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A sunken treasure worth about $500 million was discovered by an American company has been awarded to Spain by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The treasure-laden Spanish ship was located off the coast of Gibraltar in 2007. It had been sunk during a naval battle with the British navy in 1804. Several parties made claim to the treasure. The company that made the recovery, Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc., the governments of Spain and Peru, and 25 individuals who were descendants of the sailors on the ship. The federal district court, which heard...

While one of India's richest temples is garnering worldwide attention for its estimated $22-billion treasure trove, a Canadian researcher says archeologists, scholars, economists and even jewellers are eager to flock to the site to study its historical impact. The haul from the underground chambers of a medieval Hindu temple in Thiruvananthapuram, India, included enormous quantities of gold coins dating back to the era of French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte, and silk bundles full of diamonds, jewelry and Belgian gold — all artifacts that could help researchers paint of a picture of what world trade looked like between the 16th and...

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The legend of El Dorado was definitely not set on the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. But the seven-member panel, which is drawing up a list of assets at the famed shrine here, had a feel of the lost city of gold as they set foot in one of the two secret vaults located inside the sprawling granite structure which gives the Kerala capital its name. On Thursday, the team assisted by personnel from the fire services and archeology department opened the locks of vault A to find a narrow flight of stairs leading down to an underground granite cellar. Oxygen...

Finders fail to become keepers as £100,000 worth of American money is returned to the family of its original owner The glass jar contained 80 American coins dating from 1854. Photograph: Hackney CouncilA hoard of gold coins found in Hackney by a local resident in 2007 does not qualify as treasure and should be returned to the descendent of the man who originally buried them, ruled an inquest last week (Monday 18 April).In 2007, Hackney resident Terence Castle was digging a frog pond with three others in a back garden in Stamford Hill when they struck suddenly struck gold, discovering...

VIENNA — A man turning dirt in his backyard stumbled onto buried treasure — hundreds of pieces of centuries-old jewelry and other precious objects that Austrian authorities described Friday as a fairy-tale find. Austria's department in charge of national antiquities said the trove consists of more than 200 rings, brooches, ornate belt buckles, gold-plated silver plates and other pieces or fragments, many encrusted with pearls, fossilized coral and other ornaments. It said the objects are about 650 years old and are being evaluated for their provenance and worth. While not assigning a monetary value to the buried bling, the enthusiastic...

KEY WEST, FLA.—Shipwreck experts are evaluating a centuries-old-101-centimetre gold chain plucked from the sea floor while searching for a 17th-century sunken Spanish galleon off the Florida Keys. The piece is tentatively valued at about $250,000. It is believed to be from the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank during a 1622 hurricane. It was found Wednesday by divers from Mel Fisher’s Treasures about 55 kilometres west of Key West. The chain has 55 links, an enameled gold cross and a two-sided engraved religious medallion featuring the Virgin Mary and a chalice.

Named the Silver Moon Diamond since its discovery happened during the weekend of the full moon supermoon event. Melissa and Kenny Oliver of Rosston, Arkansas, enjoy the adventure of treasure hunting, so they make regular visits to the Crater of Diamonds State Park to prospect at Arkansas’s diamond site. On Sunday afternoon the couple found a flawless, 2.44-carat white diamond at the park. Due of the gem’s silver white color, and because it was discovered during the weekend of a full moon “supermoon” event, the couple named their diamond the Silver Moon. According to Park Interpreter Margi Jenks, “The Oliver’s...

Officials stumble upon 522 old silver slabs weighing about 18 tonnes In one of the biggest findings of “hidden treasure” from a religious place, Orissa's Endowment Department officials and the police stumbled upon 522 silver slabs weighing about 18 tonnes from a mutt in Puri on Saturday. As per the present market price, the value of the metal is estimated to be around Rs. 90 crore. The huge stock of silver was found from four sinduka (wooden containers) placed inside a room, closed from all sides by brick walls, in the Emar Mutt in front of the Sri Jagannath Temple....

Dave Crisp found treasure on a soggy ridge outside the Somerset town of Frome last April, and helped rewrite history. On a bitter winter afternoon, as he walks the frosty field again, he recalls one of the most heart-stoppingly exciting moments of his life. The 63-year-old ex-army man had discovered a scattering of Roman silver coins in the field. He came back a few days later with his detector, bought secondhand on eBay, to round up any remaining broken pieces. The signals were faint and confusing.

A gold crown - said to be one of the 'world's most beautiful and priceless objects' - is set to be the star attraction at a British Museum exhibition of treasures from Afghanistan. More than 200 objects, many of which were hidden away for 25 years, are being loaned from the National Museum of Afghanistan. The 'collapsible' crown was discovered by Soviet archaeologists in 1978 in an elite nomadic cemetery and has never been shown in Britain before. Other objects showing ancient Afghanistan's links through trade with other cultures include classical sculptures, gold ornaments and jewellery, carved ivory attached to...

