The Antidote: Five happy things in the news today, January 13

We live in unusual times. It all gets a bit much some days. So each weekday we’re bringing you a much-needed dose of positivity to remind you that there’s inspiration, kindness and quirkiness out there too.

9-year-old finds 15-million-year-old shark tooth

Molly Sampson, a 9-year-old budding palaeontologist living in the US state of Maryland, spent Christmas morning wading through the waters of a state park looking for fossils.

It was then that she made a rare discovery: a five-inch tooth that belonged to a megalodon shark that lived millions of years ago, The Washington Post reports.

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“Molly has been searching for a meg because she knows how big they can be, and also how rare they are,” her mother, Alicia Sampson, told The Washington Post.

Molly’s dad, Bruce, had been hunting teeth for decades and took his daughters on his adventures, but Molly’s find on Christmas morning was larger than any of her father’s collection.

Molly, Alicia said, has a collection of more than 400 teeth and had “been shark tooth hunting since she could walk on the beach”.

Man reunites lost baby goose with his family

A US man sees a baby goose following him on the street and decides he will stop at nothing to reunite him with his family.

According to Dodo, Ben Yurcisin spotted the baby goose, he named Jeffrey, near a waterfront in Hobken, New Jersey.

“We saw this little baby goose all by himself. We were trying to get him to trust us without touching him,” Yurcisin said in the video.

After setting out on a mission, Jeffrey was able to find his family.

Second-oldest Sumatran tiger in the world celebrates birthday with a big box of meat

The world’s second-oldest Sumatran tiger is celebrating her 23rd birthday in Hamilton – but she doesn’t act like it, Stuff reports.

Mencari turned 23 on Tuesday and is only six months younger than the oldest Sumatran tiger Chrissie at Honolulu Zoo.

She’s still agile and healthy, and recently managed to stalk and catch an unlucky rabbit that made its way into her enclosure, Hamilton Zoo director Baird Fleming said.

“You just have no idea,” Fleming said. “But we are aware that each birthday is even more special than the last.”

The Sumatran tiger life expectancy in the wild is approximately 12 to 14 years. However, in captivity, they can live into their late teens and rarely into their early 20s.

Baird said the secret was that her keepers – some whom had worked with Mencari for most of her life – tailored their care to her condition each day.

Comedian Jimmy Carr’s next jab at New Zealand

British-Irish comedian Jimmy Carr landed another jab against NZ, cracking a joke about the size of Whanganui, the most recent stop on his Terribly Funny comedy tour, Stuff reports.

After already teasing New Plymouth’s “sight (singular)” this week, the comic posted a new photo of a knitted doll version of himself next to the opera house where he will perform in Whanganui.

“I’m in Whanganui for two shows, which I think means the entire town’s population is coming to see me…twice”, Carr tweeted around midnight Thursday.

The population of Whanganui is 45,309 according to Stats NZ.

A famous ghost train station is reborn as a 5-star hotel

Hopes for the recovery of a “lost” historic railway that ran across the Pyrenees between Spain and France have been boosted by the planned reopening of the line’s grandiose station as a luxury hotel this month, according to the London Times.

The fortunes of Canfranc International station, once dubbed the Titanic of the Mountains and about 10 times the size of London’s St Pancras station, dwindled after the railway closed over 50 years ago after a train accident.

The station, set among mountains in the Aragon region on the Spanish side of the border and built in carved stone in the style of a late French château, fell into a ruinous state.

Since then the authorities on both sides of the border have lobbied for the reopening of what one senior French official called “perhaps the most beautiful European project”.

The proposal has been given new impetus by the transformation of Canfranc station into a 5-star hotel, which is due to open this month.