Restoration work at the Carmelite monastery in Hungary has turned up a Gothic passageway, a window, as well as some mural paintings in a 17th century dining hall.

The section that links the monastery and a church on a hill was made during restoration work which started in 2007. The work is aimed at a full restoration of the building complex, he said.

Experts have already found mural paintings in a 17th century dining hall, depicting Saint Paul the Hermit, the portraits of four other church leaders, as well as scenes from the day-to-day life of Pauline friars, Balazsik said. An 8.5-metre drain section dating back to the same century has also been found in its original condition, he added.

Archaeologists in Bulgaria have uncovered an enormous cult complex at the ancient Thracian city of Perperikon.

The complex consists of at least 9 altars each 2 meters in diameter located on an area of 12 square km. They are dated back to about 1 500 BC thanks to objects discovered around them, which is about the time of Ancient Egypt and the civilization of Mycenae and Minoan Crete. This is the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.

On those altars, the ancient Thracians practiced fire rituals; similar rituals were practiced at about the same time in Ancient Egypt, on the island of Crete, and in the Hittites state in Asia Minor.

A burial mound on an Orkney island may contain carvings showing human eyes and eyebrows.

Richard Strachan, senior archaeologist with the Historic Scotland cultural resources team, said: “Initial comparisons do show a similarity in use of this eyebrow motif and may point to the possibility that the markings in the cairn are meant to show human eyebrows and eyes, as the style is very similar to the figurine.

“Alternatively, we may be seeing the re-use of a motif familiar to the carver and applied to different contexts with different meaning.

What could be the oldest habitation site found in the Burren has been discovered at Caherconnell, Ireland.

Director of the dig, Graham Hull said yesterday that the team of archaeologists “were whooping and jumping up and down at the discovery of a stone arrowhead”.

He said: “We didn’t even have to carbon date it. We knew instantly that the arrowhead is a time marker and dates to approximately 2500 BC”.

The arrowhead was found by archaeologist Anita Pinagli and Mr Hull said the discovery “was the star find of the dig”. He said: “The remains of a post-built wooden house were discovered and the finely-made arrowhead, together with the hundreds of stone tools and pottery dating to the Late Neolithic period or Early Bronze Age, indicate strongly that we have found a prehistoric settlement. It could be the oldest habitation site yet known on the Burren.”

Paleontologists have discovered a new dinosaur, the Raptorex kriegsteini, which looks exactly like a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

“The thought was these signature Tyrannosaur features evolved as a consequence of large body size,” Stephen L. Brusatte of the American Museum of National History, an author of a paper describing the dinosaur published online by the journal Science, said at a news conference. “They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size.”