PARIS — Pablo Picasso gave them as a gift. So said Danielle Le Guennec, 68, explaining how she and her husband came to possess a box full of 271 previously unknown sketches, paintings and collages by one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists. “It was very straightforward,” she said in a telephone interview on Monday, after the French newspaper Libération reported the find. Her husband, Pierre Le Guennec, 71, had worked as an electrician in three of Picasso’s homes on the French Riviera in the early 1970s.

Spanish doubloons meant to fund wars, solid gold bars bound for Europe's royalty and bronze cannons that protected it all now sit scattered across the ocean floor from shipwrecks. But in a new investment plan by Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc., those long-ago sunken treasures could soon be part of investor portfolios. The Tampa, Fla., company, whose work has been documented on the Discovery Channel and on the pages of National Geographic, plans to allow investors a chance to purchase a share of a treasure hunt and split the spoils. Think of it as a romantic play on all-time highs in...

A valuable hoard of American gold coins has been unearthed in an east London garden — one of Britain's most curious treasure finds. Buried hoards are discovered every so often, but their Anglo-Saxon, Viking or Roman owners were themselves interred long ago. Whoever hid the 80 coins from the 19th and early 20th centuries may be alive. Why they chose the garden of a residential block in Hackney is a mystery. Archaeologists more used to deciphering which Roman emperor is depicted on a coin have been taken aback by the find — gold $20 “Double Eagle” pieces dating from 1854...

The coins, each weighing 400 milligrams, have markings in UrduAncient gold coins were unearthed at Kottamalam village near Kadambur block in Sathyamangalam taluk on Sunday.A villager stumbled upon an earthen pot containing the coins numbering 744 when he was cleaning his piece of land along with wife and two grand daughters near his house. It was said that the people in the village shared the treasure.On hearing the information, Village Administrative Officer alerted the Sathyamangalam Tahsildar. Along with a team of police personnel, the revenue officials rushed to the village and took possession of the coins, each weighed around 400...

Considering how thrilled I was just to find this story, I can only imagine the delirious, all-consuming excitement felt by Dave Crisp, a British hospital chef, when his metal detector uncovered this pot of 52,000 Roman coins.Crisp was lolling with his detector in a field in southwestern England when he made the discovery, eventually unearthing some 50,000 silver and bronze coins dating from 253 to 293 AD. Over 700 of them bear the face of Marcus Aurelius Carausius, a Roman general who ruled Britain and was the first to make coins in the region.Crisp, a self-described "metal detectorist," explained that...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Florida deep-sea explorers are appealing a judge's ruling that 17 tons of treasure recovered from a sunken Spanish galleon belongs to Spain. Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration filed an opening brief Monday with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, March 8, 2010 – It’s not uncommon to see Army Sgt. Benjamin Kirk Rudy walking around with an elaborate pirate-style coffee mug while spouting off some random pirate fact. Army Sgt. Benjamin Rudy looks at a map that will help him find “buried treasure” at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, March 5, 2010. The mug and the map were sent to him as gifts from his young children, who believe he’s on a pirate ship to find treasures for them. Rudy uses the pirate character to with his children during long periods of separation. U.S. Army photo by Staff...

Not long ago a story about the Labor Party's secret plan to monitor and tax it's citizens garbage would have been an amusing anecdote about those wacky Brits and their far left government. In those happy days before our government was seized by Comrades Pelosi, Reid and Obama, we were secure in the knowledge that such things could never happen here. The UK Daily Mail reports that. More than 2.5 million homes now have wheelie bins fitted with microchips to weigh their contents. [...] The spread of chipped bins marks the revival of a tax idea that the Government appeared...

Scotch whisky meant to warm Antarctic explorers retrieved after century locked in ice Associated Press WELLINGTON, New Zealand - This Scotch has been on the rocks for a century. Five crates of Scotch whisky and two of brandy have been recovered by a team restoring an Antarctic hut used more than 100 years ago by famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. Ice cracked some of the bottles that had been left there in 1909, but the restorers said Friday they are confident the five crates contain intact bottles "given liquid can be heard when the crates are moved." New Zealand Antarctic...

MIAMI — A U.S. district judge has ruled that U.S. treasure-hunting company Odyssey Marine Exploration should return to Spain a fortune in old coins recovered from the wreck of a 19th-century Spanish warship. Judge Steven Merryday nevertheless directed that the return of the treasure to Spain be stayed until an appeals process in the case was concluded. Merryday's order backed a recommendation by a U.S. magistrate judge in June that Odyssey should hand over to the Spanish government nearly 600,000 silver and gold coins valued at some $500 million that it recovered from the wreck of the 19th-century Spanish warship...