Mysterious stash of coins found hidden in cave

A cave in Britain may have been the perfect hiding place for a stash of coins … because 2,000 years passed before anyone found them. A climber sheltering from the rain happened upon four coins in Dovedale, Derbyshire, reports the Ashbourne News Telegraph, which led to a National Trust excavation of the site, called Reynard’s Cave.

And what exactly did they find? A trove of 26 Roman and Late Iron Age coins and 20 Late Iron Age gold and silver pieces that may have belonged to the Corieltavi Tribe; three of the Roman coins pre-date the 43 AD invasion of Britain, reports the BBC.

The discovery is a triple mystery: Roman coins have never been found in a cave, coins from these two civilizations have never been buried together, and the Corieltavi have long been thought to have occupied areas further east during the Late Iron Age.

The stash was possibly hidden in a cave for protection; Late Iron Age coins were largely symbols of power and status, rather than used to buy goods.

However, it's possible the coins' owner squirreled away his "best stuff," or was awaiting an increase in their value, speculates one archeologist on the dig. The project proved exciting for one participant—a military vet involved in the excavation as part of a rehabilitation program.

"I was working at the back of the cave, in the dark, and I was the first person to find a coin—a silver coin. It was so exciting,” she tells the Telegraph. The coins have been cleaned and will become permanent museum display. (In other ancient news, Rome’s Coliseum was once a condo of sorts.)

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Tomb dating back to 1100 B.C. found in Egypt

An Egyptian conservator cleans limestones at a newly-discovered tomb dating back to around 1100 B.C. at the Saqqara archaeological site, 19 miles south of Cairo, Egypt.AP

Archaeologists and journalists gather at a newly-discovered tomb dating back to around 1100 B.C. at the Saqqara archaeological site, 19 miles south of Cairo, Egypt.AP

An Egyptian archeology worker covers limestones at a newly-discovered tomb in Egypt.AP

Lead archaeology workers supervise as their colleagues dig a newly-discovered tomb in Egypt.AP

An Egyptian conservator works at a newly-discovered tomb in Egypt.AP

CAIRO –  Archeologists have found a tomb dating back to around 1100 B.C. south of Cairo, Egypt's Antiquities Ministry said Thursday.

Antiquities Minister Mohamed Ibrahim said that the tomb belongs to a guard of the army archives and royal messenger to foreign countries. Ibrahim said the Cairo University Faculty of Archaeology's discovery at Saqqara adds "a chapter to our knowledge about the history of Saqqara."

Ola el-Egeizy of Cairo University said the tomb contains "very nice inscriptions" of the funerary procession and the afterlife of the deceased.

The tomb was found near another one dating back to the same period belonging to the head of the army that was discovered in the previous excavation season. That tomb was larger but much of what remains is mud bricks as "most of its stone blocks were stolen and many of them are in museums all over the world," said el-Egeizy. Because of the blocks, archaeologists had long known that the tomb existed though it was not uncovered until recently.

Saqqara was the necropolis for the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis and site of the oldest known pyramid in Egypt.

Egypt's vital tourism industry has suffered in the wake of the 2011 uprising that toppled autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak.

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We've found Amazon River's true source, scientists say

In this Oct. 4, 2005 file photo, a boat tries to make its way through a section of the Amazon River suffering from lower water levels near Uricurituba in northern Brazil.AP Photo/A Critica, Euzivaldo Queiroz,File

It's an argument that's persisted for nearly four centuries: Where does the Amazon River begin? 

The question is complicated by the number of tributaries that feed into it, with at least five Peruvian rivers grabbing the title at some point since the mid-1600s.

Now, a group of researchers write in Area that the Apurimac River has wrongly been attributed as its source since 1971, and they have a replacement: southwestern Peru's Mantaro River.

If the designation sticks, another change would follow: The Amazon would grow, with another 47 to 57 miles being tacked on to its roughly 4,000-mile length.

But it's a somewhat muddied conclusion. First, the definition of "source" isn't entirely established, but the currently accepted explainer is "the most distant point up the longest tributary in the river's drainage basin," explains National Geographic.

Using topographic maps, satellite imagery, digital hydrographic datasets, and GPS tracking data to chart the Mantaro, the team determined it was roughly 10 percent longer than the Apurimac, handing it the title.

Except the Mantaro doesn't flow year-round; a dam constructed in 1974 causes it to run dry for nearly five months. Some geographers say that means it's not a contender; the study's authors say man-made or temporary changes shouldn't factor in.

