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A team of international scientists have discovered 240-million-year-old fossils from the Triassic period in China that one scientist described as a "long and snake-like, mythical Chinese dragon." The 16-foot-long aquatic reptile, called Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, has 32 separate neck vertebrae – an extremely long neck, according to the National Museums of Scotland, which announced the news on Friday. The new fossil has a snake-like appearance and flippers and was found in the Guizhou Province of southern China. Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was first identified in 2003 when its skull was found, but this more complete fossil discovery has "allowed scientists to depict the...

Chinese New Year 2024 will fall on Saturday, February 10, 2024. This means the Year of the Rabbit ends on February 9, and the Year of the Dragon (which coincidentally, this author is a member of) starts on February 10 according to the Chinese zodiac. Unlike the Gregorian calendar where New Year’s Day consistently occurs on January 1, the date of Chinese New Year changes every year, but it always falls between January 21 and February 20, usually the second new moon after the winter solstice. And unlike the usual one-day holiday for New Year’s (or two days for New...

Leonardo’s dragon (How did he draw a dinosaur so accurately?) by Philip Robinson Published: 7 May 2019 (GMT+10) The month of May 2019 marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo Da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519). The polymath was well known for his contributions to science, history, engineering, architecture, drawing and especially painting, with his most famous painting being the Mona Lisa. For this anniversary the UK’s Royal Collection Trust is displaying some of its collection of Leonardo drawings in 12 different locations. One particular drawing is causing a stir.

An amphibious humanlike being was reported in Karelia in 1928. The creature was repeatedly seen in the lake of Vedlozero by local residents. A group of researchers from the Petrozavodsk University arrived to investigate the case on location. Unfortunately, the findings were classified and the members of the research party eventually perished in the Gulag.

<p>Skull of an elephant. The animal's European ancestors had similar anatomies.</p> <p>IRAKLIO, Greece (AP) -- Researchers on the southern Greek island of Crete have unearthed the fossilized tusk, teeth and bones of a Deinotherium Gigantisimum, a fearsome elephant-like creature that might have given rise to ancient legends of one-eyed cyclops monsters.</p>

Strikingly tall skeletons uncovered in the Ecuador and Peru Amazon region are undergoing examination in Germany, according to a research team headed by British anthropologist Russell Dement. Will these remains prove that a race of tall people existed hundreds of years ago deep in the Amazonian rainforest? Since 2013, the team has reported finding half a dozen human skeletons dating to the early 1400s and the mid-1500s that measure between 7 feet and 8 feet (213 to 243 centimeters) in height. ... In late 2013, Dement received word that a skeleton had been uncovered by a Shuar local, approximately 70...

A 2,500-year-old predecessor of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman super heroine has emerged on a vase painting kept at a small American museum. Drawn on a white-ground pyxis (a lidded cylindrical box that was used for cosmetics, jewelry, or ointments) the image shows an Amazon on horseback in a battle against a Greek warrior. Much like the fictional warrior princess of the Amazons, the horsewoman is twirling a lasso. “It is the only ancient artistic image of an Amazon using a lariat in battle,” Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford University’s departments of classics and history of science, told Discovery...

Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men. The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians. Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and...

Sick Rams Used as Ancient Bioweapons Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Once, a Weapon Nov. 28, 2007 -- Infected rams and donkeys were the earliest bioweapons, according to a new study which dates the use of biological warfare back more than 3,300 years. According to a review published in the Journal of Medical Hypotheses, two ancient populations, the Arzawans and the Hittites, engaged "in mutual use of contaminated animals" during the 1320-1318 B.C. Anatolian war. "The animals were carriers of Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia," author Siro Trevisanato, a molecular biologist based in Oakville, Ontario, Canada told Discovery News....

The following ARE exerpts... "...From Hercules' poisoned arrows to early germ warfare and attacks with scorpion bombs and red-hot sand, she contends, cultures around the world have grappled with the revulsion and justification of using these unconventional weapons ever since they began creating their own myths and recording their histories. Mayor has compiled a slew of examples in her new book, "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World" (Overlook Press)..." "...The early dilemmas posed in mythic form would be recorded eventually in the annals of historians as combatants put their growing knowledge...

If you are under Roman siege in the middle of a desert, a scorpion bomb seems like a very good idea. Collect a bunch of lethal scorpions and, very carefully, seal them in clay pots. Hurl the pots at the attackers as needed. That's exactly what the defenders of Hatra, just south of Mosul in today's Iraq, did in 198 AD. The siege was lifted in 20 days. As Adrienne Mayor writes in her intriguing book Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, scorpions weren't the only stinging animals pressed into service in the ancient world. A clay pot full...

