Tag: identified (page 2 of 7)

Astronomers Measure Distance to Farthest Galaxy Yet

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments



The farthest confirmed galaxy observed to date was identified in this Hubble image of a field of galaxies.  The inset image of the galaxy has been colored blue as suggestive of its young stars. Credit NASA/European Space Agency/Yale/University of California, Santa Cruz


Excerpt from nytimes.com

Leapfrogging backward in time to when the universe was apparently feeling its oats, a group of astronomers reported Tuesday that they had measured a bona fide distance to one of the farthest and thus earliest galaxies known.

The galaxy, more than a few billion light-years on the other side of the northern constellation Boötes, is one of the most massive and brightest in the early universe and goes by the name of EGS-zs8-1. 
It flowered into stardom only 670 million years after the Big Bang.
The light from that galaxy has taken 13 billion years to reach telescopes on Earth. By now, however, since the universe has continued to expand during that time, the galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away, according to standard cosmological calculations.
The new measurements allow astronomers to see the galaxy in its infancy. Despite its relative youth, however, it is already about one-sixth as massive as the Milky Way, which is 10 billion years old. And it is getting bigger, making stars 80 times faster than the Milky Way is making them today. The discovery was reported in The Astrophysical Journal by Pascal Oesch of Yale University and his colleagues.

By the rules of the expanding universe, the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is retreating from us, measured by the “redshift” of its light being broadened to longer wavelengths, the way an ambulance siren seems to lower its pitch as it goes by.

In the past few years, as astronomers have raced one another into the past with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, galaxies have been found that appear even more distant. Those measurements, however, were estimates based on the colors of the objects — so-called photometric redshifts.

The new galaxy stuck out in a survey of distant galaxies by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes known as Candels, for Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey. Its redshift was precisely measured with a powerful spectrograph known as Mosfire — Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infrared Exploration — on Keck 1, one of a pair of 10-meter-diameter telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. That makes it the highest redshift confirmed in this way, said Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the astronomers in the study.

How galaxies were able to form and grow so rapidly after the lights came on in the universe is a mystery that will be addressed by a coming generation of instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, a goliath planned for Mauna Kea, already home to a dozen telescopes.

Recently, however, construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, a $1.4 billion project, has been halted by protests by Hawaii residents who feel their mountain has been abused. An echo of that controversy appears in the new paper, in which Dr. Oesch and his colleagues write: “The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.”

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‘Hats Off’ To HATS-6b: Discovery of ‘puffy’ new planet brings scientists closer to finding new life in outer space

May 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

An artist's impression of the planet HATS-6b, orbiting the star, HATS-6. (Supplied: ANU) Excerpt from abc.net.au A "puffy" new planet orbiting a small, cool star has been discovered 500 light years away from Earth, by a team of scientists c...

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Extremely distant exoplanet discovered

April 15, 2015 / / 0 Comments



 



Excerpt from  thespacereporter.com

According to a NASA statement, the agency’s Spitzer Space Telescope has taken part in the discovery of one of the most distant exoplanets yet found. Spitzer observations were combined with data from the Polish Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment’s Warsaw Telescope, part of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. The newly found exoplanet is approximately 13,000 light-years from Earth, and could yield new clues as to the distribution of planets throughout the Milky Way.

The Warsaw Telescope gathers data through the phenomenon known as microlensing, which occurs when a star passes in front of another, more distant star as seen from Earth’s vantage point. The gravity of the nearer star magnifies and intensifies the distant star’s light; any planets orbiting the distant star appear as small disruptions in the magnification. So far, the microlensing methods has identified around 30 exoplanets, the most distant of which is around 25,000 light-years away.

However, the microlensing method cannot always show how far away are the more distant stars and their planets; the distances to about half of the exoplanets found with microlensing cannot be ascertained. Fortunately, Spitzer is able to help. Located 128 million miles from Earth, Spitzer is able to observe a microlensing event at a different time from the Warsaw Telescope, a method called parallax. In the case of the newly discovered exoplanet, the microlensing event was longer than norman, lasting 150 days. 
Spitzer observed the event 20 days earlier than Warsaw. This time delay allowed the distance to the newly found planet to be calculated. With the distance, the planet’s mass, approximately half that of Jupiter, also was determined.