A Smithsonian geographer concedes that the Mantaro could be considered "a new source of the Amazon"—but not "the source." (It's not the only Amazon discovery made in recent months.)

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Mammoth tusk may be largest found in Seattle area

SEATTLE –  The mammoth tusk found this week at a construction site appears to be the largest and most intact mammoth fossil ever uncovered in the Seattle area, experts say.

Scientists at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture say the fossil dates back at least 16,000 years when ice swept through the Seattle area.

Although it's possible the paleontologists who began digging out the fossil on Thursday will find more than just a tusk, experts doubt that will happen.

Mammoth elephants lived all over the United States and Europe in ancient times, but finding a tusk or any part of those animals is rare, said Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies and Montana State University.

"We don't find them every year or even every five years," said Horner, one of the nation's most famous paleontologists.

In most cases, artifacts found at construction sites are destroyed by equipment before anyone even notices them, Horner said.

The fate of this mammoth tusk was entirely up to the landowner, because Washington has no state laws governing finds of this type. Horner said that is true anywhere in the United States.

"Americans like their private land," he said, adding that Americans don't like to pass laws putting restrictions on owners of private land, even to protect history.

Allyson Brooks, the Washington state preservation officer, said the situation would be different if construction workers had found human remains or other items of archaeological value because Washington state has laws for those situations.

With paleontological finds, the landowner can do whatever he or she wants -- sell it, destroy it, donate it or ignore it, Brooks said.

This time, the landowner decided to donate the tusk to the Burke Museum, just as Horner hoped would happen.

It's a relatively rare find and should be preserved for educational reasons, so children will know mammoth elephants once lived in Seattle, he said.

"A lot of times, people think these things are worth a lot of money," Horner said. Their true value is educational, not what someone can sell a tusk for on eBay, he said.

As paleontologists and graduate students began carefully digging away the dirt around the tusk on Thursday afternoon, Julie Stein, executive director of the Burke Museum, said AMLI Residential has been wonderful to work with.

Scott Koppelman, senior vice president of AMLI Residential, said after contractors found the fossil buried about 25 to 30 feet below street level, the company turned quickly to the museum for assistance.

He said the company's first response when hearing of the find was the community benefit.

"The excavation will cause us some construction delay, but the scientific and educational benefits of this discovery clearly outweigh the costs and delay," Koppelman said. "This is an exciting discovery for our local Northwest history."

In 2004, Washington state halted construction on a section of a major bridge project, on which $58 million had already been spent, at the request of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe after remains of an ancient Indian village and burial ground were discovered.

Discoveries of animal remains from the Ice Age are less common than human remains in western Washington. Preservation of bone and tusks depends on the environmental conditions, such as the water table, the acidity of the soil and how deeply the object was buried, Brooks said.

"A lot of time, teeth preserve better than other bones," she said, likening tusks to teeth. She said teeth and tusks are what she and the scientists she works with consider "biological rock."

The last big find of an ancient animal of this sort in western Washington happened in 1977, when a mastodon tusk was found near Sequim, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula.

Mammoths and mastodons are related and probably roamed the Earth around the same time. Both were very large and hairy. Mammoths and modern-day elephants are members of the same biological family.

Scientists at the Burke believe this tusk came from a Columbian mammoth, which is the Washington state fossil. The tusk, which could be as large as 8 feet long, is expected to be the largest and most intact mammoth tusk ever found in the Seattle area.

Gov. Jay Inslee did not wish to comment on the tusk discovery, but a member of his team had something to say.

"This has turned every adult in Seattle back into a 10-year-old," said the governor's spokeswoman, Jaime Smith.

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Found: Rare beetle collected by Darwin 180 years ago

A close up of the colorful beetle species Darwinilus sedarisi.Natural History Museum (London)

A brightly colored beetlecollected by Charles Darwin more than 180 years ago has been identified as a new species after hiding in museum storage for decades.

The discovery of Darwinilus sedarisi whose scientific epithet honors both Charles Darwin and the writer David Sedaris was announced Wednesday (Feb. 12) to coincide with the 205th anniversary of Darwin's birthday.

'Finding a new species is always exciting, finding one collected by Darwin is truly amazing.'

- Entomologist Stylianos Chatzimanolis

The South American beetle specimen had been considered lost for decades in a collection at the Natural History of Museum in London. It only resurfaced a few years ago when a scientist studying tropical beetles from the New World stumbled upon the insect. [StarStruck: Species Named After Celebrities]

"I received on loan several insects from the Museum in London, and to my surprise I realized that one of them was collected by Darwin," Stylianos Chatzimanolis, an entomologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said in a statement. "Finding a new species is always exciting, finding one collected by Darwin is truly amazing."

This rediscovered male insect was among the specimens that Darwin an avid beetle collector picked up in 1832 at Baha Blanca in Argentina, a city about 400 miles (640 km) southwest of Buenos Aires, early into his five-year journey aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin's observations during that fateful trip led to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Only one other specimen of Darwinilus sedarisi has ever been collected in the wild another male found in Ro Cuarto, a city in Argentina's province of Crdoba, sometime before 1935. Chatzimanolis did not find any other members of the species after scouring the insect stockpiles at European and North American museums, but hopes that additional members might come to light either in the wild or museum collections.

"Much of the area between Baha Blanca and Ro Cuarto has been converted into agricultural fields, and it is questionable if that is a suitable habitat for the species," Chatzimanolis wrote in his description of the species. "One of course hopes that a newly described species is not already extinct."

The beetle has sawtoothed antennas anda hexagonal-shaped head that's metallic green in color. Darwinilus represents a new genus of rove beetles, the largest family of beetles that includes more than 57,000 known species.

As for the species name, sedarisi, Chatzimanolis decided to honor author and humorist David Sedaris, "as an appreciation for his fascination with the natural world."

"I spent many hours listening to Mr. Sedaris' audiobooks while preparing the specimens and the figures for this and other manuscripts," Chatzimanolis wrote. Among Sedaris' many titles is "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary" (Little, Brown and Company, 2010), a book of fables starring anthropomorphized animals.

A full description of Darwinilus sedarisi is in the journal ZooKeys.

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Major Native American site found in downtown Miami leaves city in quandary

MIAMI –  As more Native American archaeological sites are being uncovered around the nation, the findings are posing difficult questions for the cities where they are found.

In Miami, a major prehistoric Native American village has been discovered at a downtown site where developers plan to construct a movie theater, condos and hotel building.

The discovery has pitted developers against archaeologists and historic preservationists who want the find preserved in its entirety. Developers say the public is better served by removing a portion and putting it on display while continuing with construction.

Little is still known about Native American architecture but more sites are being found with advances in technology and a better understanding of the subtle markers that remain.

In a vacant lot between gleaming hotels in downtown Miami are a series of holes carved into the bedrock that form eight circles.

At first glance, the site seems like an eyesore. But it's here where archaeologists say they have uncovered a major prehistoric Native American village, one of the largest and earliest examples of urban planning ever uncovered in North America.

It's also where a movie theater, condos and 34-story hotel are expected to be built.

The discovery has pitted developers against archaeologists and historic preservationists. The dispute comes as an increasing number of Native American sites are being uncovered around the country with advances in technology and a greater understanding of the subtle markers left behind to look for. The discoveries pose difficult questions for cities such as Miami that must decide whether it is best to preserve the remains of an ancient society or, often times, destroy it in hopes of revitalizing a new one.

"Let's be honest with each other," said Eugene Stearns, the attorney representing MDM Development Group, which owns the property and is eager to move forward with construction. "Every great city is built on the shards of a former great city."

At its height, archaeologist Bob Carr estimated as many as 2,000 people lived in the Tequesta village, starting around 500 B.C. It likely extended a quarter mile along the Miami River and then wrapped around Biscayne Bay.

Much of the village consisted of thatched, hut-like buildings the Tequestas, one of South Florida's earliest tribes, built by digging holes with clam shells into the soft limestone, and then inserting pine logs to hold floors, walls and roofs.

Because of the materials used -- straw, wood -- the only remnants of the buildings are the postholes, today still forming 18 to 40-foot circles in the blackened bedrock.

MDM has proposed carving out a section of the limestone containing the circle formations and placing it on display in a public plaza.

Preservations, however, say removing a piece of architecture isn't like moving a painting from one museum to another.

"The idea that you would carve out a chunk and move it to some other place and put it into exhibition sounds strange to me and sad," said Mark Jarzombek, associate dean of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology's School of Architecture and Planning. "These places are very site specific. There's a reason why they made this village or town there which has to do with orientation, landscape, access to rivers."

MDM has spent $3 million conducting an archaeological review and is now anxious to continue construction. Stearn said all of the planned commercial space has been leased and half of the residential units have been sold.

"There are enormous financial obligations and commitments that have to be met," he said. "And they need to go forward."

Miami isn't the only city grappling with how best to preserve an ancient site while allowing development to advance. Nationwide, Native American sites are being discovered at a quickening pace.

"Archaeology is really going through a bit of a golden era now with uncovering these sights," Jarzombek said.

In California, where as many as 1 million Native Americans may have once lived, Dave Singleton with the Native American Heritage Commission said he receives reports from county coroner offices regarding Native American remains about once every 10 days.

Construction crews have unearthed burial grounds, artifacts and villages in rural, desert areas to downtown Los Angeles. Any time remains are found in California, construction is halted while an archaeological review is done and a descendant identified.

With a few exceptions, however, construction has eventually resumed.

Hundreds of tools and other artifacts, along with possible burial sites, were found at a planned 250-megwatt solar energy project east of the Coachella Valley in 2011, slated to be one of the largest in the nation. Tribal leaders said federal officials had deemed the findings "unprecedented."

Construction was temporarily halted but later allowed to continue. A mitigation plan that included an extensive study and public outreach was developed.

"We, of course, like the other tribes of the area, were shocked and saddened," Jay Cravath, cultural director of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe said. "Mitigation will not change the damage that was done."

Singleton said the Native American groups are not opposed to development, but they object to the generation of plants and transmission lines that go through burial grounds and destroy sacred sites.

Miami-Dade County archaeologist Jeff Ransom, however, plans to recommend full preservation at a city meeting Friday and, if the committee members agree, MDM could be forced to redesign the site.

Ransom would like to see the huts and village reconstructed, and he believes the site could be turned into a viable heritage tourism destination.

Miami is a city vying to become an international destination not just for its nightlife and beaches but also its art and culture. Revitalizing the city's downtown with a new museum district, shops and restaurants has been seen as a central part of that.

There are some Native American within urban areas that have been successfully preserved. A Hohokam mound next to a hospital near Phoenix was purchased by the city of Mesa in 1988 and stabilized by a team of archaeologists. It is now a six-acre cultural park.

"What more human and intelligent and culturally rich way to revitalize a place than to recognize its antiquity and to celebrate its earlier native occupants?" said Peter Nabokov, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Developers in Miami contend it would be difficult to preserve the site and promote it as an area for tourists to visit because it is on soft limestone rock, has no drainage and is corroding from rain and pollution. They also note the site is prime real estate that would cost the city about $100 million to purchase.

Stearns, MDM's attorney, said the archaeological value of preserving the postholes in their current state ultimately doesn't outweigh what could be gained in terms of education and development by carving them out and building on top.

"Archaeologists see them differently," Stearns said. "They can wax eloquently about the significance of the postholes. But I dare say that's not a view shared by most others."

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Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists who last summer triumphantly announced the discovery of a new particle but held back from saying what it was, declared on Thursday there was now little doubt it was the long-sought Higgs boson.

Latest analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, where the boson was spotted as a bump on a graph early in 2012, "strongly indicates" it is the Higgs, said CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

Physicists believe the boson and its linked energy field were vital in the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago by bringing flying particles together to make stars, planets and eventually humans - giving mass to matter, in the scientific jargon.

The particle and the field, named for British physicist Peter Higgs who predicted their existence 50 years ago, are also the last major missing elements in what scientists call the Standard Model of how the cosmos works at the very basic level.

But the CERN statement stopped short of claiming a discovery - which would clear the way to Nobel prizes for scientists linked to the project - and floated the idea that this might be an exotic "super-Higgs" offering a key to new worlds of physics.

"It remains an open question whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model ... or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model," said CERN, a large complex on the edge of Geneva.

"Finding the answer to this question will take time."

Although some CERN physicists privately expressed irritation at the continuing refusal to - as one said - "call a Higgs a Higgs", others argued that this could only come when the evidence was all totally irrefutable.

If it is not what one CERN-watching blogger has dubbed a "common or garden Higgs" but something more complex, vistas into worlds of supersymmetry, string theory, multiple dimensions and even parallel universes could begin to unfold.

WHAT KIND OF HIGGS?

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, spokesman for CMS, one of the two independent CERN LHC monitoring teams.

