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3,000-year-old headless skeletons discovered on Vanuatu

The skeletons of 71 individuals have been found buried in an old coral reef in Vanuatu which served as a cemetery 3,000 year ago.

When a team of archaeologists began excavating an old coral reef in Vanuatu in 2008 and 2009, they soon discovered it had served as a cemetery in ancient times. So far, 71 buried individuals have been recorded, giving new information on the islands’ inhabitants and their funeral rites.

“This is a groundbreaking discovery, as it is the oldest and biggest skeleton find ever in the Pacific Ocean; bigger cemeteries found further east are much younger,” says Mads Ravn, head of research at the University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology in Norway.

Relatives did not treat their dead gently. Besides being headless, some of them had had their arms and legs broken, in order to fit into the coral reef cavities. Ravn suggests they may have been left to rot first, and buried later as skeletons.

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Three skeletons found at Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal

The skeletons of two adults and one teenager have been unearthed at the Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal.

“From their bones and teeth we can determine their sex, age and size,” said bio-archeologist Gerard Gagne.

The discoveries come thanks to excavation work carried out by Bell to lay new lines in front of the Basilica. Contractors knew they would encounter the ancient foundations of the Notre Dame Church, which was built in 1672 and sat near where the basilica is now.

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Chilean family finds four 2,300-year-old skeletons in their backyard

A family in Santiago, Chile were removing soil from their yard when they uncovered four skeletons dating back to 320 B.C.

The Valdes Navarro family found the relics of the Bato culture on Saturday in Con-Con, a municipality located about 130 kilometers (81 miles) west of Santiago.

Francisco Allendes, an archaeologist, historian and former director of the Con-Con Museum, said that locating the skeletons about 80 centimeters (2 1/2 feet) beneath the ground “is a relevant find, because it serves to confirm the presence of this group (the Batos) in a super-dense way in demographic terms in this area.”

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Tyrannosaurus Rex’s miniature ancestor

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.”

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Will we ever run out of dinosaur bones?

Slate asks the question, “Will we ever run out of dinosaur bones?”

Not for a long, long time. There are currently about 3,000 so-called “full” dinosaur specimens—complete or near-complete skeletons or just a complete or near-complete skull—in museums around the United States. Scientists estimate that there are at least triple this number as yet uncollected around the globe. It’s hard to say how long it will take to track these down. But currently we’re discovering new full specimens at a rate of about 14 per year. If we continue at that pace, it’s safe to say we won’t run out soon. (This rate is historically high—between 1970 and 1990, the rate was only six per year.) Pinning down the exact number of all uncollected fossils—not just complete specimens but bits and pieces like individual teeth or stray tail bones—is nearly impossible, but the figure is certainly in the millions.

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