gracious/archeology

Why he became extinct? All the female walruses ran when they saw that thing!

A fossilized penis bone from an extinct walrus went for a whopping $8,000 at a Beverly Hills auction Sunday.

The 4 1/2-foot-long bone was sold to the company that runs the Ripley's Believe It or Not museums.

Discovered in Siberia, the fossilized penis bone is from a species of walrus that went extinct 12,000 years ago. The piece curves to a point and is covered with weathered skin and dry muscle tissue.

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T. rex was no chicken.

But scientists say soft tissue recovered from inside the leg bone of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex most closely resembles that of a modern hen.

This is the first time dinosaur protein has ever been sequenced. The feat, described in Friday's edition of the journal Science, means that researchers now have a new way to learn how ancient creatures are related to modern animals.

The discovery also bolsters the theory that birds descended from dinosaurs, and suggests that a T. rex drumstick might have tasted like chicken.

"What we knew, based on bone shape, was that dinosaurs are closely related to birds," said Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and lead author on one of the Science papers.

"The similarity to chicken is definitely what we would expect."

The T. rex femur was discovered at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana in 2003, buried deep beneath the surface of a sandstone outcrop. Paleontologists had to break the leg into pieces to get it into the helicopter that was ferrying finds away from the site.

In a remarkable feat, three amateur explorers have stumbled upon more than 100 fossilised eggs of dinosaurs in Madhya Pradesh. The eggs, belonging to the Cretaceous Era (approximately 144 to 65 million years ago), have been discovered in Kukshi-Bagh area of Dhar district, some 150 kms south-west of Indore.

The rare find is a significant step in the study of the pre-historic life in Narmada Valley.

"All the eggs were discovered from a single nesting site in a start to end exploration for 18 hours at the site in Kukshi-Bagh area, 40 kms from Manavar. As many as 6-8 eggs were found per nests," an excited Vishal Verma of the Mangal Panchayatan Parishad, a group of amateur explorers, told Hindustan Times from near the site.

Hands over her eyes and her face gripped with terror, the woman's fear of death is all too obvious.

The remarkable mummy was found in a hidden burial vault in the Amazon.

It is at least 600 years old and has survived thanks to the embalming skills of her tribe, the Chachapoyas or cloud warriors.

Eleven further mummies were recovered from the massive cave complex 82ft down.

The vault - which was also used for worship - was chanced upon three months ago by a farmer working at the edge of northern Peru's rainforest. He tipped off scientists who uncovered ceramics, textiles and wall paintings.

The Chachapoyas were a tall, fairhaired, light-skinned race that some researchers believe may have come from Europe.

Little is known about them except that they were one of the more advanced ancient civilisations in the area.

A new fossil discovery from China shows that a tiny squirrel-like creature glided through the air during the age of dinosaurs, more than 75 million years earlier than scientists had documented that ability in a mammal.

The creature might have even beaten birds into the air.

Like today's flying squirrels, it stretched a furry membrane between its limbs to provide an airfoil for gliding after it jumped from a tree. But it's not related to anything living today.
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Argentine fossil points to largest bird ever found

A curious teenager in Argentina has discovered the fossil skull of the biggest bird ever found -- a swift, flightless predator 10 feet tall that pursued its prey across the steppes of Patagonia 15 million years ago.

The skull, tapering to a cruel beak curved like a brush hook, belongs to a previously unknown offshoot of extinct birds known as phorusrhacids -- "terror birds."

Weighing perhaps 400 pounds, the bird most likely preyed on rodents the size of sheep that once grazed on the South American savanna.

Remains of the ancient Maya culture, mysteriously destroyed at the height of its reign in the ninth century, have been hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years. Now, NASA and university scientists are using space- and aircraft-based "remote-sensing" technology to uncover those ruins, using the chemical signature of the civilization's ancient building materials.

A short history of ancient Egypt: The Unification - The pyramid builders - The growth of the middle class, the decline of central power and the conquest of the Hyksos - Building an empire - The rule of the foreigners - The Hellenists