"There is every possibility that it is a Higgs boson from a more complex model, such as supersymmetry (a theory which says every elementary particle has a so-far unseen heavier partner)," another CMS researcher, John Conway, told Reuters.

In recent months, rumors have flown that the particle might be some sort of super-Higgs - "the link between our world and most of the matter in the universe" as predicted by U.S. physicist Sean Carroll in a new book.

But David Charlton, who speaks for the ATLAS team, said the latest analysis, presented on Thursday to a conference in the Italian Alps, pointed to the particle fitting the Standard Model - which would exclude exotica.

However, CERN scientists agree nothing startlingly new could be expected until much later in the decade, well after the LHC - shut down last month for two years to allow its power and reach to be doubled - resumes operations in early 2015.

In the giant subterranean collider, which started up in March 2010, particles are smashed together hundreds of times a second at near the speed of light to simulate the Big Bang. The debris is then tracked on huge detectors.

But the new particle turns up only once in every trillion collisions - leaving the thousands of physicists and analysts at CERN, and in laboratories around the world, the massive task of deciding what data to discard.

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Pravin Char)

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Hundreds of Dinosaur Egg Fossils Found

Researchers in northeastern Spain say they've uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never been found before in the region. The eggs likely were left behind by sauropods millions of years ago.

Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Nargó in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.

"Eggshells, eggs and nests were found in abundance and they all belong to dinosaurs, sauropods in particular," the study's leader, Albert García Sellés from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Palaeontology Institute, told Spanish news agency SINC this week.

"Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region: Megaloolithus siruguei," Sellés added. His team found evidence of at least four other species: Cairanoolithus roussetensis, Megaloolithus aureliensis, Megaloolithus siruguei and Megaloolithus baghensis. Megaloolithus eggs are thought to be associated with sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs that were among some of the largest to roam the planet.

The Coll de Nargó area is considered one of the most important dinosaur nesting areas in Europe, the researchers said, adding that their study shows it was used by several dinosaurs from the Late Campanian age (around 71 million years ago) to the Late Maastrichtian age (around 67 million years ago).

"We had never found so many nests in the one area before. In addition, the presence of various oospecies (eggs species) at the same level suggests that different types of dinosaurs shared the same nesting area," Sellés said, adding that the dinosaur eggs could help scientists determine the date of future findings at the site.

"It has come to light that the different types of eggs are located at very specific time intervals," Sellés explained to SINC. "This allows us to create biochronological scales with a precise dating capacity. In short, thanks to the collection of oospecies found in Coll de Nargó we have been able to determine the age of the site at between 71 and 67 million years."

The findings are published in the March issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

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Russian scientists may have found new life under Antarctic ice

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian scientists believe they have discovered new life forms sealed off for millions of years in a subglacial lake deep under the Antarctic ice, the RIA news agency reported on Thursday.

After more than a decade of stop-and-go drilling, Russia pierced through Antarctica's frozen crust last year and took back samples of water from a vast lake that has lain untouched for at least 14 million years.

Scientists say the icy darkness of Lake Vostok, under some 3,700 metres of ice, may provide a glimpse of the planet before the Ice Age and clues to life on other planets.

"After excluding all known contaminants, bacterial DNA was found that does not match any known species in world databases," Sergei Bulat of the St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute told RIA.

"If it (the bacteria) had been found on Mars, then without a doubt we would have said there is life on Mars - but this is DNA from Earth," he said. "We are calling this life form unidentified or unclassified."

Scientists from the United States and Britain are close on Moscow's heels to probe what life may exist in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

This year, a U.S. expedition said they had seen living cells under a microscope in field samples taken from the shallower subglacial Lake Whillans, but more study is needed to determine what kinds of bacteria they are and how they live.

A British effort to reach a third body, Lake Ellsworth, was called off in December because of problems drilling.

What life is found in the icy depths may provide the best answer yet to whether life can exist in the extreme conditions on Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa.

The Russian discovery came from analysing water that froze onto the end of the drill bit used to bore through to Vostok - the largest of a network of hundreds of lakes under the ice cap that acts like a blanket trapping the Earth's geothermal heat.

Bulat and other members of Russia's Antarctic mission could not be reached for comment to Reuters on Thursday.

But Bulat told RIA that scientists are waiting for more samples from the lake to confirm their discovery.

Because of the technology used to keep from polluting the pristine lake, Russia will only obtain clean water samples - uncontaminated by drilling fluid - for analysis later this year.