“We’ve mainly explored our own solar neighborhood so far,” said Sebastiano Calchi Novati of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology. “Now we can use these single lenses to do statistics on planets as a whole and learn about their distribution in the galaxy.”

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Researchers Discover Fossils Of A New Species Of Terror Bird

April 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments






Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com 

An army of huge carnivorous "terror birds" -- some as big as 10 feet tall -- ruled South America for tens of millions of years before going extinct some 2.5 million years ago.

Now, with the discovery of a new species of terror bird called Llallawavis scagliai, paleontologists are gaining fresh insight into this fearsome family of top predators.

More than 90 percent of the bird's fossilized skeleton was unearthed in northeastern Argentina in 2010, making it the most complete terror bird specimen ever found. 

“It’s rare to find such a complete fossil of anything, let alone a bird,” Dr. Lawrence Witmer, an Ohio University paleontologist who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Science magazine. “This is a very exciting find.”


llallawavis
Skeleton of Llallawavis scagliai on display at the Lorenzo Scaglia Municipal Museum of Natural Sciences in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
terror bird drawingPreserved skeleton of Llallawavis scagliai. Bones colored in gray were missing in the specimen. Scale bar equals 0.1 m.

Llallawavis likely lived around 3.5 million years ago, near the end of terror birds' reign, according to the researchers. It stood about four feet tall and weighed about 40 pounds.

“The discovery of this species reveals that terror birds were more diverse in the Pliocene than previously thought," Dr. Federico Degrange, a researcher at the Center for Research in Earth Sciences in Argentina and the leader of the team that identified the new species, said in a written statement. "It will allow us to review the hypothesis about the decline and extinction of this fascinating group of birds.” 

CT scans of the bird's inner ear structures indicated that its hearing was tuned for low-pitched sounds, and that it likely produced these kinds of ostrich-like sounds too.

"Low-frequency sounds are great for long-[distance] communication, or if you're a predator, for sensing the movements of prey animals," Witmer told Live Science.

The researchers hope further analyses will yield insights into the bird's vision and other senses.

An article describing the findings was published online March 20 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Buried Mars Glaciers are Brimming With Water

April 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Researchers have identified thousands of glacier-like formations on the planet.
NASA/Levy et al./Nanna Karlsson



Excerpt from news.discovery.com

Glaciers beneath the dusty sands of Mars contain enough water to coat the planet with more than three feet of ice, a new study shows.
“We have calculated that the ice in the glaciers is equivalent to over 150 billion cubic meters of ice — that much ice could cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.1 meters (3.6 feet) of ice,” Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson, a post-doctoral researcher the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

Radar images previously revealed thousands of buried glacier-like formations in the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres.
That data has now been incorporated into computer models of ice flow to determine the glaciers’ size and hence how much water they contain.

“We have looked at radar measurements spanning 10 years back in time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves. A glacier is, after all, a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers on Earth behave and from that we have been able to make models for the ice flow,” she said.

The glaciers are located in belts around Mars between 30 degrees and 50 degrees latitude, roughly equivalent to just south of Denmark’s location on Earth. The glaciers are found on both the northern and southern hemispheres.

The finding could be an important clue to what happened to Mars’ water. The planet, which is now a cold, dry desert, once had oceans, lakes and habitats suitable for microbial life, results from past and ongoing science missions show.

“The ice at the mid-latitudes is an important part of Mars’ water reservoir,” Karlsson said.

Scientists suspect the thick layer of dust covering the ice has saved if from evaporating out into space.

The study appears in this week’s Geophysical Research Letters.

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An Alien Radio Beacon? Possibly Not This Time

April 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments



An Alien Radio Beacon? Possibly Not This Time.

Excerpt from postpioneer.com


For practically a decade, astronomers have puzzled over strong bursts of radio energy that appear to be hailing from billions of light years away. Recently, we received reports of a new wrinkle to this mystery: The bursts seem to comply with a mathematical...

For practically a decade, astronomers have puzzled over strong bursts of radio energy that appear to be hailing from billions of light years away. Recently, we received reports of a new wrinkle to this mystery: The bursts seem to comply with a mathematical pattern, one that does not line up with something we know about cosmic physics.

