Roman Coins discovered in (U.S) Texas burial Mound

Finds of Roman coins in the United States, including one in an Indian mound in Texas, are most likely lost souvenirs of World Wars I and II rather than proof of ancient transoceanic contact, an expert says.

A study of some 40 reported finds of Roman coins in the United States has convinced Dr. Jeremiah Epstein, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, that “if Romans ever got to America, we haven’t got any evidence of them yet.”

Dr. Epstein reported his findings to American and British experts at a symposium on ancient coins that ended here Tuesday. Roman coins were reported found in the New World as early as 1530, the research says, although it appears that that report and many others since have been in error.

The only documented pre‐Columbian European contact with the New World is the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, dating to about 1000 A.D.

Recently a London coin dealer and expert, Peter Seaby, identified a coin found at Blue Hill Lane as a Norse penny from the reign of Olaf Kyrre, 1067 to 1093 A.D. The coin was reportedly excavated from an Indian midden.

The finding of a Roman “follis” of Emperor Constantin the Great (306‐337 A.D.) in an Indian mound prompted Dr. Epstein to begin his study of reports of Roman coin discoveries. But other artefacts from the mound 1,000 years or older than the coins have been found.

It appears, Dr. Epstein says, that the coin is an example of “reverse stratigraphy,” a phenomenon known from other archaeological sites, of which later objects are carried down below earlier ones, often by animals’ burrowing activities.

As part of his investigations, Dr Epstein advertised in coin publications for people who had found or lost Roman coins.

One correspondent from Africa reported losing a coin while skiing in Colorado. A conference member reported that a coin dealer lost a number of coins, still unrecovered, in an accident on a Houston freeway.

Finds were reported from various areas, including what Dr Epstein describes as “obviously historical contexts,” such as a Baton Rouge, La., bus station and the Abilene, Tex., Air Force base officers’ club.

Others that were investigated turned out to be cases of mistaken identities, such as one “Roman” coin that was actually a token from the 1893 Colombian Exposition. An “ancient Jewish shekel” turned out to be a commemorative token given Jewish immigrants to the New World.

Research on reported finds shows the number increasing after 1914, apparently from returning G.I.’s losing coins picked up on foreign lands. Experts at the conference reported that that situation had occurred in many other places, including Australia, where Roman contact has not been hypothesized.

Accidental Contact Suggested

Dr Epstein agrees that, apart from deliberate attempts at colonization, conquest or trade, there is a possibility of accidental contact by Romans from a “drift voyage” by a disabled ship.

However, there is no evidence, he says, to indicate that any such voyage occurred. Coin finds are not concentrated in coastal areas, nor do they correspond to peak periods of Roman shipping, he explained.

There is evidence on the West Coast for “drift voyages” by Japanese junks, with documented reports, and coin concentration for 18th and 19th-century contact by Chinese fur traders with coastal tribes there, Dr Epstein says.

The lost ancient megacity of the United States

The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is the site of a pre-Columbian Native American city (which existed c. 1050–1350 CE) directly across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis, Missouri. This historic park lies in southwestern Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville.

Things are quieter these days at Cahokia, now a placid Unesco site. But towering, earthen mounds there hint at the legacy of the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico.

A cosmopolitan whir of language, art and spiritual ferment, Cahokia’s population may have swelled to 30,000 people at its 1050 AD peak, making it larger, at the time, than Paris. 

It’s what Cahokia didn’t have that’s startling, writes Annalee Newitz in their recent book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. The massive city lacked a permanent marketplace, confounding old assumptions that trade is the organising principle behind all urbanisation.

“Cahokia was really a cultural centre rather than a trade centre. It still boggles my mind. I keep wondering ‘Where were they trading? Who was making money?’,” Newitz said. “The answer is they weren’t. That wasn’t why they built the space.”

Newitz isn’t alone in their surprise. Assumptions that commerce is the key to urban life long shaped a Western view of the past, explains archaeologist Timothy Pauketat, who has studied Cahokia for decades.

“It’s definitely a bias that influenced earlier archaeologists,” he said. When excavating cities in Mesopotamia, researchers found evidence that trade was the organising principle behind their development, then turned the same lens on ancient cities across the globe. “People thought that this must be the basis for all early cities. It’s led to generations of looking for that kind of thing everywhere,” Pauketat said.

They didn’t find it in Cahokia, which Pauketat believes may instead have been conceived as a place to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead. For many cultures with roots in ancient Cahokia, “water is this barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead,” Pauketat said. Sprawling across a landscape that combines solid earth with patches of the swamp, Cahokia may have served as a kind of spiritual crossroads.

“It’s a city built to straddle water and dry land,” Pauketat said. Living residents settled in the driest spots, while burial mounds rose up in wetter places. Lidar scans of the site have revealed elevated causeways linking the “neighbourhoods” of the living and the dead, physical walkways that literally joined the realms.

And if living at the cusp of the two worlds sounds rather sombre, Cahokians seem to have seen their hometown as a festive place. In Four Lost Cities, Newitz writes that Cahokia’s planners crafted structures and public spaces devoted entirely to mass gatherings, places where individuals would be swept up by the joy of collective experiences. The most spectacular of all was the 50-acre Grand Plaza, where 10,000 or more people could come together for celebrations in a monumental space flanked by earthen pyramids.

“It’s hard to capture the intensity, the grandeur, the multi-dimensionality of an event like that,” Pauketat said. For days, food and drink would be carried into the city, where a phalanx of cooks fed people arriving for the festivities. Stockpiles of wild game, berries, fruits and vegetables became shared feasts. Visitors would sleep in temporary housing or the homes of friends, heading to the plaza for dances, blessings and other events.

On the plaza, the crowd’s buzzing energy turned to a collective roar when spectators bet on bouts of chunkey. The game kicked off when a player rolled a stone disk across the smooth surface of the ground. Taut with focus, hundreds of athletes hurled their spears even as the stone still bounced and rolled. The winner was the one whose spear stuck nearest to the chunkey stone, like a massive game of bocce played with deadly projectiles. Towering poles lining the Grand Plaza may have provided another spectacle of athletic grace, Pauketat said. He imagines men may have climbed the poles or tied themselves in for soaring, airborne dances, a ritual still practised in some Maya parts of Mesoamerica. “In the Mesoamerican ceremony, you have these big, tall cypress poles put in, and four guys who dress up as bird men and fly around those poles,” he said. “We’ve got those poles at Cahokia.”

Shell beads, feathers and fine leather caught the sunlight as everyone donned their most elaborate costumes for such events, Pauketat explained. Cahokians loved a palette of red, white and black; people styled their hair into elaborate buns, mohawks and plumes. Tattoos adorned some bodies and faces. When the parties ended, Cahokians swept waste into pits that now serve as accounts of what the citizens ate and drank together. A decade ago, analysis of pottery beakers archaeologists found at Cahokia revealed biomarkers for a species of holly, known as yaupon, that’s the only caffeinated plant native to North America. Cahokians, it seems, kept the festivities going in part by catching a buzz. And since the native range of yaupon is hundreds of miles from the city site, we know they put significant effort into obtaining it.

That, in turn, may have cemented the plants’ place in ritual life. “Part of their value is in the difficulty of acquiring them,” said anthropologist Patricia Crown, who led the analysis of the beakers. “You had to have the networks to be able to get the substance if it was really important to your religious system.  Today, the site of ancient Cahokia is preserved as Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a Unesco World Heritage Site where archaeological work is ongoing. Seventy of the original mounds are protected there, and a long staircase leads to the summit of Monks Mound, with views across the Grand Plaza. Toting audio guides, visitors walk a 10km path winding through grassland, forest and wetlands. 

Once again, as in ancient times, a constellation of tall poles aligns with the rising sun to measure passing seasons. The onsite interpretive centre features recreated scenes of life here, along with displays of stone tools and pottery shaped by skilled Cahokian hands.

They fit right into American history

Modern life is not far away: Cahokia is framed by a middle-American sprawl of interstate highways and suburbia. But it wasn’t modern development that ended Cahokia’s thrilling story.

Eventually, Cahokians simply chose to leave their city behind, seemingly impelled by a mix of environmental and human factors such as a changing climate that crippled agriculture, roiling violence or disastrous flooding. By 1400, the plazas and mounds lay quiet.

When Europeans first encountered the remarkable mounds at Cahokia, they saw a lost civilisation, explains Newitz in Four Lost Cities. They wondered if some faraway people had built Cahokia, then disappeared, taking with them the brilliant culture and sophistication that had once thrived in the soil of the Mississippi bottomland, where the earth is enriched by riverine floods. But the people of Cahokia, of course, didn’t disappear. They simply left, and with them, Cahokia’s influence wove outward to far-flung places, where some of their most beloved pastimes are cherished to this day.