To answer concerns kerosene and anti-freeze from the borehole would seep into the lake, Russian engineers withdrew the drill to allow the water to percolate up into the borehole and freeze there, only returning this year to collect it.

But Bulat said the unknown microbes were found after separating out species of bacteria that are known to exist in the drilling fluid.

"When we tried to identify the DNA, it did not coincide with any of known species. It's degree of similarity was less than 86 percent," Bulat told RIA.

"That is practically zero when working with DNA. A level of 90 percent tells us the organism is unknown."

Frozen samples from deeper in the borehole collected during this year's Antarctic summer season in February are now being carried back by boat and are due in St Petersburg in May.

"If we again identify the same group of organism in that pure sample of water, then we can confidently say we have found new life on Earth," Bulat said.

(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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Fossil of Long-Extinct Whale Found on Seafloor

Researchers diving off the coast of Georgia may have found the remains of an Atlantic gray whale, a relic of a population that was hunted to extinction by the 18th century.

But this particular specimen died long before whalers became a threat. Carbon dating showed that the fossil, a left jawbone, is about 36,000 years old.

The big bone was first discovered along with two badly eroded vertebrae near Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off southeast Georgia in 2008. It took the researchers two years to pull out all of the pieces of the fossil, which was embedded in layers of shell and sand 70 feet (21 meters) below the surface. The jawbone was recovered in sections and measures 5 feet (1.5 m) in length.

The researchers say the bone is clearly from a baleen whale — or whales that use baleen plates in their mouths to filter meals of tiny organisms out of seawater — and looks very similar to that of the gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus. This species is only locally extinct. Gray whales can be found today in quite strong numbers, but only in the Pacific Ocean, and even these had once teetered on the brink of extinction during eras when the whaling industry reigned.

Scientists previously believed that the Atlantic gray whale had been a distinct species. But recent research has shown these vanished whales and the living ones in the Pacific are actually one in the same.

"The California grays looked exactly like the bones that were dug up in Scandinavia back in the 19th century," Ervan Garrison, a geoarchaeology professor at the University of Georgia, said in a statement, describing it as "one of the first instances where a living species was named based on the fossil evidence."

The new specimen's age of approximately 36,570 years old makes it one of the oldest fossil finds in the western Atlantic basin, the researchers say. And if the find indeed represents a Pleistocene-age gray whale, its oldest counterpart is a specimen found on the southern North Sea dating to 42,800 years ago.

The research was detailed online last month in the journal Paleontologica Electronica.

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World's Oldest Meteorite Crater Found

A study of Greenland's rocks may have turned up something unexpected: the oldest and largest meteorite crater ever found on Earth.

Researchers think the crater was formed 3 billion years ago, making it the oldest ever found, said Danish researcher Adam Garde. The impact crater currently measures about 62 miles (100 kilometers) from one side to another. But before it eroded, it was likely more than 310 miles (500 km) wide, which would make it the biggest on Earth, Garde told OurAmazingPlanet.

The team has calculated it was caused by a meteorite 19 miles (30 km) wide, which, if it hit Earth today, would wipe out all higher life.

Mystery feature

In the 3 billion years since impact, the land has been eroded down to about 16 miles (25 km) below the original surface. But the effects of the intense shock wave and heat penetrated deep into the Earth, and remain visible today, said Garde, a researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. [Meteor Mania: How Well Do You Know 'Shooting Stars'?]

Garde had been conducting research on Greenland's geology and noticed several strange features that didn't make sense. One day in September 2009, he came up with the extreme explanation of an impact from a meteorite. His team collected samples over the years and published the results in the July issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. He's now "100 percent positive" it's a crater, for several reasons, he said.

For one, he found widespread crushed rocks in a circular shape that seemed to be caused by the shock waves of a massive impact. Second, there are deposits of a melted mineral called K-feldspar (or potassium-feldspar) that could have been liquefied only at extremely high heat, like that caused by an meteorite's crash-landing. There's also widespread evidence of weathering by hot water, which he thinks was caused by the ocean rushing into the crater after it struck the area. The area may have been covered by a shallow ocean at the time, but even if it wasn't, it doesn't matter, Garde said. "The crater from a meteorite that big would have caused the sea to rush in," he said.