And, of course, when we hear “mathematical pattern,” “radio transmission,” and “outer space,” all strung collectively, we straight away jump to our preferred explanation—aliens! (Or, you know, a decaying pulsar star, an unmapped spy satellite, or a cell telephone tower.)

It’s also probable that the pattern doesn’t basically exist.

Because 2007, telescopes have picked up almost a dozen so-known as “fast radio bursts,” pulses that last for mere milliseconds, but erupt with as a great deal power as the sun releases in a month. Where could they be coming from? To come across out, a group of researchers took advantage of a basic principle: That higher frequency radio waves encounter less interference as they traverse space, and are detected by our telescopes earlier than reduce frequency waves. The time delay, or “dispersion measure”, in between larger and reduce frequency radio waves from the very same pulse event can be applied to figure out the distance those waves traveled.

Here’s where things got weird. When researchers calculated the dispersion distance for each and every of eleven rapid radio bursts, they identified that every distance is an integer many of a single number: 187.5. When plotted on a graph, as the researchers show us in Figure 1 of their paper, the points type a striking pattern.

A single explanation is that the bursts are coming from distinctive sources, all at on a regular basis spaced intervals from the Earth, billions of light years away. They could also be brought on by a smaller cosmic object a lot closer to residence, such as a pulsar star, behaving according to some sort of physics we don’t yet understand. And then there’s the possibility that aliens are trying to communicate, by blasting simple numeric patterns into space.

But no matter how you slice it, eleven data points is a tiny sample set to draw any meaningful conclusions from. A handful of deviant observations could bring about the complete pattern to unravel.

And that is precisely what seems to be happening. As Nadia Drake reports for National Geographic, newer observations, not integrated in the most up-to-date scientific report or other well known media articles, don’t fit:

“There are 5 quickly radio bursts to be reported,” says Michael Kramer of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. “They do not fit the pattern.”
Rather of aliens, unexpected astrophysics, or even Earthly interference, the mysterious mathematical pattern is probably an artifact produced by a little sample size, Ransom says. When working with a limited quantity of data – say, a population of 11 quickly radio bursts – it’s straightforward to draw lines that connect the dots. Usually, on the other hand, these lines disappear when much more dots are added.
“My prediction is that this pattern will be washed out quite immediately after a lot more fast radio bursts are located,” says West Virginia University’s Duncan Lorimer, who reported the very first burst in 2007. “It’s a great instance of how apparently considerable final results can be identified in sparse information sets.”

That is a bit of a bummer, but nevertheless, these radio bursts are fascinating, and what could be causing them remains as a lot of a mystery as ever. It could even nonetheless be aliens, if not an alien beacon. As SETI Institute Director Seth Shostak told me in an e mail:

“If it is a signal, nicely, it is surely NOT a message — except perhaps to say ‘here we are’. There’s not actual bandwidth to it, which suggests these speedy radio bursts can not encode several bits. But there are so many other possibilities, I feel that automatically attributing one thing in the sky that we don’t (at very first) understand to the operate of aliens is … premature!”

If there’s 1 point that is clear in this whole organization, it is that we’ve nonetheless got plenty to discover about the patterns woven into the universe around us.

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Huge Alien Planet Bathes in the Light of Four Suns

April 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments



30 Ari with its newly discovered companion stars
Karen Teramura

Excerpt from nbcnews.com


Astronomers have spotted a fourth star in a planetary system called 30 Ari, bringing the number of known planet-harboring quadruple-sun systems to two. 

"Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems," study lead author Lewis Roberts, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It's amazing the way nature puts these things together." 

30 Ari lies 136 light-years from the sun in the constellation Aries. Astronomers discovered a giant planet in the system in 2009; the world is about 10 times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its primary star every 335 days. There's also a pair of stars that lie approximately 1,670 astronomical units away. (One AU is the distance between Earth and the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers).

The newfound star circles its companion once every 80 years, at a distance of just 22 AU, but it does not appear to affect the exoplanet's orbit despite such proximity. This is a surprising result that will require further observations to understand, researchers said. 

To a hypothetical observer cruising through the giant planet's atmosphere, the sky would appear to host one small sun and two bright stars visible in daylight. With a large enough telescope, one of the bright stars could be resolved into a binary pair. 