The yaupon they loved to drink is making a mainstream comeback as a sustainable, local tea that can be harvested from the forest. Chunkey – Cahokia’s favourited game – never went away either. In some Native communities, it has attracted a new generation of young athletes and is on the roster with stickball and blowguns at Cherokee community games.

But it’s more than that. Cahokians loved to kick back over good barbecue and sporting events, a combination that, Newitz noted, is conspicuously familiar to nearly all modern-day Americans. “We party that way all across the United States,” they said. “They fit right into American history.

Giant “Skeletons of Enormous Size” Discovered In New Mexico – New York Times Article From 1902

The expression “we’re like a species of amnesia,” coined by researcher Graham Hancock, is accurate. Despite the fact that it seems that the story of human evolution has been well-documented, new findings are made every year that challenge what we previously believed to be true. There are several findings that are kept hidden from the general public for different reasons; a great example of that would be the black budget world. There also seems to be amazing discoveries that are completely ignored by mainstream media and most of these discoveries would shake the foundations of human history. Another great example is the bodies recently discovered in Nazca, Peru – three-fingered/towed humanoid beings whose physical anatomy is far different from that of a human.  Another example would be the stories regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, like Atlantis, for example, which many scholars now believe to have actually existed.

Out of all the information that’s out there regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, and more, even if just one of these stories are true, it would completely change what we thought we knew about human history and the history of our planet. I believe the story of our past might be different from what seems to be the only two available options, creationism and evolution. There may be a myriad of other factors involved.

These discoveries would also shake the foundations of many people’s belief systems. The human race has been kept from so much information, and forced into a specific worldview that’s designed to benefit the ‘1 per cent.’

In today’s day and age, it’s always best to keep an open mind, especially when new information is constantly emerging (for those who are curious enough to actually look) which challenges the old.

Giants?

Did giants once roam the Earth? It’s been in the literature and lore of multiple cultures throughout human history, from the Maya, the global indigenous populations, the Bible and more since what we perceive as the beginning of time. For example, the Bible tells us that when the Gods were on Earth, they were giants. “This, when you bring up in conversation, normally brings up, you know, laughter and people giggling and thinking your joking, and yet, the Bible is full of references of giants in our history.” – Michael Tellinger

Tellinger is referring to the Nephilim, as referenced in Numbers 13:33 of the Bible: “We saw the Nephilim there (the defendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Again, it’s not just the bible, it’s lore from cultures that pre-dated religion as well as the indigenous.

Tellinger is a renowned author/politician who has made several groundbreaking discoveries regarding lost ancient civilizations that once roamed the Earth. Here’s an article about him, with a picture of him standing next to a giant footprint, almost the size of a full human being.

There are several examples of physical evidence which exists to support the idea that giants once roamed the Earth. For example, stored in the vaults of the medical school at WITS University, Johannesburg, there is part of an upper leg bone with a hip joint that would have stood approximately 12 feet tall. It’s been there since the early 1960s and was found by miners in Northern Namibia. It is one of the most precious and rare specimens available today that clearly indicate the existence of giants in Southern Africa more than 40,000 years ago.

Apparently, in 1883 the Smithsonian, a United States government/military led organization at the time sent a team of archaeologists to South Charleston Mound. According to the official report, the team discovered a number of giant skeletons ranging from 7 to 9 feet tall. Some of them had a “compressed or flat-head type” which would resemble similar skeletal characteristics to those found in Egypt and South America (source).

Whether or not this is ‘fake news is highly debatable, as there is a lot of evidence to suggest it’s not. The list goes on and on, and what’s interesting is an article published in the New York Times in 1902 that also deals with the subject.

The article goes on to describe two stones with “curious inscriptions” and underneath were the bones of a body that “could not have been less than 12 feet in length.” According to the NY Times article, “the men who opened the grave say that the forearm was 4 feet long and that in a well-preserved jaw the lower teeth ranged from the size of a hickory nut to that of the largest walnut in size .”

Apparently, the chest of the body had a circumference of 7 feet.

The bodies were first discovered by Luciana Quintana, it was on his ranch these specific bodies were found, according to the article, “Quintana, who has uncovered many other burial places, expresses the opinion that perhaps thousands of skeletons of a race of giants long extinct will be found. This supposition is based on the traditions handed down from the early Spanish invasion that have detailed knowledge of the existence of a race of giants that inhabited the plains of what now is Eastern New Mexico. Indian legends and carvings also in the same section indicate the existence of such a race.” 

