For any fans of Jurassic Park, now could be the chance to tread the same path as the prehistoric giants before us, after a set of well-preserved dinosaur footprints were unearthed on a beach off the south coast of England.
Engineers from the UK government's Environment Agency were investigating how to reinforce sea defenses along the Yaverland seafront on the Isle of Wight, when they uncovered the fossils, according to a press release.
"Dinosaurs existing right where our team is working brings old and new together – the modern challenges of combatting climate change with a period of time we can only imagine," the agency's regional flood and coastal-risk manager Nick Gray, said.
"We've all read the stories and seen the films, but this gives us just a hint of what life was like."
Experts believe the 125 million-year-old prints could be from a mantellisaurus, seven meters long, 750kg in weight and three-toed, which distinguishes them from other dinosaurs. Mantellisaurus were herbivorous and lived during the early Cretaceous period, which ended 66 million years ago.
The Environment Agency said the fossils were excavated in a vacation destination beside a beachside café, a car park and a bus stop. But while tourists have unknowingly been walking in the footsteps of dinosaurs, this type of discovery does not come as a surprise to experts.
Martin Munt, curator of the local Dinosaur Isle Museum, called the Isle of Wight the "richest dinosaur location in Europe."
In the press release, Munt said 35 different dinosaur types have been found on the island, and that while they can't be certain of the dinosaur species that made the prints, it is most "likely a mantellisaurus was here, not just in other parts of the south coast," where they were assumed to be more common.
Displayed in London's Natural History Museum is a mantellisaurus skeleton that was discovered on the Isle of Wight in 1917. It is one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons in the UK, according to the Environment Agency.
The ruins of an "incredibly rare" 5000-year-old tomb have been uncovered on one of the Scottish Orkney Islands, National Museums Scotland said in a statement.
The excavation at Holm, East Mainland, Orkney, revealed a stone structure accessed through a seven-metre long passage and traces of a cairn – or pile of stones – that would have covered it, representing the "pinnacle of neolithic engineering in northern Britain," the statement said.
Fourteen articulated skeletons of men, women and children, as well as other human remains, were discovered in one of the six smaller side cells that surrounded a large stone chamber.
"In the neolithic, it would have been an incredibly impressive 15m diameter, enormous mound, very substantial stonework, very impressive architecture. Those cells are real feats of engineering," Hugo Anderson-Whymark, one of the excavation's co-directors and senior curator of prehistory (neolithic) at National Museums Scotland, told CNN.
Two of the skeletons had been positioned so that they were almost embracing against each other, with two children placed over their heads, Anderson-Whymark said. However, archaeologists have not yet determined the relationships between these individuals.
"The preservation of so many human remains in one part of the monument is amazing, especially since the stone has been mostly robbed for building material," archaeologist Vicki Cummings, head of the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University, who co-directed the excavation, said in a statement.
"It is incredibly rare to find these tomb deposits, even in well-preserved chambered tombs and these remains will enable new insights into all aspects of these peoples' lives," she added.
The tomb was largely destroyed in the late 18th or early 19th century to provide stone for building a farmhouse, according to the statement, but later rudimentary excavations in 1896 uncovered eight skeletons and prompted local antiquary James Walls Cursiter to hypothesize that it was a ruined tomb.
Papers held in a private collection of Curister's notes contained more clues that allowed archaeologists to undertake a geophysical survey in the hope of pinpointing the potential tomb, and provide the basis for the excavation.
"It was quite a surprise to make that discovery," Anderson-Whymark said.
A 500-year-old stone snakehead has been presented to the public after it was uncovered in an earthquake in Mexico City last year.
The Aztec figure was found in "the bowels of ancient Tenochtitlan" after the quake on September 19, 2022, according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
The sculpture measures 1.8 metres long, one metre high, 85cm wide and has an estimated weight of 1.2 tonnes.
Thanks to its preservation 4.5 metres below the earth's surface, scientists were even able to detect paint on about 80 per cent of the figure's surface.
Restoration work on the sculpture will continue until early 2024 in a humidity chamber.
It's not known what the sculpture represents, but the Aztecs did revere a creator god, Quetzalcoatl, who was depicted as a feathered serpent.
A series of ancient Egyptian paintings up to 2000 years old have been restored by experts from Germany and Egypt.
It took 30 specialists five years to complete the restoration.
Swipe through to see what the paintings looked like after their restoration.
Orion represents the constellation of the same name.
Sothis, which is the ancient Egyptian name for the constellation Sirius, is depicted next to him.
"Sirius is invisible in the night sky for 70 days a year until it rises again in the east," Christian Leitz from the University of Tübingen said.
"That point was New Year's Day in ancient Egypt and also heralded the annual flooding of the Nile."
Egyptians believe the third figure – the goddess Anukis – was responsible for the Nile floodwaters receding about 100 days later.
The experts cleaned the dirt and soot off hundreds of figures and astronomical representations to reveal their original colours.
The temple is in Esna, located about 700 kilometres south of Cairo in Egypt.
It is 37 metres long, 20 metres wide and 15 metres high.
The sandstone structure was placed in front of the actual temple building under the Roman Emperor Claudius (41–54 AD) and probably eclipsed it, according to the University of Tübingen.
The colourful ceiling shows gods, mythological figures and representations of the sun, moon, signs of the zodiac and various astronomical constellations, the university said.
