The Sydney Morning Herald has posted an article about the mystery of how thirty strands of Napoleon’s hair ended up in Sydney, Australia.

Genetic testing has never been carried out, but there are two historical facts in its favour.

Firstly, that Napoleon’s head was shorn in the moments after his death and locks were distributed.

Secondly, that a man mentioned in a letter that accompanied the lock, Captain William Crockat, was at the deathbed of the deposed emperor, and therefore would have had an opportunity to take a lock or two for himself.

The letter, from a Scotsman named Ned Todd, states he was given the hair by a woman:

“If I mistake not she said that her brother [Major Crockat] had himself cut the lock from the head of the illustrious dead.”

Ms Betteridge said she looked forward to the task ahead of discovering exactly how it found its way to Sydney.

“I don’t want it to be a fait accompli,” she said. “It’s nice to have a story that unfolds.”

[Full story] [Discuss here]

Giant marsupials, reptiles and flightless birds lived alongside man in Australia for about 5,000 years before going extinct.

Controversy has long surrounded when such creatures became extinct in Australia. New equipment that can date teeth and bones has solved the puzzle, Australian researchers said in the latest issue of the journal Science.

“For a long time, we couldn’t measure bone and teeth, or how old they (animals) were when they died, that is, when they went extinct,” paleontologist Barry Brook at the University of Adelaide in southern Australia told Reuters by telephone.

One of the new techniques used in the latest research was uranium thorium dating, which can gauge when uranium was taken up into the animal’s teeth when it was still alive.

[Full story]

The personal details of convicts sent down under 200 years ago have been put online.

The British government has released the details to coincide with Australia Day on Tuesday, allowing individuals to search through an online data base to check if they are descended from criminals.

If they do find they have convict ancestors, most Australians are unlikely to be perturbed – surveys have revealed that many regard having a convict as an early family member as an interesting talking point at dinner parties.

‘The Colony’. Many Australians will be able to trace the details of their ancestry on Tuesday

Many of the convicts sent to Australia in the 1700s and 1800s were transported for minor crimes such as stealing bread or riding off with someone’s horse.

[Full story]

A 25 million-year-old fossil of mud-sucking whale, an ancestor of today’s blue whales, has been discovered in Australia.

The ancient animal’s mud slurping may have been a precursor to the filter feeding seen in modern baleen whales.

These whales strain huge quantities of tiny marine animals through specialised “combs” which take the place of teeth.

The research is published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The fossilised remains of the primitive baleen whale Mammalodon colliveri were discovered near Torquay, in Victoria, Australia.

[Full story]

An Australian hospital ship which was torpedoed by the Japanese during WW2, taking 268 lives with it, has been found off the coast of Queensland.

The loss of the Centaur in 1943 while sailing to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea was one of Australia’s great wartime disasters. Survivors and their relatives have long pressed for the wreck to be found, fearing salvagers would reach it first.

The government eventually supported a search for the vessel.

On Sunday, it said the wreck’s location had been confirmed by a team led by U.S. marine search expert David Mearns, whose other finds include HMAS Sydney, another Australian wartime wreck.

The sinking of the Centaur was considered a war crime, though no one was ever tried for it. The converted merchant vessel was clearly marked as a hospital ship and had no naval escort, as required by international conventions.

Many of the dead were medical staff.

[Full story] [Photo source]