See the 'Star of India,' decades after it was nabbed in a heist

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 2 days ago

At 563 carats, the Star of India is the world’s largest gem-quality blue star sapphire, and is approximately 2 billion years old. (Image credit: D. Finnin/Copyright AMNH)


What does the legendary Star of India — a 563-carat star sapphire the size of a golf ball — have in common with a 35-million-year-old petrified redwood slab; a massive cluster of sword-like crystals that looks like it came from "Game of Thrones;" and a 5-ton (4.5-metric ton) stone pillar that can "sing?"

You can see all of them, along with 5,000 other amazing stones, in the newly renovated Mignone Hall of Gems and Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, which is reopening after a four-year closure on Saturday (June 12). There, one-of-a-kind precious gems appear alongside odd-looking rocks — some of which date to billions of years ago — that have been uniquely warped and twisted by extreme temperatures and pressures.

Individually and together, these objects tell a story of the diverse geologic processes that shape minerals on Earth's surface and deep inside our planet, beginning when the world was young and continuing to this day, museum representatives told Live Science.

Related: 13 mysterious and cursed gemstones

The Star of India, which formed about a billion years ago, was discovered in Sri Lanka in the 18th century. It is one of the best-known gems in the world, in part because it was famously and brazenly stolen from AMNH in 1964, along with several more of the museum's prized stones, by a pair of thieves named Jack "Murf the Surf" Murphy and Allan Kuhn, Smithsonian reported in 2014, on the heist's 50th anniversary. (The one-of-a-kind sapphire was recovered and went back on display in 1965).

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But there are many more sapphires on display in the museum alongside the Star of India, and they glow in a vibrant rainbow of colors that stem from the individual gems' chemical composition and formation, said Lauri Halderman, vice president of the AMNH exhibition department.

The exhibit will also display two towering amethyst geodes that are brimming with purple quartz crystals. They formed about 135 million years ago from mineral deposits carried by geothermal heated water, and are among the biggest in the world: One measures around 9 feet (2.7 meters) high and weighs about 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilograms), and the other is around 12 feet (3.6 m) high and weighs 9,040 pounds (4,100 kg).



The amethyst geode pictured here stands 9 feet (3 meters) tall, weighs around 12,000 pounds (5,440 kilograms), or about as much as four black rhinos, and was collected from the Bolsa Mine in Uruguay. (Image credit: D. Finnin/Copyright AMNH)

Another massive slab is the so-called Singing Stone, a nearly 5-ton pillar of blue azurite and green malachite ore that was exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It came to the museum after the fair closed and earned its name because changes in humidity in the exhibit hall (before it was climate-controlled) caused parts of the ore to vibrate and "sing," according to AMNH.

Beautiful creatures

In a temporary exhibit, the hall shines a spotlight on high-end gems that over the last 150 years were incorporated into jewelry resembling wildlife. "Beautiful Creatures," curated by jewelry historian Marion Fasel, features more than 100 gem-studded animals of the land, air and water, including birds, insects, fish, lizards and spiders. An ornate crocodile necklace holds 60.02 carats of yellow diamonds and 66.86 carats of emeralds, and a sinuous snake necklace is set with 178.21 carats of diamonds, according to AMNH.


According to legend, when actress María Félix commissioned this necklace, she carried live baby crocodiles into Cartier in Paris to serve as models for the design. (Image credit: Nils Herrmann, Cartier Collection/Copyright Cartier)

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Minerals have been part of Earth's evolution since the first elements formed grains of dust that collected around our sun and began smashing together to form planets, said hall curator George Harlow, a curator in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at AMNH, and a professor in the museum's Richard Gilder Graduate School. After Earth differentiated into a planet with a core, mantle and crust, "things like sodium, potassium and lithium started coming up to the surface and becoming more concentrated," Harlow explained. "Once they reach a certain concentration, then you get a new mineral." Over billions of years, water and oxygen's appearance on Earth gave rise to more minerals, and pressure from plate tectonics created still more, Harlow said.

Some of the minerals in the hall come from places that you might not expect, such as the 9-lb. (4-kg) Subway Garnet, a deep-purple almandine garnet that surfaced in New York City in 1885 during sewer construction on 35th Street. Other specimens have unusual and bizarre shapes or colors, such as grape agate, which looks like a cluster of purple grapes; pale-yellow gypsum, which resembles a messy pile of potato chips; and a slab from a zinc ore mine in Sterling Hill, New Jersey, which glows in brilliant stripes of neon red and green under shortwave ultraviolet light.

