From Xinhuanet
#Tags: terracotta, xi'an, shaanxi, chinaA terracotta warrior with a green face will be shown in the newly revamped Shaanxi History Museum. The terracotta warrior is the only green-faced warrior out of over 1,500 terracotta warriors unearthed so far. The warrior was put in the showcase at the Shaanxi History Museum in Xi'an city of Shaanxi Province on Monday, Dec. 24, 2007.
Fossilized hadrosaur Dakota skin picture (Tyler Larson/National Geographic)
The partially mummified hadrosaur [wiki], dubbed Dakota, were found in 2000 by Tyler Lyson, then a 17-year-old boy, on his uncle's ranch in North Dakota.
The creature is fossilized, with the skin and bone turned to stone. But unlike most dinosaur fossils, tissues are preserved as well.
Scientists believed the Dakota hadrosaur should be the most complete dinosaur ever found, with intact skin where clear remains of scales were visible.
"This is not a skin impression. This is fossilized skin," paleontologist Phil Manning of the University of Manchester said. "When you run your hands over this dinosaur's skin, this is the closest you are going to get to touching a real dinosaur, ever." Source: Reuters
Ancient Roman Road Map: Tabula Peutingeriana (large version)
Tabula Peutingeriana, made in the Middle Ages, is the only surviving copy of a road map from the late Roman Empire. It dates from the late 12th or the early 13th century and was made in Southern Germany or Austria.
The nearly-7-metre-long parchment scroll shows the network of main Roman roads from Spain to India.
At first sight, it looks very unlike a modern map.
Both the landmass and the seas have been stretched and flattened. The Mediterranean has been reduced to a thin strip of water, more like a river than a sea.
Instead of being oriented from north to south, the map, which is only 34 centimetres wide, works from west to east.
At the centre of the Tabula Peutingeriana is Rome. The city, represented by a crowned figure on a throne, has numerous roads leading to and from the metropolis. Some, such as the Via Appia and the Via Aurelia, still exist today.
The Tabula Peutingeriana, one of the Austrian National Library's greatest treasures, is normally never shown to the public and has been on display for only one day to celebrate its inclusion in Unesco's Memory of the World Register on 26 November 2007. Source: BBC Tags:
Giant Sea Scorpion Picture Illusion by Simon Powell
The fossilised remains of a giant claw that once belonged to a sea scorpion roughly 2.5 metres long have been found in Germany.
Researchers say the monstrous creature is the largest arthropod ever known – over 30 centimetres bigger than the previous largest specimen of the same species.
Markus Poschmann with the giant sea scorpion fossil via
Simon Braddy at the University of Bristol, UK, Markus Poschmann in German Archeology Directorate, O. Erik Tetlie at Yale University, examined the 46-centimetre-long claw, found in a quarry near Prüm, western Germany, and believe it belonged to a sea scorpion species called Jaekelopterus rhenaniae that roamed the ocean floors between 460 and 255 million years ago.
Link to Biology Letters' article Link to the Press Release of University of Bristol Link to NewScientists report Tags:
King Tut's face picture, a screen snap from BBC's video report
Not until today November 4, 2007, the Egyptian government has unveiled King Tutankhamun's face. The mummy is currently put on public view by placing in a climate-controlled case inside his tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings.
"The golden boy has magic and mystery and therefore every person all over the world will see what Egypt is doing to preserve the golden boy, and all of them I am sure will come to see the golden boy," said Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass .
King Tutankhamun, or King Tut, is one of Egypt's most famous ancient rulers. He was possibly in his teens when he died. The boy king's tomb was discovered by British explorer Howard Carter in 1922. King Tut's 3000-year-old face was seen by only about 50 living people in the past 85 years. Source: BBC Tags:
It is the most beautiful mummy
I ever see. Ice Maiden, or Children of Llulailaco (la Doncella in Spanish) is a mummy found in in 1999 in an icy pit on Llullaillaco volcano. The 15-year-old girl/maiden were believed to be sacrificed more than 500 years ago in a ceremony marking the annual Andes corn harvest. Dressed in fine clothes and given corn alcohol to put her to sleep, the victim were then left to die at an elevation of 6,730 meters (22,080 feet). Currently, the well-preserved mummy of the Inca maiden is on display for the first time at a museum in Salta, Argentina. The serene gaze etched on her face from hundreds of years ago when she froze to death high in the Andes is still so charming. 
Source: Preserved mummy of 500-year-old Inca 'Ice Maiden' wows visitors @ Dailymail
Archaeologists in Egypt claimed to have found what they believe might be the oldest human footprint in history.
