No, people didn’t bid for the right to kill a man named Ian Usher. Rather, they bid for everything in his life. While at its heart this auction was simply “buy my junk,” the story behind why Ian Usher sold his junk is the stuff of eBay legend.

As BBC recapped, in 2008 Ian Usher, a British man living in Australia, separated from his wife. He soon realized everything in his world reminded him of his wife and decided he no longer wanted it. So he put his entire material life on eBay. Included were his luxurious, three-bedroom house, along with everything in it, plus his car, motorcycle, and jet ski. What’s more, the winning bidder gained Usher’s friends and job … kind of. Whoever won got a meet-and-greet with Usher’s buddies, along with a trial run at the sales assistant job he was quitting.

In the end Usher sold his “life” for about 400,000 Australian dollars (at the time, the U.S. dollar was roughly equal to the Aussie buck). He used that money to travel the world, accomplishing his “bucket list” of everything he wanted to do but never had. He then wrote a book about it, which Disney bought the movie rights to. He used the Disney money to buy an island, officially making the aftermath of his auction even crazier than the auction itself.

Guinea pigs are cute and all, but their small and defenseless nature makes survival as a pet fairly difficult. That’s why your fuzzy little friend needs a genuine suit of armor, something that actually exists and got its time in the eBay spotlight.

As the Huffington Post reported, in 2013 a handmade, guinea pig-sized suit of chainmail complete with helmet appeared on eBay and quickly caught people’s attention. But this wasn’t the work of some goofball who got bored one day. Rather, this was the work of a Virginia man named Sean, looking to raise money for a nonprofit called the Metropolitan Guinea Pig Rescue, whose workers do exactly what their name says they do. Sean set up the armor and auction to raise money for their cause, and pledged to donate 100 percent of the sales to the MGPR.

Initially, he looked to have hit pay dirt — the winning bid was a crazy $24,300. Unfortunately, whether it was a prankster or a person with genuine buyer’s remorse, the winner backed out of the auction. So Sean put the armor on auction again, this time fetching $1,150. That sounds like less, but the buyer actually paid, meaning the seller made $1,150 more than they did the first time. And based on the MGPR’s Facebook page, the buyer’s guinea pig not only wore the armor, but seemed to enjoy it. Now if only someone would get to work on a matching sword and shield.

We have yet to discover roughly 86 percent of the species on Earth, according to a major study published several years ago. So there’s tons of potential for new-to-us animals to pop up basically anywhere. In one case, an eBay auction unknowingly added to the rapidly growing sea urchin family.

As The Guardian reported, in 2006 an eBay seller put up a colorful sea urchin for auction, one that looked more like a piece of jewelry than a living thing. But when Dr. Simon Coppard from London’s Natural History Museum was alerted to the auction by curious urchin collectors, he realized he had never seen that kind before. In fact, nobody had, meaning this simple auction had accidentally unearthed one of the millions of undiscovered species roaming our planet.

Dr. Collins, who works for the Museum’s International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, officially named the urchin Coelopleurus exquisitus, due to its exquisite coloring. He then published his findings in the scientific journal Zootaxa, sending the urchin’s eBay value way up, from $8 to $138, according to the BBC. No word on whether anyone actually bought the little guy, but the sheer enormity of an online auction site playing a role in expanding our knowledge of the creatures around us trumps any amount of money somebody paid to store it on the back of a toilet.

Snakes operate almost entirely on instinct, meaning if you put most anything in front of them, they’ll likely try to eat it, even if it’s not food. In one case, a snake’s near-fatal mistake turned into boffo bucks that went toward saving other animals’ lives too.

As UPI reported, in January 2008 an Australian farmer laid out some golf balls in one of his hen’s nests. The idea was for the would-be mama to associate the balls with eggs, and thus begin laying some real ones. It didn’t work that way, but not because the hen figured out exactly what the farmer was up to. Rather, a very silly python named Augusta slithered into the henhouse and gobbled up the golf balls, thinking they were eggs.

Vets at the nearby Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary worked quickly to remove the balls from Augusta’s belly, since the snake couldn’t poop them out and would likely die if they stayed inside. Surgery was successful, and the sanctuary capitalized on the ensuing media attention by auctioning the balls on eBay. The winner not only got the balls (unwashed and still covered in slimy snake stomach stuff), but Augusta’s X-rays along with before-and-after pictures of the snake.

In the end, somebody paid 1,400 Aussie bucks (about 1,200 USD) for balls that had been in the most unusual of hazards. The sanctuary then put the money toward an animal hospital, meaning something great came out of a critter not following its nose to anything that smelled edible.