"Everywhere you look there are dazzling, beautifully displayed mineral and gem specimens," Halderman said. "When I look at the specimens they make me curious — how do you find it, how did it form, what do we know about it? Some of the stories are human, some of the stories are scientific — we tried to bring all those stories to the foreground."

AMNH's Mignone Hall of Gems and Minerals and the temporary exhibit "Beautiful Creatures" open to the public on June 12. "Beautiful Creatures" will be on view through September 19.

Originally published on Live Science.

Girl buried with finch in her mouth puzzles archaeologists

By Owen Jarus - Live Science Contributor 3 days ago

This girl was found buried in a cave with at least one finch in her mouth. The discovery was made in the 1960s, but was not analyzed in detail until now. (Image credit: Archives of Faculty of Archaeology, Warsaw University)

Archaeologists are trying to solve the mystery of a girl who was buried with the head of at least one finch in her mouth hundreds of years ago.

Although the skeleton was discovered by archaeologist Waldemar Chmielewski in southern Poland in Tunel Wielki Cave during excavations in 1967 and 1968, the burial had not been analyzed in detail until now. New radiocarbon dating indicates that the girl died around 300 years ago.

People in Europe stopped burying their dead in caves during the Middle Ages, making the burial of this girl highly unusual.

"Cave burials are generally absent from historical periods in Europe," a team of researchers wrote in a paper published online May 29 in the German journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift (Prehistoric Journal). "Consequently, the discovery of a post-medieval inhumation of a child buried with at least one bird head placed in the mouth in Tunel Wielki Cave is an exceptional find."

Related: In photos: 'Demon burials' discovered in Poland cemetery

The fact that she has at least one bird head stuffed in her mouth is also unusual, and no other examples are known from this time in Europe, the researchers wrote in the journal article.

After analyzing the skeleton, the researchers, from the University of Warsaw and other institutions in Poland, found the girl had died between 10 and 12 years of age. Her bones also showed signs of arrested growth in later years, possibly the result of a metabolic disease. They didn't find any evidence of trauma, nor any clues about how the girl died. No grave goods, aside from the bird head placed in her mouth, were found.

Who was she?

To try to solve the mystery of who the girl was and why she was buried in this way, the team conducted a series of scientific tests and examined historical records. DNA tests indicated that the girl was likely from an area north of Poland, possibly around modern-day Finland or Karelia

Historical records show that from 1655 to 1657, the area was occupied by an army led by King Charles X Gustav of Sweden. His army included many soldiers from Finland and Karelia, the records show, and those soldiers often traveled with their families. "The soldiers, for the most part of low rank, were commonly accompanied by wives, mistresses and sometimes maidservants," the researchers wrote.

Records from the 19th century also show that people in Karelia, a region that stretches over modern-day Russia and Finland, believed that someone who died in a forest had to be buried in a forest rather than in a cemetery. "Historically, this custom appears rooted in cosmological conceptions of a forest as being like a cemetery," the researchers wrote.

These finds led the researchers to suggest that this girl may have come to the area during the 1655-1657 war and that she may have died in the forest where the cave is located. The researchers noted that Ojców Castle, which housed many soldiers and their families, is located near the cave. The war pitted Sweden and its allies against a coalition of countries that included Poland, Russia and Denmark.

Why she was buried with at least one finch head in her mouth remains unknown.

"Among many cultures, the souls of children have also been conceived in the form of small birds," the researchers wrote. "Nevertheless, in the period in question, birds were never deposited into graves, let alone being placed in the mouth of the deceased. The riddle of the unique child burial from Tunel Wielki Cave cannot be fully explained."

Originally published on Live Science.

These eels can swallow prey on land, thanks to extendable jaws in their throats

No water? No problem

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 3 days ago

A snowflake moray eel prepares to swallow a squid snack. (Image credit: Rita Mehta and Kyle Donohoe)

Moray eels have a second, hidden set of jaws that are the stuff of nightmares. These extra jaws can snap forward in an instant to clamp into prey and drag the animal down into the eel's gullet.

Those terrifying slingshot jaws help a type of moray do something that's impossible for most fish: swallow their prey while on land, according to a new study. It's an unnerving sight, with researchers' video showing prey being yanked down the eel's throat as the moray's mouth gapes open.

Fish typically need moving water to carry food from their mouths into their bellies. But snowflake moray eels (Echidna nebulosa) can ambush crabs on land by wriggling from the sea to catch their prey during low tide, and researchers recently found that the recoil of the eels' secondary jaws was strong enough to help morays swallow their meal without having to retreat back into the ocean.

