Archaeology news: 100 million-year-old ancient turtle fossil discovered in Texas, USA

Archaeologists have discovered a new, 100 million-year-old turtle fossil in Texas, USA. The ancient remains are believed to be the earliest remnants of the side-necked turtle in North America and have unravelled some of the mysteries surrounding reptile migration from the relatively unknown Cenomanian age.

Archaeologists in Texas, USA have discovered the remains of the oldest side-necked turtle in North America. The turtle, which has been named Pleurochayah appalachius, was well adapted for coastal living and had large bony attachments to its upper arms.

The site sits on the remnants of an old river delta from the Late Cretaceous period (80 to 66 million years ago), which was believed to flow through the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Scientists have been using the dried-up river delta to unravel numerous fossilised remains over a number of years.

Archaeologists had previously discovered dinosaur and crocodilian fossils at the site.

Now, they’ve made a brand new discovery, which could transform their understanding of hard-to-track reptiles.

The unearthed fossil belonged to an extinct lineage of pleurodiran turtle – a type of side-necked turtle.

Side-necked turtles withdrew their necks sideways into their shells when they’ve threatened.

The discovery hints that side-necked turtles migrated to North America around the Cenomanian age – between 100 and 94 million years ago.

The archaeologists, who reported their findings in Scientific Reports, uncovered a number of adaptations on the turtle.

These adaptations suggest that it was a coastal-dwelling species.

In particular, it had large bony attachments on its upper arms.

The attachments would provide powerful swimming strokes, and suggested the turtle would swim with a rowing style of movement, as opposed to the modern-day flapping motion.

P.appalachius also had an unusually thick outer shell bone, when compared with its inner shell bone. It would have given the turtle even more protection from predators, especially in the marine environment, the scientists said.

Lead author of the study, and senior research specialist at the Midwestern University College of Graduate Studies, Brent Adrian, said: “This discovery provides the earliest evidence of side-necked turtles in North America.

“[It] expands our understanding of the first migrations of the extinct bothremydids [a type of extinct side-necked turtle].

“It further establishes the Arlington Archosaur Site as an important fossil unit that is revealing the foundations of an endemic Appalachian fauna.”

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The AAS has been used by archaeologists since 2009, although the river delta was first discovered six years earlier. Active excavations have been ongoing, almost continually, since then. About 2,000 individual fossils have been discovered at the site, ranging from multiple species of both animals and plants.

A Unique Native American Map Everyone Should See

Finding an address on a map can be taken for granted in the age of GPS and smartphones. But centuries of forced relocation, disease and genocide have made it difficult to find where many Native American tribes once lived.

Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans.

As a teenager, Carapella says he could never get his hands on a U.S. map like this, depicting more than 600 tribes — many now forgotten and lost to history. Now, the 34-year-old designs and sells maps as large as 3 by 4 feet with the names of tribes hovering over the land they once occupied.

“I think a lot of people get blown away by, ‘Wow, there were a lot of tribes, and they covered the whole country!’ You know, this is Indian land,” says Carapella, who calls himself a “mixed-blood Cherokee” and lives in a ranch house within the jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation.

For more than a decade, he consulted history books and library archives, called up tribal members and visited reservations as part of research for his map project, which began as pencil-marked poster boards on his bedroom wall. So far, he has designed maps of the continental U.S., Canada and Mexico. A map of Alaska is currently in the works.

What makes Carapella’s maps distinctive is their display of both the original and commonly known names of Native American tribes, according to Doug Herman, senior geographer at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

“You can look at [Carapella’s] map, and you can sort of getting it immediately,” Herman says. “This is Indian Country, and it’s not the Indian Country that I thought it was because all these names are different.”

He adds that some Native American groups got stuck with names chosen arbitrarily by European settlers.

