Paleontology news

Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, said the bodies were found near a defense line within the city built in the late Bronze age.

The discovery could add to evidence that Troy's lower area was bigger in the late Bronze Age than previously thought, changing scholars' perceptions about the city of the "Iliad."

"If the remains are confirmed to be from 1,200 B.C. it would coincide with the Trojan war period. These people were buried near a mote. We are conducting radiocarbon testing, but the finding is electrifying," Pernicka told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Ancient Troy, located in the northwest of modern-day Turkey at the mouth of the Dardanelles not far south of Istanbul, was unearthed in the 1870s by Heinrich Schliemann, the German entrepreneur and pioneering archaeologist who discovered the steep and windy city described by Homer.

Pernicka said pottery found near the bodies, which had their lower parts missing, was confirmed to be from 1,200 BC, but added the couple could have been buried 400 years later in a burial site in what archaeologists call Troy VI or Troy VII, different layers of ruins at Troy.

The rare Arakan forest turtle, once though to be extinct, has been rediscovered in a remote forest in Myanmar, boosting chances of saving the reptile after hunting almost destroyed its population, researchers said Monday.

Texas researcher Steven Platt and staff from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society discovered five of the brown-and-tan-spotted turtles in May during a survey of wildlife in the Rakhine Yoma Elephant Sanctuary.

The sanctuary contains thick stands of impenetrable bamboo forests, with the only trails made by the park's elephants, said Platt, of Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.

Plat said he and his team were able to reach the area only by small boat and endured round-the-clock torrential rains and bands of leeches before finding their first Arakan turtle on May 31.

"At this moment, all of the physical hardships of the trip were forgotten," Platt said in an e-mail interview.

Native to the Arakan hills of western Myanmar, the turtles were believed extinct for close to a century until they started turning up in Asian food markets in the mid-1990s.

The local name for the turtle is "Pyant Cheezar," which translates to "turtle that eats rhinoceros feces." Sumatran rhinos were once found in the area, but vanished half a century ago due to hunting.

Scientists blame the near-disappearance of the turtle on their popularity in Asia as an ingredient in cooking and medicine. Known by its scientific name, Heosemys depressa, it is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and has proven difficult to breed in captivity.

The discovery in May makes scientists hopeful that the species can survive.

"Throughout Asia, turtles are being wiped out by poachers for the illegal wildlife trade," Colin Poole, the Wildlife Conservation Society's director of Asia programs, said in a statement. "We are delighted and astonished that this extremely rare species is alive and well in Myanmar. Now we must do what we can to protect the remaining population."

Douglas B. Hendrie, a freshwater turtle expert from Education for Nature-Vietnam who did not take part in the research, said he was not surprised by the discovery because he had heard anecdotes of hunters and guides finding the turtle.

"That said, I think it is good to bring attention to the species," Hendrie said in an e-mail interview, adding that it is an "an important part of furthering the aims of conservation."

Platt and the conservation society recommend that guard posts be set up on roads leading in and out of the park to thwart poaching and that additional data be collected on the species to develop a conservation plan for it.

credited to AP

A new species of giant rat has been discovered deep in the jungle of Papua New Guinea.

The rat, which has no fear of humans, measures 82cm long, placing it among the largest species of rat known anywhere in the world.

The creature, which has not yet been formally described, was discovered by an expedition team filming the BBC programme Lost Land of the Volcano.

It is one of a number of exotic animals found by the expedition team.

Like the other exotic species, the rat is believed to live within the Mount Bosavi crater, and nowhere else.

"This is one of the world's largest rats. It is a true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers," says Dr Kristofer Helgen, a mammalogist based at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who accompanied the BBC expedition team.

Initially, the giant rat was first captured on film by an infrared camera trap, which BBC wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan set up in the forest on the slopes of the volcano.

The expedition team from the BBC Natural History Unit recorded the rat rummaging around on the forest floor, and were awed by its size.

Immediately, they suspected it could be a species never before recorded by science, but they needed to see a live animal to be sure.

Then trackers accompanying the team managed to trap a live specimen.

"I had a cat and it was about the same size as this rat," says Buchanan.

The trapped rat measured 82cm in length from its nose to its tail, and weighed approximately 1.5kg.

It had a silver-brown coat of thick long fur, which the scientists who examined it believe may help it survive the wet and cold conditions that can occur within the high volcano crater. The location where the rat was discovered lies at an elevation of over 1,000m.

Initial investigations suggest the rat belongs to the genus Mallomys, which contains a handful of other out-sized species.

It has provisionally been called the Bosavi woolly rat, while its scientific name has yet to be agreed.

Other rodents, the group of animals that includes rats, grow to a bigger size.

For example, the largest rodent of all is the capybara, which lives in or near freshwater in South America.

It can grow up to 130cm long and weigh up to 65kg.

The Philippines is also home to a few species of cloud rat which can reach over 2kg in weight.

But of the true rats, which includes urban brown and black rats that belong to the genus Rattus, few can match the new species.

In 2007, an expedition to New Guinea led by Conservation International discovered another closely related giant woolly rat, which can weigh up to 1.4kg. It also belongs within the genus Mallomys.

However, that species lives in the Foja Mountains, part of the Mamberamo Basin.

Mount Bosavi, where the new rat was found, is an extinct volcano that lies deep in the remote Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The expedition team entered the crater to explore pristine forest, where few humans have set foot.

Even members of the Kasua tribe, who acted as trackers for the expedition, live outside the crater, which is 4km wide and has walls up to 1km high, trapping the creatures that live within.

