Author: Mary JL

Sixty six million years ago, sea monsters really existed. They were mosasaurs, huge marine lizards that lived at the same time as the last dinosaurs. Growing up to 12 meters long, mosasaurs looked like a Komodo dragon with flippers and a shark-like tail. They were also wildly diverse, evolving dozens of species that filled different…

Trepanation, a procedure which involves drilling a hole into the patient’s skull, is one of the oldest known surgical procedures in human history. A 3,200-year-old skull was recently uncovered in Turkey’s eastern Van province. This find was made even more intriguing by the skull’s clearly man-made triangle-shaped hole, indicating that the deceased owner had undergone…

In 2018 another entry was added to the internet’s collection of giant skeleton photographs, this one said to show a discovery in a cave in Krabi, Thailand, of the remains of a giant who “appeared to have been battling a large horned serpent upon death”: Most images of this nature are either digital manipulations or…

A giant 70 million year old fossil of a fish that lived amongst dinosaurs has been discovered in Argentine Patagonia, a team of researchers said on Monday. Argentine paleontologists “found the remains of a predator fish that was more than six meters long,” the researchers said in a statement. The discovery was published in the…

Now more than 2,000 years old, Xin Zhui, also known as Lady Dai, is a mummified woman of China’s Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) who still has her own hair, is soft to the touch, and has ligaments that still bend, much like a living person. She is widely recognized as the best-preserved human mummy…

She is known as the ‘woman with crossed legs’: the remains of a Peruvian who died around 600 years ago. As with many mummies from that part of the world, her arms are crossed, too. Unusually, her hands are clasped. Thanks to research by the German Mummy Project, we now know what she was holding…

When the first humans reached The Great Plain, USA, remains unknown. There are several theories attempting to answer this historical question, but many scientists think this complex subject requires solid archaeological and scientific studies. Other researchers are more cautious arguing one should not jump to conclusions and further research is needed to determine the age…

The FBI has solved the mystery of the identity a 4,000-year-old mummy, after extracting DNA from its tooth. Since 1915, when the severed head of a mummy was discovered in the corner of a looted tomb in the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Deir el-Bersha, archaeologists have puzzled over its identity. Despite deciphering that the tomb…

June 18 (Reuters) – The coelacanth – a wondrous fish that was thought to have gone extinct along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago before unexpectedly being found alive and well in 1938 off South Africa’s east coast – is offering up even more surprises. Scientists said a new study of these large and…

The remains of 17 people, mainly children, found in 2004 during a construction project in Norwich, England, are probably those of medieval Jews massacred for their religion, according to a new study. Genetic analysis of the remains indicates the dead were all Ashkenazi Jews — that is, the descendants of Jews who had established communities…