All bony fishes — those with skeletons made mostly of bone, rather than cartilage — have pharyngeal jaws in addition to their main jaws. Pharyngeal jaws lie behind the pharynx, or throat. They are smaller than the jaws in fishes' mouths and are used for gripping and piercing or crushing food, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

But unlike most fishes' pharyngeal jaws, those in moray eels "are highly mobile" and can spring past the throat and into the morays' mouths, said Rita Mehta, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

In 2007, Mehta described how moray eels took advantage of this extreme movement while feeding in the water, with their pharyngeal jaws acting as "these wonderful forceps that grab prey," she previously told Live Science. In the new study, published June 7 in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Mehta and co-author Kyle Donohoe, a research assistant at the UCSC Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Laboratory, filmed eels as they munched on meals while out of the water, Mehta told Live Science in an email.

"Based on what we knew about the mechanics of the pharyngeal jaws, it made sense that if morays were able to capture prey in the intertidal or on land, they could also swallow their prey on the land without relying on water," Mehta said.




Long muscles pull morays' pharyngeal jaws forward to grasp prey and then slide it down their throats. (Image credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation (after Rita Mehta, UC Davis))

Training snowflake moray eels to feed out of water in lab experiments — and then recording the results — took six years, according to the study. The scientists installed eels in aquariums equipped with platforms and ramps that were above water. They then trained the eels — named Benjen, Marsh, Qani, Jetsom, Frosty, Flatsom and LB — to climb up the ramps for pieces of squid. Over time, the food was moved higher up the ramp, until eventually the eels were independently wriggling out of the water and undulating up the ramps to find food.

"For the majority of terrestrial trials, snowflake morays undulated the upper third of their body from the water to capture prey on the ramp," the researchers reported. They analyzed 67 videos of eels' meals in water and on the ramp, finding that the fish used their pharyngeal jaws in the same way and at the same speed while in water or on land.

Morays aren't your average "fish out of water." They can function during temporary oxygen deprivation, and studies of a snowflake moray relative, the Mediterranean moray (Muraena helena), showed that lipids and mucus in morays' skin could protect the eels against drying out when they're exposed to air, the study authors wrote.

The experiments offered previously unseen examples of moray eel behavior, hinting at how morays might combine amphibious traits with a slingshot jaw to make them versatile and formidable hunters in wet or dry environments. These adaptations could allow morays to find new types of food if their regular supply disappears and may help the fish avoid competition in their ocean ecosystems by letting them feed in a different habitat, Mehta said.

The findings were published on June 7 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Hoard of silver coins may have been part of historic ransom to save Paris


By Tom Metcalfe - Live Science Contributor 

4 days ago

Only three coins of this type have ever been found before in Poland, which was well beyond the Carolingian realms. Archaeologists suspect they are linked to the Scandinavian trading emporium at Truso. (Image credit: Museum of Ostróda)

A hoard of silver coins minted in the Carolingian Empire about 1,200 years ago has been unearthed in northeastern Poland and may have been part of a historic ransom to save Paris from a Viking invasion.

It's the first time anyone has found so many Carolingian coins in Poland. Only three such coins — of a distinctive style with Latin inscriptions and a central crucifix — have been found in the country before now.

The Carolingian Empire was founded by the Frankish king Charlemagne — Charles the Great — and spanned much of modern France, Germany, Switzerland and northern Italy in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Related: 12 bizarre medieval trends

Archaeologists think the newfound coins may have come from the Viking trading town of Truso, which was then located near the Baltic coast about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of the farmer's field where they were found.

And if the coins did come from Truso, it's possible that they were part of an immense ransom of gold and silver paid by a Carolingian king to prevent invading Vikings from sacking the city of Paris.

"If a larger number of the coins can be attributed to Paris, then yes, it is possible — and some have already been attributed to Paris," said Mateusz Bogucki, an archaeologist and coin expert at the University of Warsaw in Poland. But "it is way too early to give such an interpretation," he told Live Science.

Regardless, the distinctiveness of the coins raises interesting questions about their origins, Bogucki said. At the time the hoard was hidden or lost, the first medieval Polish kingdom had yet to be established, and the Slavic tribes in the region used mainly Arabian silver dirhams paid in exchange for slaves by traders from the Muslim caliphate, based in Baghdad far to the south

Carolingian coins

Metal detectorists discovered the first handful of the coin hoard in November 2020, in a field near the town of Biskupiec.