Here’s another New York Times article about skeletons that were discovered in 1885. Going back further still, in 1774 settlers found what they called “The Giant Town,” which housed several gigantic skeletons, one being an eight-foot-tall male. (source)

“In addition to the human skeletons found in NY State, there is also the famous case of ‘The Cardiff Giant,’ a white alabaster-like statue of an 11-foot man who showed an exposed penis and hieroglyphic inscriptions. This statue caused a worldwide sensation and was exhibited in New York City to thousands of paying customers before it was declared a fake by the NY newspapers, despite the fact that scholars from Harvard and elsewhere insisted that the statue was genuine.”

– Richard Dewhurst

Dewhurst is an Emmy Award-winning writer. He’s a  graduate of NYU with degrees in journalism, film, and television, he has written and edited for the History Channel, the Arts & Entertainment Channel, PBS, Fox Television and Fox Films, ABC News, TNT, Paramount Pictures, and the Miami Herald. He himself is well research and you can read his article on the topic here: “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America“

The Story of Human History

As mentioned earlier, we don’t really know the full story of human history, and when new evidence and information pops up, either from the past or today, which challenges the current accepted framework, it seems like people lose their minds. What we have today, in large part, is dogma, instead of actual fact. With all of the discoveries being made and all the discoveries that have been made which mainstream media completely ignores, we are clearly not being told something about the true origins of humanity. The idea that a powerful group of people protecting their interests by suppressing information in multiple fields is unsettling. For a plant and its people to thrive, it must live in complete transparency.

A Northern California couple found $10 million worth of rare coins dating back to the 1800’s San Francisco Mint Coin

A box with rare gold coins discovered by a couple of Californians walking their dog goes on sale with a $15,000 coin. Coins were priced at $11 million and were dated from 1847 to 1894. Several coins were auctioned at the Old San Francisco Mint and one of them — an 1874 $20 double eagle that is usually worth $4,250 — sold for $15,000.

Don Kagin, whose firm is handling the sale, says most of the remaining 1,400 coins had gone on sale on Amazon.com and Kagins.com after the auction.

The couple, whom Kagin declined to identify, found them last year buried under the shadow of a tree on their rural Northern California property.

Here are five things to know about the coins and their origin:

Why are they so Valuable?

Experts say paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s, so it’s extremely rare to find any coins from before that period.

Additionally, most of the coins are in mint condition, having been stashed away seemingly immediately after they were minted. They were valued by Don Kagin, a numismatist who is handling the sale and marketing of the coins.

Who Found them?

Kagin says the couple — a middle-aged husband and wife — does not want to be identified in part to avoid a gold rush on their rural Northern California property by modern-day prospectors.

They discovered the coins in eight cans buried in the shadow of an old tree on the property.

They plan to keep a few of the coins themselves and use the money from the rest to pay off bills and donate to local charities. Money from Tuesday’s auction will benefit the effort to turn the Old Mint into a museum.

Where did the coins Come From?

Most of the coins were minted at the San Francisco Mint, according to Kagin. It’s not clear, however, who put them in the ground or how they were obtained, though theories have abounded.

Kagin says people have linked the coins to stagecoach bandit Black Bart, outlaw Jesse James and theft at the San Francisco Mint, but none of the theories has panned out.

What is in the Collection?

The treasure consists of four $5 gold pieces, fifty $10 gold pieces, and 1,373 $20 double eagles. Among the coins that will be on display in the crown jewel of the collection — an 1866-S No Motto $20 gold piece valued at more than $1 million.

How Does this Discovery Compare to Other Coin Find?

Kagin calls this coin to find the largest such discovery in U.S. history. One of the largest previous finds of gold coins was uncovered by construction workers in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1985 and valued at $1 million.

More than 400,000 silver dollars were found in the home of a Reno, Nevada, man who died in 1974 and were later sold intact for $7.3 million.

Gold coins and ingots said to be worth as much as $130 million were recovered in the 1980s from the wreck of the SS Central America.

But historians knew roughly where that gold was because the ship went down off the coast of North Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.

Long-lost Native American Fort of the Norwalk Discovered in Connecticut

In the United States in Connecticut, there has been a remarkable discovery that might shift our attitude toward the Native North American Community. A fort believed to have been built by a tribe in the seventeenth century has been unearthed.

