Archive for the ‘Archaeology’ Category
Gigantic Scorpion
A cast is being made of tracks left by a two-metre long ancient animal in north east Fife.
The tracks were made by a giant six-legged “sea scorpion” called Hibbertopterus as it crawled over damp sand about 330 million years ago.
It is the largest known walking trackway of a eurypterid or any invertebrate animal.
The tracks were discovered by Dr Martin Whyte from the University of Sheffield while he was out walking.
Scottish Natural Heritage, which is funding the project, described the find as unique and internationally important because the creature was gigantic.
The trackway, which is preserved in sandstone, consists of three rows of crescent shaped footprints on each side of a central groove.
A study of a 150 million year old dinosaur fossil has revealed it had multi-coloured feathers.
The research, published in the journal Science, compared the structures which determine colour in living bird feathers with those in the fossil.
“This would be a very striking animal if it was alive today,” said Yale University’s Professor Richard Prum, co-author of the report.
It is believed the colours would have helped the dinosaur attract a mate.
Anchiornis huxleyi is a four-winged dinosaur which lived in the late Jurassic Period in China. Researchers chose this particular fossil to work on because the feathers were so well preserved.
Source: BBC.
Catacombs at Tuna el-Gebel
The site of Tuna el-Gebel in Middle Egypt was known to the Greeks as Hermopolis. In the southern part of the site there is an animal necropolis. Mummified ibises and baboons, associated with the god Thoth, were buried here in their thousands in subterranean galleries, similar to the burials of the Apis bulls at Saqqara.
The Saqqara plateau served as a burial site to the ancient Egyptians for over three thousand years. It is home to pyramids, private tombs and temples, and is even the burial place of sacred animals. The most famous of the animals buried at Saqqara were the Apis bulls. For over a thousand years these bulls were laid to rest in the darkness of the Serapeum, a massive gallery of tunnels and niches carved into the rock below Saqqara.
Source and more info: Saving the Serapeum (via Dr Hawass).
This short horizontal passage in the Pyramid of Teti (Sixth Dynasty) at Saqqara leads to the king’s burial chamber.
Pyramid of Teti
The Pyramid Texts can be seen on the walls on either side of the passage, while stars can be seen on the ceiling. The king’s sarcophagus can be seen at the end of the room.
Pyramid of Teti
The Pyramid complex of Teti is located in the pyramid field at Saqqara, in Egypt. It was originally called Teti’s places are enduring.
The preservation above ground is very poor, and it now resembles a small hill. Below ground the chambers and corridors are very well preserved.
Source and more information: Dr Hawass
New evidence suggest some, if not all European Cave Paintings were made by females, and not males as previously thought.
For about as long as humans have created works of art, they’ve also left behind handprints. People began stenciling, painting, or chipping imprints of their hands onto rock walls at least 30,000 years ago.
But until recently, most scientists assumed these prehistoric handprints were male. But “even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there,” said Pennsylvania State University archaeologist Dean Snow.
By measuring and analyzing the Pech Merle hand stencils, Snow found that many were indeed female.
Source: National Geographic.
Artist's rendering of Megapiranha Paranensis
How did piranhas — the legendary freshwater fish with the razor bite — get their telltale teeth? Researchers from Argentina, the United States and Venezuela have uncovered the jawbone of a striking transitional fossil that sheds light on this question. Named Megapiranha paranensis, this previously unknown fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between flesh-eating piranhas and their plant-eating cousins.
Present-day piranhas have a single row of triangular teeth, like the blade on a saw, explained the researchers. But their closest relatives — a group of fishes commonly known as pacus — have two rows of square teeth, presumably for crushing fruits and seeds. “In modern piranhas the teeth are arranged in a single file,” said Wasila Dahdul, a visiting scientist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina. “But in the relatives of piranhas — which tend to be herbivorous fishes —the teeth are in two rows,” said Dahdul.
Megapiranha shows an intermediate pattern: it’s teeth are arranged in a zig-zag row. This suggests that the two rows in pacus were compressed to form a single row in piranhas. “It almost looks like the teeth are migrating from the second row into the first row,” said John Lundberg, curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a co-author of the study.