The ceiling is divided into seven sections, with each featuring a different theme.
Themes include the daily course of the sun, the phases of the moon, the different hours of the night and even New Year's Day.
Construction workers in northeast Florida have unearthed a piece of 19th-century history buried beneath the oldest city in the United States.
Florida Department of Transportation crews were digging as part of an ongoing drainage improvement project in downtown St. Augustine on October 5 when they discovered a nearly intact vessel hidden in the dirt, the department said in a news release.
The shipwrecked boat – found more than eight feet below ground – was fully removed and in wet storage by Wednesday, department officials said.
The fishing boat was found on State Road A1A near the Bridge of Lions in the city known as the "oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin" in the US, according to the historic city's website.
DOT officials say they believe the vessel dates back to around the mid- to late 1800s.
"We believe the vessel may have sunk unexpectedly and, over time, was silted in," said Greg Evans, the department's District 2 secretary, in a statement. "That is why it was preserved so well – it was encapsulated in soil and mud, so there was no air contact for it to decay. It's truly an incredible find."
Aerial imagery shows the site where archaeologists recovered an 19th-century ship in Florida.
It was likely buried for "as much as a century" before crews found it, James Delgado, vice-president of the archeological company contracted to preserve the wreck said.
"Many waterfronts that have changed over time through landfill have buried boats and ships," he said. "That being said, these are still rare finds in the world of maritime archaeology."
Florida boat
Archaeologists excavate the ship, possibly from the late 19th century, along its left side.
Before the boat is relocated to a permanent home, the next step is to stabilise the vessel, according to Ian Pawn, Florida DOT District 2 cultural resources manager.
"When an object this well-preserved is discovered in wet conditions, archaeologists have to work quickly as the drying of wood will begin the decaying process," Pawn said in a statement.
"The pieces will be observed in wet storage to stabilise as we determine future preservation efforts," he said.
Each measuring less than a centimetre tall, and the width of a fingernail, five newly unearthed mysterious gold treasures found in Hov, Norway, could help unlock secrets of an ancient society, scientists say.
The tiny pieces - intricately detailed gold foil figures discovered during excavations of a pagan religious temple - are a rare find in Norway.
A total of 35 gold foil figures have been found at this Hov temple site.
The five most recently found were discovered during an excavation led by Kathrine Stene, an archaeologist at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo.
The remains of the Hov temple were uncovered in 1993 along with two gold figures. Subsequent digs turned up 28 more foils there over the following years, making it the site with the most Norwegian foil discoveries thus far.
The five latest pieces uncovered were buried under the Hov temple's walls and within post holes of the structure, as if they were placed their intentionally.
This has led researchers to believe that the foils may have been an offering to the building.
"They tell us a story about the importance of the area in which they were discovered," archaeologist and adviser at the University of Oslo Nicolai Echkoff said.
"The site is found next to Mjøsa (the biggest lake in Norway), at the outlet of the river Gudbrandsalslågen.
"As such, most trade goods from the mountain regions in eastern Norway must have passed by this site before being shipped toward the shore.
"The figurines and (temple) thus confirm it is as a seat of power in the late Norwegian Iron Age," he said.
A gullgubber measures just under a centimeter and is as thin as a piece of paper.
While the foils' designs have distinct references to the Merovingian Period, a pre-Viking period between 476 and 750 AD, exactly what they were made for remains unclear.
"There are many different suggestions (as to the foils' purpose)," Ingunn Marit Røstad, an archaeologist and associate professor at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, said.
"They must have been placed there intentionally, so I think it's some form of sacrifice that has been done - probably in connection with some of the rituals that had been taking place inside of this pagan building, perhaps marriage rituals, since very many of these gold foils have pictures of couples on them."
New research confirms that fossil human footprints in New Mexico are likely the oldest direct evidence of human presence in the Americas, a finding that upends what many archaeologists thought they knew about when humans arrived in the New World.
The footprints were discovered at the edge of an ancient lakebed in White Sands National Park and date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science.
The estimated age of the footprints was first reported in Science in 2021, but some researchers raised concerns about the dates. Questions focused on whether seeds of aquatic plants used for the original dating may have absorbed ancient carbon from the lake — which could, in theory, throw off radiocarbon dating by thousands of years.
The new study presents two additional lines of evidence for the older date range. It uses two entirely different materials found at the site, ancient conifer pollen and quartz grains.
The reported age of the footprints challenges the once-conventional wisdom that humans didn't reach the Americas until a few thousand years before rising sea levels covered the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, perhaps about 15,000 years ago.
"This is a subject that's always been controversial because it's so significant — it's about how we understand the last chapter of the peopling of the world," said Thomas Urban, an archaeological scientist at Cornell University, who was involved in the 2021 study but not the new one.
Thomas Stafford, an independent archaeological geologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was not involved in the study, said he "was a bit skeptical before" but now is convinced.
"If three totally different methods converge around a single age range, that's really significant," he said.
A Norwegian family hunting for a lost earring in their backyard dug up an entirely unexpected treasure - two Viking-era brooches.
The Aasvik family on the island of Jomfruland deployed a metal detector to try to find the earring but it soon detected the bronze brooches, both of which had traces of gold on them, according to a translated post on the local council's cultural heritage department's Facebook page.