The find was made during a construction project and it is regarded as one of the most important discoveries in the north-east in recent years. It is believed that the fort will throw new light on Native American’s first encounters with Europeans and the mysterious Norwalk Indians.

Long-lost Native American Fort

This area of Connecticut was inhabited by an elusive tribe known as the Norwalk Indians. It is believed that they had a fort at the site during the early to the mid-seventeenth century and it was used for defence and trade.

The Norwalk appeared to have had some contact with the Dutch, who seemed to have trade arrangements with the tribe. The tribe later sold land to some English colonists and then they seemed to have disappeared from the pages of history.

In the 19th century, the ruins of an Indian stronghold were described in the area by a local antiquarian and it is believed that the discovery is this long-lost fort.

Locating the Fort

The discovery of the fort occurred near some busy railroad tracks near the Norwalk River.

The fort was located during an investigation by archaeologists of the area before work began on replacing the 19th century Walker Bridge. This bridge which spans the Norwalk River had become unstable and had caused some trains to be delayed recently.

At present, the fort is being excavated by ‘the Archaeological & Historical Services Inc., a Storrs, Connecticut-based firm’, according to CNY Central. One of the company’s archaeologists, Ross Harper, and other experts are removing artefacts from the site which are being sent to museums for further examination.

AP News reports that the experts believe that the ‘’fort had wooden walls because what appeared to be post holes were found where vertical wood pieces were placed’’.

The walls would have been made of long wooden posts or stakes tightly tied together and may have been reinforced with structures such as galleries or even a watchtower, which are typical in other Native American forts.

While little remains of the actual fort, because it was constructed from wood, the company has found a treasure trove of artifacts. They have found spear tips, arrows, hatchets, knives, pottery, and wampum. What is intriguing the experts is that they have found items that date up to 3000 years old and they indicate that the site was inhabited for many generations. So far no graves or human remains have been unearthed.

According to VOA News, one of the experts working on the site declared that ‘it’s definitely one of the more important sites, not just for the area but New England in general.”

What makes this fort so unique is that there are so few sites from the Native Americans’ encounters with Europeans in the North Eastern seaboard. For this reason, the discovery of the fort has created great excitement among the archaeological and anthropological communities in the US.

Recently a group of experts has toured the site and they are eagerly awaiting the Archaeological & Historical Services Inc report on the site.

The company overseeing the work is collaborating with the ‘Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegans — the two federally recognized tribes in the state’’ report’s  AP News.

In the past Native American tribes have objected to the removal of artefacts from archaeological sites but not on this occasion. The tribes, who may or may not be descended from the Norwalk people called for great sensitivity to be displayed during the excavations of the fort. It is reported by Phys.org that members of the tribe have ‘’actively been working with people on the ground there for over a year to offer their expertise.”

Importance of the fort

The fort in itself is an important find and will allow experts to better understand the nature of Native American settlements during the first encounters with Native Americans. It can also provide some light on how they used goods such as iron and knives which had been unknown prior to the coming of the Europeans.

The site may also provide insights into the enigmatic Norwalk people, their history and why they simply appeared to have vanished from this part of Connecticut.

Mississippi Repatriates Native American Remains and Artifacts

The Associated Press reports that the Mississippi Department of Archives and History will hand over more than 400 sets of human remains and 83 artefacts in its collections to The Chickasaw Nation under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

A man and a woman were found buried among wolf teeth and turtle shells. Other graves contained mothers and infants. Some tribal members were laid to rest with beloved dogs. Over the past century, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History has stored the remains of hundreds of Native Americans who once inhabited the state.

Most of the remains were found in the Mississippi Delta and range from 750 to 1,800 years old. For decades, they sat on shelves in the state’s collections.

Now, the remains of 403 Chickasaw ancestors along with various artefacts have been returned to their people to be laid to rest on Mississippi soil.

The initiative is the largest of its kind conducted by the state of Mississippi since the passage three decades ago of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Since 1990, the law has required that institutions like museums and schools that receive federal funding return human remains, funerary objects and other sacred items to their Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian descendants.

“We see the repatriation process as an act of love,” said Amber Hood, director of historic preservation and repatriation for The Chickasaw Nation. “These are our grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles and cousins from long ago.”

Around 83,000 ancestral native remains in the United States had been returned to descendants as of last fall, according to National Park Service data. But at least another 116,000 still are waiting to be returned.