The discovery marks just the second time a planet has been identified in a four-star system. The first four-star planet, PH1b or Kepler-64b, was spotted in 2012 by citizen scientists using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler mission. 

Planets with multiple suns have become less of a novelty in recent years, as astronomers have found a number of real worlds that resemble Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet in the Star Wars films. 

The research was published online this month in the Astronomical Journal.

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Citizen Scientists Find Green Blobs in Hubble Galaxy Shots

April 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from wired.com

In 2007, A Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny var Arkel discovered a weird green glob of gas in space. Sifting through pictures of galaxies online, as part of the citizen science project Galaxy Zoo, she saw a cloud, seemingly glowing, sitting next to a galaxy. Intrigued, astronomers set out to find more of these objects, dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp (“Hanny’s object” in Dutch). Now, again with the help of citizen scientists, they’ve found 19 more of them, using the Hubble space telescope to snap the eight haunting pictures in the gallery above.



Since var Arkel found the first of these objects, hundreds more volunteers have swarmed to help identify parts of the universe in the Galaxy Zoo gallery. To find this new set, a couple hundred volunteers went through nearly 16,000 pictures online (seven people went through all of them), clicking yes/no/maybe as to whether they saw a weird green blob. Astronomers followed up on the galaxies they identified using ground-based telescopes, and confirmed 19 new galaxies surrounded by green gas.



What causes these wispy tendrils of gas to glow? Lurking at the center of each of these galaxies is a supermassive black hole, millions to billions times as massive as the sun, with gravity so strong that even light can’t escape them. As nearby gas and dust swirls into the black hole, like water circling a drain, that material heats up, producing lots of radiation—including powerful ultraviolet. Beaming out from the galaxy, that ultraviolet radiation strikes nearby clouds of gas, left over from past collisions between galaxies. And it makes the clouds glow an eerie green. “A lot of these bizarre forms we’re seeing in the images arise because these galaxies either interacted with a companion or show evidence they merged with a smaller galaxy,” says William Keel, an astronomer at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.



The eight in this gallery, captured with Hubble, are especially weird. That’s because the quasar, the black-hole engine that’s supposed to be churning out the ultraviolet radiation, is dim—too dim, in fact, to be illuminating the green gas. Apparently, the once-bright quasar has faded. But because that UV light takes hundreds of thousands of years to travel, it can continue to illuminate the gas long after its light source has died away.  


Hubble finds phantom objects close to dead quasars

That glowing gas can tell astronomers a lot about the quasar that brought it to light. “What I’m so excited about is the fact that we can use them to do archaeology,” says Gabriela Canalizo, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, who wasn’t part of the new research. Because the streaks of gas are so vast, stretching up to tens of thousands of light years, the way they glow reveals the history of the radiation coming from the quasar. As the quasar fades, so will the gas’s glow, with the regions of gas closer to the quasar dimming first. By analyzing how the glow dwindles with distance from the quasar, astronomers can determine how fast the quasar is fading. “This was something we’ve never been able to do,” Canalizo says.

Measuring how fast the quasar fades allows astronomers to figure out exactly what’s causing it to turn off in the first place. “What makes them dim is running out of material to eat,” Canalizo says. That could happen if the quasar is generating enough radiation to blow away all the gas and dust surrounding the black hole—the same gas and dust that feeds it. Without a steady diet, the quasar is powerless to produce radiation. Only if more gas happens to make its way toward the black hole can the quasar turn on again. The glowing gas can provide details of this process, and if other mechanisms are at play.

With more powerful telescopes, astronomers will likely find many more. Hanny’s Verwoort, it turns out, may not be that weird after all.

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Discovered: A ‘Treasure Chest’ of Ancient Galaxies

March 31, 2015 / / 0 Comments


full sky planck
The full visible sky as seen by the Planck space observatory. The band running through the middle corresponds to dust in our Milky Way galaxy. The black dots indicate the location of the proto-cluster candidates identified by Planck and subsequently observed by the Herschel space telescope. (Photo : ESA and the Planck Collaboration)


Excerpt from natureworldnews.com

Treasure seekers have found the haul of a lifetime, but it wasn't in some ancient temple or mysterious island. Instead, it was in the sky. Researcher using two of the European Space Agency's (ESA) impressive space telescopes have successfully identified what they are calling a "treasure chest" of ancient galaxy clusters, which could help explain how the Universe came to be the way it is today.