Fossilised teeth and upper jaw of Megapiranha paranensis shows intermediate tooth arrangement between single-rowed piranhas and their double-rowed relatives. The fossil measures about 3 inches in length.
If this is so, Megapiranha may be an intermediate step in the long process that produced the piranha’s distinctive bite. To find out where Megapiranha falls in the evolutionary tree for these fishes, Dahdul examined hundreds of specimens of modern piranhas and their relatives. “What’s cool about this group of fish is their teeth have really distinctive features. A single tooth can tell you a lot about what species it is and what other fishes they’re related to,” said Dahdul. Her phylogenetic analysis confirms their hunch — Megapiranha seems to fit between piranhas and pacus in the fish family tree.
The Megapiranha fossil was originally collected in a riverside cliff in northeastern Argentina in the early 1900s, but remained unstudied until paleontologist Alberto Cione of Argentina’s La Plata Museum rediscovered the startling specimen —an upper jaw with three unusually large and pointed teeth — in the 1980s in a museum drawer.
Cione’s find suggests that Megapiranha lived between 8-10 million years ago in a South American river system known as the Paraná. But you wouldn’t want to meet one today. If the jawbone of this fossil is any indication, Megapiranha was a big fish. By comparing the teeth and jaw to the same bones in present-day species, the researchers estimate that Megapiranha was up to 1 meter (3 feet) in length. That’s at least four times as long as modern piranhas. Although no one is sure what Megapiranha ate, it probably had a diverse diet, said Cione.
Other riddles remain, however. “Piranhas have six teeth, but Megapiranha had seven,” said Dahdul. “So what happened to the seventh tooth?”
“One of the teeth may have been lost,” said Lundberg. “Or two of the original seven may have fused together over evolutionary time. It’s an unanswered question. Maybe someday we’ll find out.”
An artificial underground cave, the largest in Israel, has been exposed in the Jordan Valley in the course of a survey carried out by the University of Haifa’s Department of Archaeology. Prof. Adam Zertal, who headed the excavating team, reckons that this cave was originally a large quarry during the Roman and Byzantine era and was one of its kind. Various engravings were uncovered in the cave, including cross markings, and it is assumed that this could have been an early monastery. “It is probably the site of “Galgala” from the historical Madaba Map,” Prof. Zertal says.
Mystery Cave found in Jordan
The enormous and striking cave covers an area of approximately 1 acre: it is some 100 meters long and about 40 meters wide. The cave is located 4 km north of Jericho. The cave, which is the largest excavated by man to be discovered in Israel, was exposed in the course of an archaeological survey that the University of Haifa has been carrying out since 1978.
As with other discoveries in the past, this exposure is shrouded in mystery. “When we arrived at the opening of the cave, two Bedouins approached and told us not to go in as the cave is bewitched and inhabited by wolves and hyenas,” Prof. Zertal relates. Upon entering, accompanied by his colleagues, he was surprised to find an impressive architectonic underground structure supported by 22 giant pillars. They discovered 31 cross markings on the pillars, an engraving resembling the zodiac symbol, Roman letters and an etching that looks like the Roman Legion’s pennant. The team also discovered recesses in the pillars, which would have been used for oil lamps, and holes to which animals that were hauling quarried stones out of the cave could have been tied.
The cave’s ceiling is some 3 meters high, but was originally probably about 4 meters high. According to Prof. Zertal, ceramics that were found and the engravings on the pillars date the cave to around 1-600 AD. “The cave’s primary use had been as a quarry, which functioned for about 400-500 years. But other findings definitely indicate that the place was also used for other purposes, such as a monastery and possibly as a hiding place,” Prof. Zertal explains.
The main question that arose upon discovering the cave was why a quarry was dug underground in the first place. “All of the quarries that we know are above ground. Digging down under the surface requires extreme efforts in hauling the heavy rocks up to the surface, and in this case the quarrying was immense. The question is, why?” For a possible answer to this mystery, Prof. Zertal points to the famous Madaba map. This is a Byzantine mosaic map that was found in Jordan and is the most ancient map of the Land of Israel. Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley are depicted with precision on the map, and a site called Galgala is depicted next to a Greek inscription that reads “Dodekaliton”, which translates as “Twelve Stones.”