"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he said.
Archaeologists found the footprint, imprinted on mud and then hardened into rock, while exploring a prehistoric site in Siwa, a desert oasis.
Scientists are using carbon tests on plants found in the rock to determine its exact age, Hawass said.
Khaled Saad, the director of Prehistory Department at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of a human, found in Ethiopia in 1974.
Source: Press TV
When excavating in a Neolithic area called “Kierikkikangas” (4.000 and 5.000 years before Christ) in Finland, the 23-year-old Sarah Pickin, from UK's Derby University discovered an unprecedented 5000-year-old “Chewing Gum”with tooth imprints on it. The world's oldest chewing gum is believed to be what Neolithic people used as an antiseptic. Link
The perfectly mummified woolly mammoth, a female who died at the age of six months, was named "Lyuba" after the wife of reindeer breeder and hunter Yuri Khudi who found her in Russia's Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region.
Weighing 50 kg (110 lb), and measuring 85 centimeters high and 130 centimeters from trunk to tail, Lyuba who died at least 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, is roughly the same size as a large dog.
Lyuba will be shipped to School of Medicine, Jikei University in Japan to undergo three-dimensional computer mapping of her body. The mammoth will then return to St Petersburg for an autopsy before being put on display in Salekhard.
The discovery of the baby mammoth preserved in the Russian permafrost gives researchers their best chance yet to build a genetic map of a species extinct since the Ice Age.
A pair of sister beds was found in Zigui County, central China's Hubei Province, July 17. The beds with elegant patterns carved on was made in the reign of Emperor Xianfeng (1851-1862) of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) for a couple of twin girls. Link
The picture above shows the head and leg of a naturally made mummy found in 2004 display "salt-cured" skin and yellowish hair after spending centuries in the Iranian Chehrabad Salt Mine. The remains belong to one of five mummies found in the mine between 1993 and 2005.
Recently, a sixth natural mummy which was exposed after heavy rains pounded the salt mine has been discovered in the Hamzehlu region near Zanjan, a northwestern Iranian province.
Scientists believe the newly found man was a Roman Empire-era salt mine worker killed by falling rocks during an earthquake.
Iranian salt men were naturally mummified by the preserving properties of salt over the past 1,800 years. Link
Archeologists in central China's Henan Province unearthed fossils of the heaviest dinosaur in Asia in an area where local residents kept on digging up what they called "dragon's bones" to use as traditional Chinese medicine.
The calcium-rich 'Dragon bones' were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and made into a paste that was applied directly to fractures and other injuries.
Scientists studied the "dragon's bones" and identified them as fossils of dinosaurs that lived between 85 to 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era.
The dinosaur named Ruyang Yellow River Dinosaur measures 18 meters long and its sacrum - part of the vertebrae in the lower back - is as broad as 1.31 meters, making it broader than that of the dinosaur fossil unearthed in Gansu in 2006, which was then identified as Asia's heaviest dinosaur.
Links: Qingdaonews & Sina & Physorg
Chinese archaeologists had excavated a 2,500-year-old tomb containing 47 coffins made of a kind of rare wood called nanmu in Lijia village in Jing'an county, east China's Jiangxi Province. The tomb, which is 16 meters long, about 11.5 meters wide and 3 meters deep and believed to date back to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770 B.C.-221 B.C.), is the largest group of coffins ever discovered in a single one.
On the excavation site, scientists had found a relatively complete human skeleton, bodily tissue, as well as many bronze, gold and silk items, porcelain and jade.
The bodily tissue has been identified as the brain of the dead in the coffin. The tissue has shrunk to the size of a fist, but it has complete brain structure with two cerebral hemisphere, cerebel, and brainstem.
The graves of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty are the most important archaeology discovery of 2007 in China, so important that the State Administration of Cultural Heritage has ranked it as the nation's top ranking archaeological project.
After five years of research, Chinese archaeologists now confirmed that a 30-metre-high building is buried in the vast mausoleum of Emperor Qinshihuang (who was the Chinese first emperor more than 2000 years ago) near the former capital, Xian, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, China.
The building, buried in the 51-meter-high, pyramid-like earth above the tomb's main body underground, has four surrounding stair-like walls and each wall with nine steps of platforms, said Duan Qingbo, a researcher with Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology.
The whole building were buried under the earth, which made it difficult for researchers to get a complete picture of it, according to Duan.
Duan said he believed the building may have been built for the soul of the emperor to go out.
Duan said they began to carry out research on the mausoleum's internal structure in 2002 with remote sensing technology, for it has not been allowed to be excavated.