They were often derogatory names other tribes used to describe their rivals. For example, “Comanche” is derived from a word in Ute meaning “anyone who wants to fight me all the time,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“It’s like having a map of North America where the United States is labelled ‘gringos’ and Mexico is labelled ‘wetbacks,’ ” Herman says. “Naming is an exercise in power. Whether you’re naming places or naming peoples, you are therefore asserting a power of sort of establishing what is reality and what is not.”

Look at a map of Native American territory today, and you’ll see tiny islands of reservation and trust land engulfed by acres upon acres ceded by treaty or taken by force.

Carapella’s maps, which are sold on his website, serve as a reminder that the population of the American countryside stretches back long before 1776 and 1492.

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Carapella describes himself as a former “radical youngster” who used to lead protests against Columbus Day observances and supported other Native American causes. He says he now sees his mapmaking as another way to change perceptions in the U.S.

“This isn’t really a protest,” he explains. “But it’s a way to convey the truth in a different way.”

Tennessee’s Tattooing Tools Dated to More Than 5,500 Years Ago

According to a Science News report, a new study of turkey bones unearthed in 1985 in a burial pit at the Fernvale site in central Tennessee suggests that they may have been used by Native Americans to make tattoos between 5,520 and 3,620 years ago.

These pigment-stained bones are the world’s oldest known tattooing tools, say archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf of the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in Nashville and his colleagues.

The find suggests that Native American tattoo traditions in eastern North America extend back more than a millennium earlier than previously thought (SN: 3/4/19).

Ötzi the Iceman, who lived around 5,250 years ago in Europe, displays the oldest known tattoos (SN: 1/13/16), but researchers haven’t found any of the tools used to make the Iceman’s tattoos.

Excavations in 1985 revealed these turkey bones and other elements of a probable tattoo kit in a man’s burial pit at Tennessee’s Fernvale site, the researchers report in the June Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Damage on and near the tips of the two turkey leg bones resembles distinctive wear previously observed on experimental tattooing tools made from deer bones, Deter-Wolf’s team says.

In that research, tattooed lines in fresh slabs of pigskin were produced by a series of punctures with tools that had tips coated in homemade ink.

Experimental tattooing left ink remnants several millimetres from tools’ tips, a pattern also seen with red and black pigment residues on the Fernvale tools.

Two turkey wing bones found in the same Fernvale grave display microscopic wear and pigment residues that likely resulted from applying pigment during tattooing, the scientists say.

Pigment-stained seashells in the grave may have held solutions into which tattooers dipped those tools.

Pedro: The Mysterious Mountain Mummy

In June of 1934, two prospectors, Cecil Main and Frank Carr, were using explosives to mine for gold in the San Pedro Mountains of Wyoming.  After the dust of one of their blasts cleared, Main and Carr discovered a small room in a cave. 

There they found a tiny, mummified body with a deformed head, sitting in a flexed position.  The mummy was about 6 inches long and weighed about a pound.

From 1934-1950 the Pedro Mountain Mummy, as it was nicknamed, was sold a few times, as it made the rounds at sideshows and displayed in a drug store window in a glass jar.  

Ivan Goodman, a Casper, Wyoming car salesman, purchased it and used it in car advertisements.  The Shoshone, a tribe indigenous to Wyoming, have many legends about “little people.”  Goodman believed these legends and displayed the mummy as a pygmy man who was 65 years old when he died.

Before the Pedro Mountain Mummy vanished around 1950, Goodman took the mummy to Dr Harry Shapiro, curator of biological anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it was examined and x-rayed.  

Shortly after Goodman took the Pedro Mountain Mummy to the Big Apple it disappeared, and Goodman soon passed away.  There are differing stories about what happened to the Pedro Mountain Mummy.  Some people say Goodman lost it to a con man others say he sold it.

In 1971, physical anthropologist Dr. George Gill was hired by the University of Wyoming when heard about the mummy from one of his students.  He got the x-ray films from Shapiro and found that the mummy was not a hoax, a pygmy, or an old man.

These mummified remains belonged to an infant, maybe Native American, who suffered from anencephaly.  Anencephaly is a neural tube defect and one of the most common skull abnormalities, characterized by the absence of a major part of the skull, brain, and scalp. 