Mining for minerals

John Spray, a meteorite expert at the University of New Brunswick, who wasn't involved in the research, said he thinks it's probably a meteor crater, but points out that it hasn't been proved, and may not be for some time. "It's very interesting and it's good science," he said. "But we don't really know how to recognize very old impact craters, because they are typically so highly modified."

That's because Earth is alive and constantly changing due processes such as erosion, precipitation and plate tectonics. At one time Earth likely had as many craters as the moon, which is essentially geologically dead. But these have mostly been wiped away, destroyed by erosion and the like.

Only around 180 impact craters have ever been discovered on Earth, and nearly one-third of them contain significant minerals deposits such as precious metals. The Canadian mining company, North American Nickel, is exploring the region where the potentially newfound crater is for nickel and other mineral deposits, company geologist John Roozendaal said. They are conducting airborne surveys and will soon do more mapping, small-scale sampling and drilling to see if they can find an area that could be economical to mine.

These impacts are of interest to mining companies not because of the large meteorites themselves — they typically vaporize — but because of the effect upon the Earth's surface. The impact heats rocks so much that metals can melt and then collect toward the bottom of the crater. Craters can also be important sources of oil and gas; the crushed, permeable rocks can act like a sponge, absorbing hydrocarbons.

Before this discovery, the oldest crater was thought to be the Vredefort crater in South Africa, estimated to be 2 billion years old. At 186 miles (300 km) wide, it's also the largest crater that remains visible. Scientists expect that there were many more craters formed around 3-4 billion years ago when Earth lacked a protective atmosphere.

Garde said the most interesting thing about the experience was finding an alternate explanation for something outside of his training. "I had a problem I couldn't solve in a region I knew very well," he said. "A meteor impact was the idea that made everything fall into place — It's not something I was looking for."

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Copyright 2012 OurAmazingPlanet, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Moon Dust Missing for 40 Years Is Found at Auction House (Time.com)

It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and a lot of people wanted a piece of it. Now, some 40 years after moon dust brought back from the Apollo 11 mission went missing, it was recovered at a St. Louis auction house and returned to the Johnson Space Center in Houston this week.

"It's a speck - the size of a fingertip," said David Kols of Regency-Superior auction house, where the dust had been placed for sale. "But it's lunar material, and since we're not going back to the moon in my lifetime or yours, that makes it worth a lot to some people." (See TIME's special report on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)

The U.S. attorney's office in St. Louis, which announced the recovery of the moon dust on June 23, said that investigators with NASA believed the dust had come from the film cartridge of a camera used by astronauts on humanity's first trip to the moon in 1969. The dust was lifted from the cartridge using a 1-in. (2.5 cm) piece of clear tape. Somehow, it reached the black market and was sold in 2001, NASA investigators believe, to a German collector who cut up the tape into tiny slivers rather than return it to the U.S. government.

When investigators from both NASA and the U.S. attorney's office noticed moon dust listed for sale in St. Louis, they shut down the transaction with the cooperation of the auction house and the seller. The widow trying to sell the dust - her name was not released - said she didn't know where her late husband had purchased it. She "immediately and graciously agreed to relinquish it back to the American people," the U.S. attorney's office said.

The auction house had estimated its value at $1,000 to $1,500. (See photos of Mercury.)

Preliminary testing by the Johnson Space Center's lab has concluded that the material in "all likelihood" is lunar, but final results will take a few weeks.

More than 800 lb. (363 kg) of moon rocks, pebbles, sand and dust were ferried back to Earth during the Apollo lunar missions, which ended in late 1972. The overwhelming majority of the material was kept for analysis, but a handful of samples were given to museums, individual states and foreign dignitaries. Some are now unaccounted for, and there are many fakes for sale. A moon rock given to Missouri during the administration of Governor Christopher "Kit" Bond, who was first elected in 1972, was found last year in a box of memorabilia when Bond cleaned out his office after four terms in the U.S. Senate. Bond promptly returned the rock to the current governor, Jay Nixon.

The story of the film canister and the stolen dust had been considered a hoax by some, U.S. attorney Rich Callahan said. This discovery, even a little speck, suggests the story is true - though you have to peer really, really close. "The truth is, it's not much to look at," said Callahan. "You have to believe it's there."

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Monster Black Hole Twins Found Inside Galaxy's Belly (SPACE.com)

A galaxy already known to have one ginormous black hole at its core is actually home to two of these cosmic giants, a new study reveals.

