinking the tortoise was a wild animal, released him on a farm 20 miles away — until he read about the missing pet, retrieved and returned him.

A rare 4-foot-wide jellyfish has been discovered on a Florida beach.

Anatoli Smirnov of Naples spotted the giant sea creature while jogging Saturday along Vanderbilt Beach in Collier County.

Smirnov quipped to local media that he “almost got eaten by giant jellyfish.”

Mysterious bright lights were spotted in the sky over Hawaii over the weekend — and astronomers believe the light show came from a rocket booster launched in 2008.

The booster that launched a Venezuelan communications satellite “has been orbiting around the Earth, but its orbit has been decaying and eventually decayed enough to get slowed down by the atmosphere and re-entered in over the Pacific,” said a scientist at the W.M. Keck Observatory.