As the skull develops, the cranial vault may remain open.  If anencephalic births are alive, the infant generally dies within a week.  Studies show that these disorders may be hereditary, but taking folic acid greatly reduces the chances of the defect.

The Pedro Mountain Mummy was featured in an episode of the 90’s television show, Unsolved Mysteries, which included an interview with Dr. Gill, who asked for the public’s help in locating the lost remains.  

After the show aired, a Wyoming rancher brought Gill another mummy he found in 1929 in the San Pedro Mountain area.  This second mummy was about four inches long and had blonde hair.  

Dr. Gill had this mummy X-rayed and tested.  DNA and radiocarbon tests revealed that it was an infant who suffered from anencephaly and died in the eighteenth century.

These results, Gill said, “confirmed everything that I had ever thought” about the Pedro Mountain Mummy, including the diagnosis of anencephaly.

According to Atlas Obscura, Gill recently learned the mummy is somewhere safe but is saying little else.

In Northern California, a park ranger discovers a treasure trove of several million-year-old fossils.

In California, a treasure trove of fossils was discovered, including the fully preserved skeleton of a mastodon and the bones of a 400-pound monster salmon.’ Last summer, while walking through the Mokelumne River’s drainage in the Sierra mountains, forest ranger Greg Francek came across the fossil woods.

Since then, researchers have unearthed the remains of some 600 petrified trees and dozens of animal species, including an elephant ancestor and a giraffe-sized camel.

Experts said that the site — which dates back some around 10 million years ago to the Miocene epoch — is one of the most significant ever found in California.

For now, its exact location is being kept under wraps in order to protect the artefacts until they can be safely extracted from the ground for proper analysis.

The mastodon skull, meanwhile, is scheduled to go on display at the California State University, Chico’s Gateway Science Museum in the autumn of this year.

Mr Francek, who works for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, which provides drinking water for the local area, found the site by accident after discovering something that looked like wood but was smooth like stone.

‘I happened upon a petrified tree,’ Mr Francek told LiveScience.

‘This tree was partially encased in the burial sediments, and because one end was exposed, I could actually see the tree rings inside.’

Looking around, the ranger went on to discover more fossilised tree trunks.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later, however, when he returned to conduct an organised survey of the petrified forest that he first spotted the animal fossils among the plants.

‘I located the first vertebrate fossils,’ Mr Francek told SFGate.

‘What I didn’t comprehend at the time was the fact that I was looking at the bones of great beasts that had roamed this landscape millions of years ago.’ 

At this point, Mr Francek decided that he would reach out to specialist researchers, among whom were California State University, Chico palaeontologist and stratigrapher Russell Shapiro.

‘Few other fossil discoveries like this exist in California,’ Professor Shapiro told SFGate.

‘The discovery is highly significant because of both the sheer number and diversity of specimens found.

‘The bones paint a clearer picture of life 10 million years ago when animals evolved from living in forests to grassland as the landscape changed.’ 

According to the researchers, the site was once the location of an oak forest that was ringed by an ocean. Wood from the trees would have been buried in the fine-grained sediments of a delta, floodplain or volcanic ash bed, turning to stone over the course of millions of years.

The bones of the prehistoric creatures that the team found among the now-petrified forest would have been carried to the region by floods and volcanic debris flows coming from further inland, they explained. 

Professor Shapiro and his team reported being particularly surprised to have excavated the skull, teeth and tusks of an astonishingly well-preserved mastodon.

‘What you hope to find is a tip of a tusk,’ he told Chico State Today.

‘Not only do we have the tip, but we have the entire thing. And it’s just beautiful ivory. It’s mind-blowing.’ 

Researchers Just Found The Deepest Shipwreck On Earth Four Miles Below The Pacific

A US-based team has thoroughly mapped and filmed the world’s deepest recorded shipwreck, a World War II US Navy destroyer. In the Philippine Sea, the USS Johnston is at a depth of 21,180 feet (about 6,500 meters). While its existence has long been established, this is the first time a crew has been able to map and film the entire wreckage.