Anne Amati, NAGPRA coordinator with the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, said institutions in the southeastern United States have more remains than anywhere else in the country.

Dozens of tribes, including the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee, once lived across millions of acres throughout the Southeast until forcibly and violently removed by the U.S. government following the Indian Removal Act of the 1830s.

After the Great Depression, thousands of graves were disrupted by the Tennessee Valley Authority as workers built reservoirs. Nearly 11,500 remains from Tennessee have now been returned to descendants, but 21,200 remain. More than 18,600 in Alabama have been returned, but there are still about 10,650 more.

In some instances, shell beads, stone tools, celts and vessels found in burial sites across the nation have been put on exhibit in museums.

Many remains in Mississippi were discovered by Delta farmers developing land from the 1950s to 1970s.

Meg Cook, the Mississippi agency’s director of archaeology, said the state has an ethical as well as a legal responsibility to return remains.

“We’re doing everything that we can to reconcile the past and move forward in a very transparent way,” Cook said. “It’s our responsibility to tell the Mississippi story. And that means all of the bad parts, too.”

There are more than 1,000 remains still to be identified and returned to tribes in Mississippi.

The Chickasaw Nation told Mississippi officials they wanted remains and objects from their ancestors to be transported in muslin bags, which will decompose when reburied. Volunteers were recruited during the pandemic shutdown to hand-sew the bags at home.

“Volunteers knew they were helping in some ways to bring these people home, to put them to rest,” Cook said.

Trapped In A Fossil: Remnants Of A 46-Million-Year-Old Meal

A mosquito plunged its proboscis into an animal, perhaps a bird or a mammal, and filled up on a blood meal around 46 million years ago. Then its luck turned for the worse, as it fell into a lake and sunk to the bottom.

Normally this wouldn’t be newsworthy, and nobody would likely know or care about a long-dead insect in what is now northwest Montana.

But somehow, the mosquito didn’t immediately decompose — a fortuitous turn of events for modern-day scientists — and became fossilized over the course of many years, said Dale Greenwalt, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Greenwalt discovered the mosquito fossil after it was given to the museum as a gift, and he immediately realized the specimen’s rarity.

It is, in fact, the only blood-engorged mosquito fossil found, Greenwalt told LiveScience.

The fossil is even stranger because it comes from shale, a type of rock formed from sediments deposited at the bottom of bodies of water, as opposed to amber, the age-old remains of dried tree sap, in which insect remnants are generally better preserved. 

“The chances that such an insect would be preserved in shale is almost infinitesimally small,” Greenwalt said.

In their study, Greenwalt and his collaborators bombarded the mosquito fossil with molecules of bismuth, a heavy metal, which vaporizes chemicals found in the fossil.

These airborne chemicals are then analyzed by a mass spectrometer, a machine that can identify chemicals based on their atomic weights, Greenwalt said.

The beauty of this technique, called time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, is that it doesn’t destroy the sample — previously, similar techniques required grinding up portions of fossils, he added.

The analysis revealed hidden porphyrins, organic compounds found in hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in the blood, hidden in the fossilized mosquito’s abdomen.

The finding may bring to mind the story of “Jurassic Park,” a novel and movie in which scientists resurrect dinosaurs from DNA preserved in blood-engorged mosquitoes preserved in amber.

Although this finding doesn’t really make this fictitious story any more likely, it does show that complex organic molecules besides DNA can be preserved for a long time, Greenwalt said.

The discovery also shows that “blood-filled mosquitoes were already feeding at that time, suggesting that they were around much earlier and could have fed on dinosaurs,” said George Poinar, a paleo-entomologist at Oregon State University, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Greenwalt said he had no way of knowing exactly how the mosquito was preserved so well. Perhaps the most likely hypothesis is that the insect was trapped in a covering of water-suspended algae, which are capable of coating specimens in a sticky, gluelike material, before sinking to the bottom; this algae process has been shown to fossilize other types of insects, he said.

Researchers don’t know what kind of animal the blood came from since hemoglobin-derived porphyrins amongst different animals appear to be identical, Greenwalt said.

The study is exciting because it provides more evidence that porphyrins, organic compounds found in “virtually all living organisms from microbes to humans in varying amounts” are “extremely stable” — and are thus a perfect target for studying long-dead plants and animals, said Mary Schweitzer, a researcher at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the study.