That's at least according to a study recently published (PDF) in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, which details how cosmologists used the ESA's Planck space observatory to identify the distant precursor galaxy clusters, and then poured over data from the Herschel telescope for a closer look.

"Finding so many intensely star-forming, dust galaxies in such concentrated groups was a huge surprise," Hervé Dole, lead author of the report from the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in France, said in a statement. "We think this is a missing piece of cosmological structure formation."

So what does he mean by that? Let's turn back to the treasure chest metaphor for this one.  While Planck was the space observatory to dig up the chest, it was the Herschel data that allowed experts to look closely at each and every gold coin (galaxy cluster) inside. Now they are able to learn more about each coin's make, mint, and ultimately, its origins.

And that's a big step in better understanding the early Universe. Expects believe that it took a great deal of time after star and galaxies first sprung to life for them to assemble into large clusters. 

A summary of the 14 billion years out Universe has been in existence, as seen by the Plank space telescop. Light coming from some of the oldest parts of the Universe are just reaching the observatory now, allowing for experts to see the incredible uniformity of the early structure, compared to the chaotic beautify of star, galaxy, and cluster formation that crowd space today.
(Photo : ESA – C. Carreau) A summary of the 14 billion years out Universe has been in existence, as seen by the Plank space telescope. Light coming from some of the oldest parts of the Universe are just reaching the observatory now, allowing for experts to see the incredible uniformity of the early matter, compared to the chaotic beautify of star, galaxy, and cluster formation that crowds space today.
Once the clusters formed, their gravitational influence triggered the creation of new stars and galaxies. Dark matter - which is theorized to account for a great deal of each cluster's mass and influence - helped usher along the process of creating stars. But how these large clusters were ultimately assembled and grew is still a mystery.
That's why looking at some of the oldest 'coins' ever made - estimated to date back to up-to 11 billion light-years ago - could be exceptionally helpful.

"We still have a lot to learn about this new population," Dole said in an ESA release. "Hints of these kinds of objects had been found earlier in data from Herschel and other telescopes, but the all-sky capability of Planck revealed many more candidates for us to study."

"Even when we combined the powerful capabilities of Planck and Herschel, we were only scratching the surface of the phenomena taking place at this critical era in the history of our universe, when stars, galaxies and clusters seem to be forming simultaneously," 
added George Helou, director of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "That's one of the reasons this finding is exciting. It shows us that there is so much more to be learned.

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Scientists Take Key Step to Resurrecting Extinct Woolly Mammoth; First Mammoth Could be Born in 2018

March 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from en.yibada.comScientists from Harvard University announced their success in splicing DNA from the extinct woolly mammoth into living cells of an Asian elephant, making it possible to "de-extinct" the animal that died-off 4,000 years ago....

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MAVEN mission finds early surprises in Martian atmosphere

March 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from chroniclebulletin.com University of Colorado-led Mars mission has observed two unexpected phenomena in the Martian atmosphere, unveiled Wednesday at the 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.NASA describes the finds by MA...

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New Development in the Controversy of the ‘Yeti’ Hair Samples — Here’s the Latest

March 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments



In this undated photo made available by Britain's Channel 4 television of Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes posing with a prepared DNA sample taken from hair from a Himalayan animal. DNA testing is taking a bite out of the Bigfoot legend. After scientists analyzed more than 30 hair samples reportedly left behind by Bigfoot and other related beasts like Yeti and almasty, they found all of them came from more mundane animals like bears, wolves, cows and raccoons. In 2012, researchers at Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology issued an open call asking museums, scientists and Bigfoot aficionados to share any samples they thought were from the mythical ape-like creatures. (AP/ Channel 4)
In this undated photo made available by Britain’s Channel 4 television of Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes posing with a prepared DNA sample taken from hair from a Himalayan animal.



Excerpt from theblaze.com

A new study that re-analyzed so-called “yeti” hair samples from previous research that had identified them as belonging to an “anomalous ursid” might have disappointing news for those who thought the findings last year meant a “bigfoot” of sorts was still out there. Yet, the author of the original findings stands by his claims.

