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Archaeologists in the Sverdlovsk Region in Russia's Urals have discovered the 9,000-year-old bones of a rhinoceros, a local museum worker said on Monday. The excavations during which the bones were discovered were carried out at a site on the bank of the Lobva River, said Nikolai Yerokhin from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Plant And Animal Ecology department. It was generally assumed that rhinoceros last wandered the Urals some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. However, the latest findings seem to prove that they existed in the area a lot more recently.

Cyclops Myth Spurred by One-Eyed Fossils? Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News February 5, 2003 Ever wonder where our worst nightmares come from? For the ancient Greeks, it may have been the fossils of giant prehistoric animals. 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...

Over the past two decades there have been renewed attempts to search for remains of Noah's ark and to discover evidence of the biblical Flood itself. In the early 1980s, several expeditions led by an American astronaut and others ascended Mt. Ararat, the legendary resting place of Noah's ark in northern Turkey, in an unsuccessful search for remains of the ark. More recently, evidence has been reported that the Black Sea may have formed suddenly about 7500 years ago by break-through flooding from the Mediterranean Sea (Ryan & Pitman 1998; Ballard 2001). These authors speculate that this natural disaster (for...

Dogs played a special role in ancient Greek society and mythology; Cerberus guarded the gates of Hades, the goddess Artemis used dogs in her hunt, and Greek citizens employed dogs for hunting and protection. To the ancient Greeks, picking your new pup was an important decision, just as it is today. But, according to Stanford University researcher Adrienne Mayor, writing for Wonders & Marvels, the process could have been just a little bit different. Like moderns, the ancients looked for an adventurous and friendly nature, but one test for selecting the pick of the litter seems rather heartless today. Let...