Astronomers discovered the second monster black hole at the center of the galaxy Markarian 739, which is about 425 million light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Leo. Its presence was revealed in observations by NASA's Swift satellite and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The two black holes are separated by about 11,000 light years, which is about one-third the distance between our solar system and the center of the Milky Way. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]

Supermassive black hole twins

Both black holes are intensely active and classified as "supermassive," that is, they can each have a mindboggling mass equivalent to millions — or even billions — of stars like our sun.  Stellar black holes, formed by the collapse of massive stars, typically have up to 10 or 20 times the mass of the sun.  

"At the hearts of most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, lies a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass," said the study's lead author Michael Koss,  a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland in College Park, in a statement. "Some of them radiate billions of times as much energy as the sun."

While supermassive black holes are relatively common at the core of galaxies, not all are radiating energy to be what astronomers call "active galactic nuclei" (AGN). So it is rare to find one active monster black hole, let alone two, in the same galaxy, researchers said.

When galaxies collide

Astronomers suspect that the active binary supermassive black hole setup can occur when galaxies collide.

"If two galaxies collide and each possesses a supermassive black hole, there should be times when both black holes switch on as AGN," said study co-author Richard Mushotzky, also of the University of Maryland in College Park.

The astronomers discovered the dual black hole heart of Markarian 739 by using NASA's Swift satellite's Burst Alert Telescope, which maps intense sources of X-ray emissions in the sky, to seek out potential active galactic nuclei. Researchers can then zoom in on potential candidates with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Markarian 739's second black hole was invisible in the ultraviolet, visible and radio ranges of the light spectrum, so it remained hidden until this new study, researchers said. The findings will be detailed in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The two giant black holes at the center of Markarian 739, which is also known by the name NGC 3758, are not the first monster black hole twins seen by astronomers, and they're not the closest either.  Both records are held by the galaxy NGC 6240, a galaxy that is about 330 million light-years from Earth.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Face of Gandhi Found On Google Mars (SPACE.com)

This story was updated at 8 p.m. ET.

Now that Google Mars, a new online map pieced together from satellite images of the Red Planet, is up and running, space enthusiasts the world over are finding interesting objects on the Martian surface.

The latest is a face found by an Italian named Matteo Ianneo, who has also claimed to have found vegetation, entrances to underground tunnels and city ruins on Mars in the past few weeks. Ianneo says his latest surface find, which is located at 33°12'29.82"N and 12°55'51.21"W, looks like a picture of Mahatma Gandhi in profile.

It is reminiscent of the Face on Mars, a hill photographed by NASA's Viking 1 probe in 1976 that, in one low-resolution image, resembled a face.  Within days of its discovery, space hobbyists were speculating that the structure was man-made and had been built by ancient Martians. A higher-resolution image taken of the "face" last year by NASA's HiRISE camera revealed a rugged hill. [Photos: The 'Face on Mars' and Other Martian Illusions]

A similar low-res deception is at work this time around.

To help sort out just what Ianneo is looking at, Jonathan Hill, a researcher at the Arizona State University Mars Space Flight Facility, which owns and operates a database of Mars images somewhat similar to Google's, tracked down the photo Google used of the Gandhi face, as seen below. It is a low-resolution image taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter.

A higher-resolution image of the same geologic feature taken by a better camera, the CTX camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, erases the illusion.

"As you can see, we're actually looking at some sort of collapse pit, not a mound like it appears in the Google Mars image," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site of SPACE.com.

Seeing things

"Pareidolia" is the scientific term for seeing faces (or other significant objects) where they aren't. Face pareidolia happens, scientists say, as a byproduct of our heightened sensitivity to the details of human faces. [Seeing Things On Mars: A History of Martian Illusions]

Takeo Watanabe of the Boston University Visual Sciences Laboratory put it this way: "We've over-learned human faces so we see them where they aren't."

Last week, a self-described "armchair astronaut" discovered another anomaly while perusing the Google Mars map. In a viral Youtube video, David Martines claimed to have identified a human (or alien) base on the planet, which he dubbed Bio Station Alpha. The somewhat mysterious linear streak that he thought was a building on the Martian surface was later revealed to be a cosmic ray artifact — a distortion arising in the camera that snapped the photo of the surface when an energetic particle zipped through it.

People have been finding suggestive objects on the surface of Mars for centuries. By making our neighboring planet visible to everyone, Google Mars will likely increase the frequency of such finds.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site of SPACE.com. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover, then join Life's Little Mysteries on Facebook.

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