Research published in the journal ZooKeys found that the hair samples said to be from Central Asia and the Himalayas belong to a known species in those regions.

“We have concluded that there is no reason to believe that the two samples came from anything other than brown bears,” the authors wrote in the study abstract.


After scientists analyzed more than 30 hair samples reportedly left behind by Bigfoot and other related beasts like Yeti, they found all of them came from more mundane animals like bears, wolves, cows and raccoons. Two samples were said to have been from an “anomalous ursid,” but new analysis suggests that the samples were from brown bears. (AP/Channel 4)
These authors used mitochondrial 12S rRNA sequencing on the same samples that Oxford University’s Bryan Sykes and his fellow authors used in their study published last year. The issue Eliecer Guiterrez, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues found with Sykes research was that his team used a fragment of DNA.

“We made this discovery that basically that fragment of DNA is not informative to tell apart two species of bears: the brown bear and [modern-day Alaskan] polar bear,” Gutierrez told Live Science.

At the time of his 2014 study, Sykes et al. wrote “[...] it is important to bear in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this survey cannot refute the existence of anomalous primates, neither has it found any evidence in support. […] The techniques described here put an end to decades of ambiguity about species identification of anomalous primate samples and set a rigorous standard against which to judge any future claims.”

And Sykes still holds his ground, despite the more recent findings.
“What mattered most to us was that these two hairs were definitely not from unknown primates,” Sykes told Live Science in light of the recent research. “The explanation by Gutierrez and [Ronald] Pine might be right, or it might not be.”

To NBC News, Sykes said that Gutierrez’ findings are “entirely statistical.”

“The only way forward, as I have repeatedly said, is to find a living bear that matches the 12S RNA and study fresh material from it,” he continued. “Which involves getting off your butt, not an activity I usually associate with desk-bound molecular taxonomists.”

Daniel Loxton, an editor for Junior Skeptic, which is produced by the Skeptics Society, told Live Science that people will continue to believe in and seek out yetis, bigfoots and the like, because they are”fascinated by monsters, and they’re fascinated by mysteries in general.”

Blake Smith, in a blog post for the Skeptics Society laid out the whole saga involving Sykes research and the more recent analysis by Guiterrez. Smith ultimately concluded that he’s “still convinced that Yeti and Bigfoot are not to be found in the forests and mountains of the Earth, but in the minds of people.”

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Neanderthals Turned Eagle Talons Into ‘Stunning’ Jewelry

March 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments


Image: Talons
The eight eagle talons from Krapina were arranged with an eagle phalanx that was also found at the site.


Excerpt from nbcnews.com

Long before they shared the landscape with modern humans, Neanderthals in Europe developed a sharp sense of style, wearing eagle claws as jewelry, new evidence suggests. 

Researchers identified eight talons from white-tailed eagles — including four that had distinct notches and cut marks — from a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal cave in Croatia. They suspect the claws were once strung together as part of a necklace or bracelet.


"It really is absolutely stunning," study author David Frayer, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas, told LiveScience. "It fits in with this general picture that's emerging that Neanderthals were much more modern in their behavior." 
The talons were first excavated more than 100 years ago at a famous sandstone rock-shelter site called Krapina in Croatia. 
There, archaeologists found more than 900 Neanderthal bones dating back to a relatively warm, interglacial period about 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. They also found Mousterian stone tools (a telltale sign of Neanderthal occupation), a hearth, and the bones of rhinos and cave bears — but no signs of modern human occupation. Homo sapiens didn't spread into Europe until about 40,000 years ago. 
The eagle talons were all found in the same archaeological layer, Frayer said, and they had been studied a few times before. But no one noticed the cut marks until last year, when Davorka Radovcic, curator of the Croatian Natural History Museum, was reassessing some of the Krapina objects in the collection. 
The researchers don't know exactly how the talons would have been assembled into jewelry. But Frayer said some facets on the claws look quite polished — perhaps made smooth from being wrapped in some kind of fiber, or from rubbing against the surface of the other talons. There were also nicks in three of the talons that wouldn't have been created during an eagle's life, Frayer said.
The findings were published March 11 in the journal PLOS ONE.

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