A 4,000-year-old burial chamber which belongs to an ancient Egyptian queen has been found outside Cairo.

The necropolis of Saqqara outside Cairo has yielded a string of new discoveries as 10 different teams excavate a previously untouched area of these burial grounds were used continuously for more than 2,000 years until Roman times.

French mission head Philippe Collombert said the mummy of Queen Behenu was destroyed, but the chamber contained green hieroglyphics picked out on white stone known as the “Pyramid Texts.”

“We are excited because the texts are well conserved,” he told The Associated Press, adding the queen’s titles were written on the walls of the 33 by 16 foot (10 metre by 5 metre) burial chamber inside her small pyramid.

The text is primarily concerned with protecting the queen’s remains and her transition to afterlife.

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A dinosaur-like creature has been found which is 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs. [Thx Tron]

Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period – about 245 million years ago.

The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.

They described their findings in the journal Nature.

The study was led by Dr Sterling Nesbitt from the University of Texas at Austin in the US.

He said: “This new evidence suggests that [dinosaurs] were really only one of several large and distinct groups of animals that exploded in diversity in the Triassic period, including silesaurs [like this one], pterosaurs, and several groups of crocodilian relatives.”

Dr Randall Irmis from the Utah Museum of Natural History in the US was also involved in the study. He said that this group of creatures – the silesaurs – were the “closest relative of the dinosaurs”.

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The remains of a 9th century moat, a rampart dating back to the 10th-11th centuries, and an illustration of the castle have been unearthed in Prague.

This one of a kind depiction was found on the lowest level of the stonework. As Ms. Marikova-Kubkova said, “this is the first find of this type in Prague.” The surprising finding was made on the final stage of excavation works in the premises to the south of the passage from the second to the third courtyards.

The remnants of Prague Castle’s fortifications were first uncovered only in the middle of the 20th century while construction works at the third courtyard were in progress. It is supposed that this very spot was a kind of cult place in the 9th century.

The archeologists managed to uncover only the lowest level of the fortifications stonework near the south passage. Some historical sources testify that local terrain originally was wave-like, but it was flattened in the 16th century while consctructing the buildings that do exist there in our days. As a result, almost all evidence of the previous dwellers activities was completely destroyed.

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A new German documentary has coloured black and white footage of WWII to allow viewers to see the war as people back then did.

Joey Cordevin, a spokeswoman for the film-makers, said: ‘Most images from this war were made in black and white.

‘But for this film they were colourised using the very latest technology to allow  people now to see the war as people then did.’

The footage has already proved extremely powerful for those who experienced the war first hand.

Berlin local Elke Breitenback, 78, said: ‘It is extraordinary. I remember my father coming back on leave after the invasion of France bringing sweets.

‘Now for the first time I was able to see what he experienced.’

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Engravings on ostrich shells which date back 60,000 years may be examples of a symbolic communication system among African hunter-gatherers.

The unusually large sample of 270 engraved eggshell fragments, mostly excavated over the past several years at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, displays two standard design patterns, according to a team led by archaeologist Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux 1 in Talence, France. Each pattern enjoyed its own heyday between approximately 65,000 and 55,000 years ago, the investigators report in a paper to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers already knew that the Howiesons Poort culture, which engraved the eggshells, engaged in other symbolic practices, such as engraving designs into pieces of pigment, that were considered to have been crucial advances in human behavioral evolution. But the Diepkloof finds represent the first archaeological sample large enough to demonstrate that Stone Age people created design traditions, at least in their engravings, Texier says.

Evidence of intentionally produced holes in several Diepkloof eggshells indicates that ancient people made what amounted to canteens out of them, a practice that researchers have documented among modern hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

The engraved patterns probably identified the eggshells as the property of certain groups or communities, Texier proposes.

“The Diepkloof engravings were clearly made for visual display and recognized as such by a large audience comprising members of a community, and probably members of related communities,” comments University of Bordeaux 1 archaeologist Francesco d’Errico, who was not involved in the new study.

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