There are a lot of mysteries surrounding Viking graves, and a recent discovery has raised a new one: Why did Icelandic Vikings kill male horses in their prime and bury them with middle-aged men? And why, it seems, were these Vikings more inclined to eat female horses? ...read more
We know the ancient Egyptians loved cats, but what about the Vikings? Recent genetic research has shown that these seafaring Nordic explorers brought domesticated cats on board their ships to kill rodents, helping the furry felines spread across the globe. But the Vikings also ...read more
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered dozens of mummified cats along with 100 wooden gilded statues of felines and a bronze statue of a cat goddess named Bastet. These artifacts were found inside the King Userkaf pyramid complex in the Saqqara necropolis, a famous burial ground ...read more
On February 5, 1918, the U.S. 102nd Infantry reached the front lines of France at Chemin des Dames, north of Soissons. Heavy artillery gunfire and grenade assaults from the Central Powers soon followed. After days and nights of shelling, the exhausted U.S. ...read more
Scientists using a new underwater camera system recently captured footage of a strange creature known as the “headless chicken monster” swimming about a mile deep in the Southern Ocean near Australia. Resembling a chicken with its head cut off, sporting tentacles and waving ...read more
The Endangered Species Act was created by a somewhat unlikely hero: President Richard M. Nixon. Although Nixon expressed personal disgust with environmentalists in private, he also recognized that Americans’ interest in the environment was not a passing fad. Nixon used his ...read more
A crocodile’s jaw crushes down on its victim with 3,700 pounds per square inch of force. That’s more than three-and-a-half times the bite of a lion and 25 times that of a human. Historically, crocodile attacks are 100 times deadlier than shark attacks—and far more ...read more
The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. The Neolithic Revolution started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile ...read more
The United States Marine Corps has endured few firefights as savage as the Battle for Outpost Vegas in the waning months of the Korean War. With a roar that sounded like “twenty tornadoes tearing at a countryside,” according to one serviceman, more than 500 mortar and artillery ...read more
1. Sergeant Stubby—The Most Decorated Dog of World War I On a fateful day in 1917, a stray pit bull mix wandered onto the Yale University campus while members of the 102nd Infantry Regiment were training. This lost pup fit right in, participating in drills and even learning to ...read more
It’s called “panda diplomacy” and it’s thought to have started as early as the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century when Empress Wu Zeitan sent a pair of bears (believed to be pandas) to Japan. This Chinese policy of sending pandas as diplomat gifts was revived in 1941, on the eve of ...read more
Ahead of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston this week, Professor George Church of Harvard University spoke about the progress his team has made over two years of trying to recreate the genetic blueprint of the ...read more
1. Franklin Roosevelt and Fala In 1940, FDR was given a Scottish terrier puppy he named Murray the Outlaw of Falahill, after one of his Scottish ancestors. Known as Fala, the pooch frequently traveled with the president, attended important meetings with him and slept by his bed ...read more
In late November 1926, a live animal sent by one Vinnie Joyce of Nitta Yuma, Mississippi, arrived at the White House to be slaughtered and served up for that year’s Thanksgiving dinner. President Calvin Coolidge, however, became smitten by the beast and instead granted it a ...read more
The bison—often called the buffalo—has appeared on everything from a famous U.S. nickel to two state flags, the seal of the Department of the Interior and even the logos of many sports teams. Now, thanks to a new law naming them the country’s national mammal, the iconic prairie ...read more
Researchers from Russia’s Tomsk State University (TSU) recently analyzed the well-preserved fossilized skull of an Elasmotherium sibiricum, otherwise known as the “Siberian unicorn,” unearthed in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan. Though scientists previously believed the species ...read more
When European scientists first encountered the fossilized teeth of Gigantopithecus in the 1930s, Chinese pharmacies were marketing the enormous dental specimens as “dragon’s teeth.” First identified as a species in 1935, Gigantopithecus immediately earned comparisons to King ...read more
In the 16th century, as many as 250,000 giant tortoises are believed to have roamed the Galápagos, an archipelago of 19 islands located in the Pacific Ocean some 620 miles (1,000 km) off the coast of Ecuador. When Spanish explorers stumbled on the islands in 1535, they actually ...read more
Old World monkeys, one of the two main monkey groups, belong to the family Cercopithecidae, which is related to apes and humans. They are distinguished from New World monkeys by the form of the nose: Like apes and humans, Old World monkeys have narrow noses with downward-facing ...read more
Though far less famous than later non-human astronauts, the first animals in space were a group of fruit flies, launched to an altitude of 42 miles at the tip of a Nazi-designed V-2 rocket by American military scientists on February 20, 1947. The flies, members of the ...read more
When archaeologists began to excavate an abandoned cellar in the medieval section of Tulln, Austria, in 2006 to make way for construction of a new shopping center, they made an extraordinary find. Along with coins, remnants of ceramic plates and scattered trash, they unearthed ...read more
Scientists recently uncovered the fossilized bones of a human-sized salamander-like creature dating to the Late Triassic period (some 220 to 230 million years ago) in the Algarve, Portugal’s southernmost region. They dubbed the newly identified species Metoposaurus algarvensis, ...read more
On February 2, 1887—a few months after an inferno had reduced a third of the commercial buildings in Punxsutawney to ashes—a small group of men ascended a wooded area a mile outside the small western Pennsylvania coal town in search of a local rodent said to possess ...read more
A group of scientists from Siberian Northeastern Federal University traveled to Maly Lyakhovsky Island, in far northern Siberia, in May 2013 to track down rumors of a woolly mammoth skeleton trapped in the region’s permafrost. After finding two giant tusks protruding from the ...read more