Caladan Oceanic, a US-based private company that focuses on ocean expeditions, gets credit for reaching the shipwreck on March 31. Its research vessel, the DSV Limiting Factor, was able to survey the wreck, which was more than 100 feet deeper than previously believed, sitting in the darkness more than four miles below the surface of the Pacific.

Caladan Oceanic’s founder is Victor Vescovo, a former US Navy commander who has a long-established passion for visiting some of the world’s most hard-to-get-to places. He holds the record for being the first person in history to have been to the top of all the world’s continents, both poles, and the bottom of all its oceans.

With the survey of the USS Johnston, Vescovo reached another milestone — completing the deepest shipwreck dive in history. He was at the controls of the Limiting Factor for the whole process, which took place in two eight-hour segments over two days.

Sunk during the Battle off Samar.

The USS Johnston was sunk by the Japanese navy on October 25, 1944, during the Battle off Samar. It was one of four naval battles which comprised the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest battles in the history of naval warfare and engagement that sounded the death knell of the Japanese navy in World War II, according to the US Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC).

Sam Cox, director of the NHHC, said the new images of the wreck of the Johnston help the Navy put the spotlight on the heroism and history of its crew.

The Johnston was captained by Cmdr. Ernest Evans, a Native American from Oklahoma. Along with two other US destroyers and four smaller destroyer escorts, Evans led the Johnston in attacking a far superior Japanese force of four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and 11 destroyers, according to the NHHC account of the battle.

In an initial encounter, fire from the Johnston knocked out a Japanese cruiser, but the US destroyer was heavily damaged and its ammunition depleted. Evans himself was seriously wounded.

Undaunted, Evans regrouped his crew and the Johnston attacked the Japanese ships again, drawing their fire from a nearby US aircraft carrier.

After two-and-a-half hours of fighting, the Johnston was without power and surrounded by Japanese ships. Evans ordered the crew to abandon the ship, and it rolled over and sank.

Two of the three ships that followed the Johnston into the Japanese battle line were also sunk, said Carl Schuster, a former Navy captain and Hawaii Pacific University instructor.

“The discovery of the USS Johnston serves as yet another reminder of the heroism and sacrifice of that day in Leyte Gulf 77 years ago,” he said.

Of the Johnston’s crew of 327 men,186 died, including Evans. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first Native American in the US Navy to be awarded his country’s highest military honour, according to the NHHC.

For Vescovo, being able to reach the USS Johnston was a very personal mission.

“In some ways, we have come full circle,” he said in a statement. “The Johnston and our own ship were built in the same shipyard, and both served in the US Navy. As a US Navy officer, I’m proud to have helped bring clarity and closure to the Johnston, its crew, and the families of those who fell there.”

Mysterious three-mile wide ‘star map dating back 150,0000 YEARS’ found in Hawaii

Perhaps you haven’t still scrolled through the internet for the latest videos of mind-blowing discoveries that have been posted by some of the content creators of some platforms. However, we’ve found something interesting and of course incredible for you today.

The official content creator of the channel “Third Phase of Moon,” Brett Cousins, said that he had never made discoveries by himself and published until he found some information across an insane discovery.

He has only published discoveries that had been reported worldwide until this incredible moment. Anyhow, this is considered the oldest petroglyphs that humanity has ever found.

He was the first to come across this incredible discovery through the usage of Google Earth. He had discovered it on an ancient celestial star map.

The dating is believed to be more than 150,000 years.

As per Brett Cousins, his novel discovery that he was able to find in Hawaii can help reveal the hidden secrets of the ancient civilizations if we sit back and put some effort into it.

Brett was able to drag the attention of more than 19,000 viewers on his YouTube channel since the release of this great finding. Among them were some of the greats too.

Brett has an idea that this star map as well as the astronomical site have a connection with the mysterious Nazca Lines.