If famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen trekked across Antarctica a few hundred million years earlier, he may never have returned to reveal the details of the world's underside. Cryolophosaurus ellioti might have eaten him for dinner.
The 22-foot-long (7-meter-long) carnivore with an unusual crest on its skull was one of several dinosaurs that thrived in the extreme polar regions of the world. Though the climate was warmer then than it is now, the dinosaurs endured months of darkness and temperatures that plunged below freezing.
For the last two decades a handful of dinosaur hunters have been chipping fossils from the ice in Antarctica, pulling them from mines dug especially to find the bones in Australia, excavating them from streambeds in New Zealand, and digging them out of frozen riverbanks in Alaska and the cold steppes of Patagonia.
These fossils, skeletal reconstructions, and models and paintings of polar dinosaurs' ancient world went on display in the U.S. last Thursday at the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington. Cryolophosaurus greets visitors with its teeth bared.
Museum may move to Boca
A cultural icon that has served Broward for 25 years may be on its way to Palm Beach County.
And the woman who founded it may see her role diminish.
The board that organizes activities and runs staffing at Dania Beach's Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History is seeking to dissolve itself. But not until after approving another board's sale of the museum building.
Under those moves, the role of Gypsy Graves, 74, the museum's founder and namesake, is uncertain.
Ancient Greek athletic games to be revived at UC Berkeley archaeological site
BERKELEY – Just weeks before the 2004 Summer Olympic Games begin in Athens, ancient footraces that gave birth to the Olympics will be revived in a tiny Greek town 80 miles away — the result of more than 30 years of research by the University of California, Berkeley.
In Ancient Nemea, where the campus continues to excavate an athletic site used some 2,300 years ago for the original Panhellenic Games, more than 1,000 people from around the world are expected to converge on July 31 to sprint barefoot and in tunics down the same track used by ancient Greeks.
Torchbearer Valery Borzov, a gold-medal sprinter at the 1972 Olympic Games, watches as the flame he has lighted on the Altar of the Nemean Games takes hold.
Today (Tuesday, March 30), the Olympic torch, lit five days ago in Olympia, Greece, passed through Ancient Nemea beneath overcast skies and entered the 45-acre archaeological site. There, in a stadium crowded with more than 5,000 people, Ukranian Valery Borzov, a 1972 Olympic gold medalist in the 100- and 200-meter sprints, ran with the torch past the flags of Greece, the United States and the University of California, through the ancient entrance tunnel and onto the track.
Museum announces innovative research project
A Pennsylvania museum has received over three hundred grand to mine a rich collection of American Indian artifacts, including ethnographic and archaeological materials.
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology said they have been awarded a three-year, $301,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support an innovative research experience for undergraduates. The title of the project is "Native Voices, Past and Present, Studies of Native American Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology."