Men among prediluvian Beasts

“No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race…[]” Lyell 1863

The debate over the age of the earth generated an even more intriguing question: how old is humankind? Written records date back some thousands of years, but geological evidence and the fossil record show us that earth must be millions of years old. Some authors tried to reconcile this discrepancy by assuming a succession of worlds, each destroyed by a global catastrophe. Therefore the “age or reptiles” could be very ancient, the ice age mammals more recent and the final catastrophe, creating the human world, happened probably only some thousands of years ago. This succession of worlds seemed to be in accordance both with the geological record as with the biblical chronology.

Solar system’s birth record revised

Some 4.567 billion years ago, our solar system’s planets spawned from an expansive disc of gas and dust rotating around the sun. While similar processes are witnessed in younger solar systems throughout the Milky Way, the formative stages of our own solar system were believed to have taken twice as long to occur. 

Now, new research lead by the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, suggests otherwise. Indeed, our solar system is not quite as special as once believed.

Scott's Last Expedition exhibition opens next month

Canterbury Museum will open a major international touring exhibition telling the epic story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole next month.

Scott's Last Expedition, a partnership between the Natural History Museum, London, the Antarctic Heritage Trust and Canterbury Museum, brings together for the first time rare scientific specimens collected on the expedition and artefacts used by Scott and his team.

Huge deposit of Jurassic turtle remains found in China

Paleontologists from University of Tübingen and Berlin Natural History Mu-seum can make first statistical analysis of ancient species. 

"Bones upon bones, we couldn't believe our eyes," says Oliver Wings, paleontologist and guest researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. He was describing the spectacular find of some 1800 fossilized mesa chelonia turtles from the Jurassic era in China's northwest province of Xinjiang. Wings and the University of Tübingen's fossil turtle specialist, Dr. Walter Joyce, were working with Chinese paleontologists there in 2008. The results of their further work in 2009 and 2011 have just been published in the German journal "Naturwissenschaften." 

'Atlantis in the Sand': Unlocking the Mysteries of Petra

The ruins of the ancient city of Petra lay hidden until 1812, when a Swiss explorer stumbled upon them in modern-day Jordan. Two centuries later, a new exhibition in Basel brings together some 150 artifacts that shed light on how this mysterious culture of spice traders carved a luxurious oasis into the rocks of the desert.

In the stifling heat, the intruder squeezed his way through the Siq, a narrow gorge flanked by steep rock walls. The man walked through the dark gorge for 1.2 kilometers (0.75 miles). Suddenly, he laid eyes on a magnificent scene.

History of Hattuşa’s excavation on display

Yapı Kredi Culture Center displays a photography documenting a century of archaeological excavations in the Hattuşa, situated in the northern province of Çorum. The exhibition features photographs drawn from German Archaeological Institute

Istanbul’s Yapı Kredi Cultural Center has opened a new exhibition on Hattuşa, inviting viewers to dig through the history of the past 100 years of archaeological excavations at the ancient Hittite capital in northern Turkey.

'Fox hole' opens passage to Neolithic past, possibly Hades

A Field Museum curator is digging around a cave in Southern Greece that’s been compared to the mythical underworld, Hades.  That cave might help explain why people choose to migrate to big cities or high tail it to the suburbs.

And it has a surprising Chicago tie.

William Parkinson is the associate curator of Eurasian anthropology at the Field Museum. He is on a research team, called The Diros Project, made up of two Greek and two American archaeologists (both Chicago natives).

Return to Antikythera: Divers revisit wreck where ancient computer found

In 1900, Greek sponge divers stumbled across "a pile of dead, naked women" on the seabed near the tiny island of Antikythera. It turned out the figures were not corpses but bronze and marble statues, part of a cargo of stolen Greek treasure that was lost when the Roman ship carrying them sank two thousand years ago on the island's treacherous rocks.

It was the first marine wreck to be studied by archaeologists, and yielded the greatest haul of ancient treasure that had ever been found. Yet the salvage project – carried out in treacherous conditions with desperately crude equipment – was never completed. So this month, armed with the latest diving technology, scientists are going back.

New geologic map of Tule Springs published

Kathleen Springer, Senior Curator of Geological Sciences for the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, is the co-author of a new geologic map of Tule Springs area.

On the eve of a scientific celebration fifty years in the making, geologists working in the deserts north of Las Vegas have published the most detailed geological map of the region ever created. Funded though the Las Vegas Office of the Bureau of Land Management and released through the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, the map of the upper Las Vegas wash — including the famous Tule Springs paleontological site, where excavations half a century ago first established the geologic context of Ice Age fossils found there — is the culmination of more than a decade of careful fieldwork and laboratory analysis.