The island which includes Papua New Guinea and New Guinea is famous for the number and diversity of the rats and mice that live there.

Over 57 species of true "Murid" rats and mice can be found on the island. The larger rats are often caught by hunters and eaten.

credited to BBC

Scientists from the NT Museum and Flinders University have discovered the remains of a giant hippo-like animal near Alice Springs, a find that will shed new light on the Territory’s prehistoric past.

For 25 years, palaeontologists from the two institutions have been painstakingly extracting the remains of giant flightless birds, wombat-like creatures and crocodiles from a nearly 7 million-year-old fossil site near Alcoota, 180km northeast of Alice Springs.

This month, in addition to finding fragments of a new species of wallaby, and an 50cm-long crocodile skull - the first such complete specimen to come from the site - they uncovered another important piece of Australia’s early history.

The researchers found jawbones of four Zygomaturus gilli, a species ancestral to the giant hippo-like animal that roamed Australia up to 45,000 years ago.

Dr Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University said the discovery was very exciting.

“One of the problems with Alcoota is that we’ve never been able to date it directly,” Dr Prideaux said.

“These Zygomaturus gilli specimens give us a strong tie in with similar specimens found at a site to the south of Melbourne that have been dated at about 5 ½ million years. It is going to help us lock Alcoota in to a tighter timeframe,” he said.

The discovery gave an insight into “how much there is to learn just at the one site, let alone the whole of Australia”, Dr Prideaux said.

“The reality is we know perhaps one percent of Australia’s fossil history. It’s like having ten pieces in a 1000-piece jigsaw; there’s a great temptation to reconstruct the picture based on those pieces, but the likelihood is that we’ll almost certainly get it wrong.”

Dr Prideaux paid special tribute to Dr Dirk Megirian, the NT Museum’s Curator of Geology and Palaeontology in Alice Springs, who passed away after a long illness while at Alcoota in July.

credited to sciencealert.com.au

In one of the more dramatic moments of an underwater archaeological survey co-led by Mercyhurst College archaeologist James Adovasio along Florida's Gulf Coast this summer, Andy Hemmings stood on an inundated river's edge where man hasn't set foot in more than 13,000 years. Donning full scuba gear, Hemmings stood in 130 feet of water on a peninsula at the intersection of two ancient rivers nearly 100 miles offshore from Tampa. The last time humans could have stood in that spot, mammoth and mastodon roamed the terrain.

"The successful tracking of the St. Marks-Aucilla River and the Suwannee River, between 50 and 150 kilometers respectively, represents what we believe to be the most extensive delineation of submerged prehistoric river systems ever done anywhere in the world," Adovasio said.

Another pivotal find is the identification of chert at three dive sites along the river systems; chert is a superior quality fine-grained stone used by prehistoric peoples to make tools.

"There is no doubt," Adovasio said, "that we have found the haystacks and are one step closer to uncovering the archaeological needles;" in effect, narrowing the search for evidence of early Americans in the now submerged Inner Continental Shelf in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast.

Hemmings, one of the leading Paleoindian underwater archaeologists in North America, agreed. "My feeling is, given a little time to probe the sediments with a dredge, we will quickly find human artifacts."

The signature expedition of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research began in the summer of 2008 when a distinguished group of scientists led by Mercyhurst's Adovasio and Hemmings identified and mapped buried river channels that could potentially help document the late Pleistocene landscape. This year's mission, undertaken July 23 to Aug. 5, further traced the river systems along whose beaches prehistoric people may have populated and identified raw materials that they may have used in tool making.

The mission also has advanced underwater understanding and research methodology exponentially, Adovasio said.

"We have developed protocols for exploring deep water, which is both time and labor intensive, as well as expensive, unlike anything done before," he said, noting that the NOAA-funded expedition is unique in part because of the depths at which scuba divers are exploring. For the most part, other prehistoric expeditions have been confined to shallow water, he said.

From the Weatherbird II, flagship of the Florida Institute of Oceanography in St. Petersburg, researchers electronically mapped the modern sea floor with a side scan sonar device and created images of the layered sediments below the seafloor surface with a sub-bottom profiler. Using GPS technology, the team selected dive locations based on an understanding of what the surface should look like, and what was hidden below that surface adjacent to the old river channels.

On the peninsula where the relict Suwannee River intersects another ancient system, divers were able to collect a 1m sediment core but were unable to complete a lengthier search for human artifacts because the water neared 130 feet, the maximum depth level for this year's dive. The team plans to return to this spot next year, increasing the divers' depth level certification to 165 feet and using a dredge to lift the silt away and see if there is an archaeological site at this confluence.

Additional work in 2010 will trace the Suwannee River channel back toward its modern mouth and continue tracking it into the Gulf. At select locations, divers will probe the sediments looking for artifacts made by ancient peoples living along the river at places where the chert was found this year.

In all, the team has identified 2,000 target locations. With direct testing by divers having already uncovered three sites with useable tool stone, Adovasio said the team is confident that it will find human artifacts from the Pleistocene on this ancient landscape as their work continues next year.

"Proof of past human habitation here would reinforce the disintegration of the once prevalent hypothesis about who the first Americans were, how they got here and when they arrived," said Adovasio, who rose to fame 30 years ago while excavating the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Pittsburgh, Pa. Radiocarbon dating at Meadowcroft revealed the presence of human campsites as many as 16,000 years ago, which went a long way toward dashing the Clovis-first paradigm, holding that the first humans arrived in the Americas about 12,000 years ago, as revealed by a site near Clovis, New Mexico.

credited to Mercyhurst College