This place is marked at a distance from Jericho that matches this cave’s distance from the city. According to the map, there is a church next to Dodekaliton; there are two ancient churches located nearby the newly discovered cave. According to Prof. Zertal, until now it has been hypothesized that the meaning of “Twelve Stones” related to the biblical verses that describe the twelve stones that the Children of Israel place in Gilgal. However, it could be that the reference is a description of the quarry that was dug where the Byzantines identified the Gilgal. “During the Roman era, it was customary to construct temples of stones that were brought from holy places, and which were therefore also more valuable stones. If our assumption is correct, then the Byzantine identification of the place as the biblical Gilgal afforded the site its necessary reverence and that is also why they would have dug an underground quarry there,” Prof. Zertal concludes. “But” he adds, “much more research is needed.”
Stylised Woolly Mammoth
Research which finally proves that bones found in Shropshire, England provide the most geologically recent evidence of woolly mammoths in North Western Europe publishes today in the Geological Journal. Analysis of both the bones and the surrounding environment suggests that some mammoths remained part of British wildlife long after they are conventionally believed to have become extinct.
The mammoth bones, consisting of one largely complete adult male and at least four juveniles, were first excavated in 1986, but the carbon dating which took place at the time has since been considered inaccurate. Technological advances during the past two decades now allow a more exact reading, which complements the geological data needed to place the bones into their environmental context. This included a study of the bones’ decay, analysis of fossilised insects which were also found on the site, and a geological analysis of the surrounding sediment.
The research was carried out by Professor Adrian Lister, based at the Natural History Museum in London, who has conducted numerous studies into ‘extinction lag’ where small pockets of a species have survived for thousands of years longer than conventionally thought.
Life size Mammoth
“Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in North Western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the ‘Last Glacial Maximum’” said Lister. “Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that, by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago.”
As the Shropshire bones are the latest record of mammoths in North Western Europe they not only prove that the species survived for much longer than traditionally believed it also provides strong evidence to settle the debate as to whether mammoth extinction was caused by climate change or human hunting.
“The new dates of the mammoths’ last appearance correlate very closely in time to climate changes when the open grassy habitat of the Ice Age was taken over by advancing forests, which provides a likely explanation for their disappearance,” said Lister. “There were humans around during the time of the Condover mammoths, but no evidence of significant mammoth hunting.”
Parrot Dinosaur
A new dinosaur with nut-cracking jaws found in the Gobi desert ate like a bird—a parrot, to be exact.
The 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) Cretaceous creature had a boxlike skull and beaklike jaw that resemble those of modern parrots, which have beaks that can crack open nuts, a new study found.
The 110-million-year-old skull—as well as “a huge pile” of 50 stomach stones found with the fossil—suggests that the beast was chewing hard, fibrous nuts and seeds, the researchers say. Stomach stones are rocks ingested by some animals to grind food in their digestive systems.
The skull, found in the Gobi desert in Mongolia in 2001, once had giant jaw muscles attached to broad sheets of extremely rigid cheekbone, giving the animal a powerful bite.
Like a parrot, the dinosaur was able to move its jaws both vertically and horizontally, allowing it to “shear” tough plants.
If confirmed, Psittacosaurus gobiensis (“parrot dinosaur of the Gobi”) would be the world’s first known nut-eating dinosaur.
Source: National Geographic.
Swedenborg Whale? Credit: Svevia
The skeleton of a whale that died around 10,000 years ago has been found in connection with the extension of the E6 motorway in Strömstad. The whale bones are now being examined by researchers at the University of Gothenburg who, among other things, want to ascertain whether the find is the mystical “Swedenborg whale”.
There are currently four species of right whale. What is particularly interesting is that the size and shape of the whale bones resemble those of a fifth species: the mystical “Swedenborg whale”, first described by the scientist Emmanuel Swedenborg in the 18th century.
“Bones from what is believed to be Swedenborg’s right whale have previously been found in western Sweden. However, determining the species of whale bones found in earth is complicated and there is no definitive conclusion on whether the whale actually existed, it could equally well be a myth,” says zoologist Thomas Dahlgren and his colleague Leif Jonsson.
Source: Science Daily.