The legendary "Sphinx" eventually found its counterpart version in archeological fossil. Chinese and American paleontologists found two distinct kinds of bone characteristics in the fossil of a sharp-mouthed mammal excavated in China's Liaoning province. The mammal's upper part makes people believe it was viviparous while its lower part looks like oviparous, reports Wen Hui Daily. The latest issue of the British magazine Nature reports the unprecedented discovery. The magazine editor as well as paleontologists marveled at the discovery and believed it might change the traditional theory on mammals evolution. Li Gang, one of the coauthors of the paper, said the...

'Hogwarts' Dragon Unveiled By Larry O'Hanlon, Animal Planet News May 24 — A dragon-like dinosaur named after Harry Potter's alma mater has performed a bit of black magic on its own family tree, say paleontologists who unveiled the "Dragon King of Hogwarts" on Monday in Albuquerque. The newly described horny-headed dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia lived about 66 million years ago in South Dakota, just a million years short of the extinction of all dinosaurs. But its flat, almost storybook-style dragon head has overturned everything paleontologists thought they knew about the dome-head dinos called pachycephalosaurs. "What you knew about pachycephalosaurs — you...

Once dismissed, myths are winning new attention from geologists who find that they may encode valuable data about earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other stirrings of the earth SEATTLE, WASHINGTON--James Rasmussen, owner of a funky used-record store called Bud's Jazz, and Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, make an unlikely professional team. Late last year, they were walking down the beach near the bustling Fauntleroy ferry dock, searching for a reddish sandstone boulder. Native American legends-Rasmussen belongs to the local Duwamish people-say the boulder is haunted by a'yahos, a spirit with the body of a serpent and...

Inner Mongolia Yields New Discoveries More than 80 leading archeological experts are participating in an international conference in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, to exchange the latest information on Hongshan, a prehistoric relics site. Relics excavated at the Hongshan ("Red Mountain") site originated around 5000 BC to 6500 BC. Now a part of Chifeng City, the site was discovered in 1935. Some of the relics found at Hongshan have led archeologists to conclude that the heads of Chinese dragons may have been inspired by boars in addition to horses and cattle. Primitive people who struggled to survive by fishing and...

BEIJING - Villagers in central China dug up a ton of dinosaur bones and boiled them in soup or ground them into powder for traditional medicine, believing they were from flying dragons and had healing powers. Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds), scientist Dong Zhiming told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

<p>IRAKLIO, Greece (AP) -- Researchers on the southern Greek island of Crete have unearthed the fossilized tusk, teeth and bones of a Deinotherium Gigantisimum, a fearsome elephant-like creature that might have given rise to ancient legends of one-eyed cyclops monsters.</p>

ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2012) — Many fossilized dinosaurs have been found in a twisted posture. Scientists have long interpreted this as a sign of death spasms. Two researchers from Basel and Mainz now come to the conclusion that this bizarre deformations occurred only during the decomposition of dead dinosaurs. A syndrome like that as a petrified expression of death throes was discussed for the first time about 100 years ago for some vertebrate fossils, but the acceptance of this interpretation declined during the following decades. In 2007, this "opisthotonus hypothesis" was newly posted by a veterinarian and a palaeontologist....

The tusk, several teeth, and some bones of a Deinotherium giganteum, which, loosely translated means really huge terrible beast, have been found on the Greek island Crete. A distant relative to today's elephants, the giant mammal stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) tall at the shoulder, and had tusks that were 4.5 feet (1.3 meters) long. It was one of the largest mammals ever to walk the face of the Earth... To paleontologists today, the large hole in the center of the skull suggests a pronounced trunk. To the ancient Greeks, Deinotherium skulls could well be the foundation for their...

New research into the Ancient Greeks shows their knowledge of travel inspired early forms of fantasy and science fiction writing.There is a long tradition of fantasy in Greek literature that begins with Odysseus' fantastic travels in Homer's Odyssey. Dr Karen Ni-Mheallaigh, at the University of Liverpool's School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, is exploring fantasy in ancient literature, examining theories of modern science fiction writing and how these can be applied to texts from the ancient world. Dr Ni-Mheallaigh is looking at the work of 2nd century AD writer, Lucian of Samosata, who wrote True Histories, a travel narrative that...