Scroll down for the photos about Emperor Qingshiwang's Mausoleum.
Sources: Xinhua & People's Daily
Scientists excavating in the Atapuerca Sierra site in the northern Spanish province of Burgos discovered the oldest European human fossil which turned out to be a million-year-old human tooth. The finding confirmed the mankind's presence in Europe started over more than 1 million years ago.
The fossil, which was the remains of an ancestor of Homo antecessor and gives a new perspective to human history, was found in the entry to Sima del Elefante, a pleistocene deposit that was the last to be systematically excavated in Atapuerca.
Source: Xinhua
The mummy which Egyptologists have identified as Queen Hatshepsut is displayed at the Egyptian museum in Cairo June 27, 2007. Based on the teeth and DNA clues, Egyptologists think they have identified with certainty the mummy of Hatshepsut, the most famous queen to rule ancient Egypt, found in a humble tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawasssaid said. Several Egyptologists have speculated over the years that one of the mummies was that of the queen, who ruled from between 1503 and 1482 BC -- at the height of ancient Egypt's power. Link
From the website:
Egyptologists think they have identified with certainty the mummy of Hatshepsut, the most famous queen to rule ancient Egypt, found in a humble tomb in the Valley of the Kings, an archaeologist said on Monday.
Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, will hold a news conference in Cairo on Wednesday. The Discovery Channel said he would announce what it called the most important find in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamun.
The archaeologist, who asked not to be named, said the candidate for identification as the mummy of Hatshepsut was one of two females found in 1903 in a small tomb believed to be that of Hatshepsut's wet-nurse, Sitre In.
Several Egyptologists have speculated over the years that one of the mummies was that of the queen, who ruled from between 1503 and 1482 BC - at the height of ancient Egypt's power.
"It's based on teeth and body parts ... It's an interesting piece of scientific deduction which might point to the truth," the archaeologist said.
Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas speculated many years ago that one of the mummies was Hatshepsut's because the positioning of the right arm over the woman's chest suggested royalty.
Local villagers on discovered the fossil of an ancient fish in southwestern China's Chongqing City with well preserved features, CRI quoted Xinhua as reported.
The fossil, measuring 250cm long and 40cm wide, was found on the face of a rock during a road building project in Zhonglun village, Shilong town of Chongqing's Banan District.
The discovery is significant for the study of prehistoric life in the area.
One more photo after skip:
Link
When digging in the Puruchuco cemetery in the suburbs of Lima of Peru, archaeologists uncovered a human skull of what they believe is the earliest known gunshot victim in the New World.
The Inca victim was thought to be killed by a musket ball from Spanish conquistadors' firearms in a battle in 1536, based on the fact that the skull bears a round gunshot hole with less than an inch in diameter and some minuscule iron particles only detectable using the powerful scanning microscope. Excerpts from NYT:
The National Geographic Society announced yesterday the discovery of the gunshot victim by the independent Peruvian archaeologists Guillermo Cock and Elena Goycochea, who have conducted research at the Puruchuco cemetery for years. A NOVA-National Geographic television program on the research is scheduled for next Tuesday.
No similar evidence of a death by gunshot this early has been found elsewhere in the Americas, Dr. Cock said. The musket shot appeared to have entered the back of the man’s skull, punching a piece of bone from outside to inside, and emerged through the face.
A combined team scientists from China and USA discovered what they called the first skull of earliest giant pandas which dated back to more than 2 million years ago. The new fossil panda skull, Ailuropoda microta (left in the picture) is revealed to be much smaller compared to today's giant pandas, Ailuropoda melanoleuca (right).
Unearthed from the Jinyin Cave in Guangxi, southern China, the fossil represents the first skull of the earliest giant pandas, Ailuropoda microta.
This so-called pygmy giant panda was half the size of its modern relatives and lived from about 2 million to 2.4 million years ago during the late Pliocene epoch in south China. There it roamed moist tropical forests alongside now-extinct creatures, such as the prehistoric elephant-like Stegodon, and the giant ape, Gigantopithecus, said study team member Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa.
“This shows that pandas are probably quite an ancient lineage that goes way back maybe 5 million years or more into the past,” Ciochon told LiveScience. “So pandas have been behaving like pandas for a very long time.”
The skull and associated teeth showed features uniquely suited for bamboo-eating, matching those found in modern giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca).
Analysis of the teeth revealed the pygmy panda sported broad, flat teeth ideal for grinding tough bamboo along with small, pointy cusps for crushing the plant food. These dental adaptations were nearly identical to, though less complex than, modern-panda teeth, the scientists said.
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