The finders, who had permission from the provincial government for their activities, stopped any further searching and kept the location secret until experts from the nearby Museum of Ostróda could investigate the find.

By March 2021, archaeologist Luke Szczepanski and his team had unearthed a total of 118 coins from the field — 117 of them minted during the reign of the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious, who ruled from A.D. 814 until 840, and one coin minted during the reign of his son Charles the Bald, who ruled until A.D. 877.

Such coins are extremely rare in Poland, which was well beyond the lands ruled by the Carolingian dynasty. The only three Carolingian coins previously unearthed were found at the archaeological site at Truso, which had been established by Norse traders by the eighth century and was famous for its trade in amber, furs and slaves.

It seems likely that the owner of the hoard of coins found near Biskupiec had obtained them in Truso, Bogucki said, but there is a possibility that they had come from somewhere else and were being taken to Truso for trading. The coins have no marks that show exactly where and when they were minted, but researchers can learn more about their origins by studying characteristics like the shapes of the letters in their Latin inscriptions, he said.

Only three coins of this type have ever been found before in Poland, which was well beyond the Carolingian realms. Archaeologists suspect they are linked to the Scandinavian trading emporium at Truso. (Image credit: Museum of Ostróda)

The silver coins are in a distinctive style used by successive Carolingian kings, with Latin inscriptions around a central crucifix and emblem of a temple. (Image credit: Museum of Ostróda)

A total of 118 of the Carolingian silver coins, about 1,200 years old, were unearthed in a farmer's field near the town of Biskupiec in north-east Poland. (Image credit: Museum of Ostróda)

Only three coins of this type have ever been found before in Poland, which was well beyond the Carolingian realms. Archaeologists suspect they are linked to the Scandinavian trading emporium at Truso. (Image credit: Museum of Ostróda)

Viking shakedown


The archaeologists aren't sure how the hoard of silver coins came to be hidden or lost near Biskupiec. The region was probably an uninhabited wilderness at the time, and archaeologists have not found any traces of a nearby settlement, Szczepanski told Science in Poland.


One intriguing possibility, however, is that the coins came from Truso and that they were originally part of a ransom paid by the Carolingian king Charles the Bald to Vikings threatening Paris, his capital city.

Norse raiders frequently attacked the Frankish heartlands of the Carolingian Empire — today's northern France and western Germany — after the late eighth century. Historical records compiled by monks suggest that in A.D. 845 a large fleet of Viking ships sailed up the Seine and laid siege to Paris, then located on an island in the river.

Charles the Bald reportedly paid the invaders 7,000 livres, or more than 5 tons of silver and gold, to prevent them from sacking the city, Bogucki said, and it's possible that some of the coins found near Biskupiec were part of that ransom.

Charlemagne was King of the Franks in the late eighth century when his armies conquered most of western Europe. He was crowned Emperor of the Romans by the pope in Rome in A.D. 800; his rule and those of his dynasty are known as the Carolingian Empire, which later became Europe's Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious succeeded him as emperor in 814, and the empire was divided among Louis' sons in 840.

Charles the Bald, one of Louis' sons, ruled the western kingdoms and became the Carolingian emperor in 875. Portrayals from the time show him with a full head of hair; historians speculate that he may, in fact, have been very hairy and that the nickname was used ironically, or that his "baldness" referred to his initial lack of lands compared with those of his brothers.

Originally published on Live Science

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'Giant arc' stretching 3.3 billion light-years across the cosmos shouldn't exist

By Adam Mann - Live Science Contributor 2 days ago

How big is too big?

The Giant Arc. Grey regions show areas that absorb magnesium, which reveals the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters. The blue dots show background quasars, or spotlights. (Image credit: Alexia Lopez/UCLan)

A newly discovered crescent of galaxies spanning 3.3 billion light-years is among the largest known structures in the universe and challenges some of astronomers' most basic assumptions about the cosmos. 

The epic arrangement, called the Giant Arc, consists of galaxies, galactic clusters, and lots of gas and dust. It is located 9.2 billion light-years away and stretches across roughly a 15th of the observable universe. 

Its discovery was "serendipitous," Alexia Lopez, a doctoral candidate in cosmology at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the U.K., told Live Science. Lopez was assembling maps of objects in the night sky using the light from about 120,000 quasars — distant bright cores of galaxies where supermassive black holes are consuming material and spewing out energy.

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As this light passes through matter between us and the quasars, it is absorbed by different elements, leaving telltale traces that can give researchers important information. In particular, Lopez used marks left by magnesium to determine the distance to the intervening gas and dust, as well as the material’s position in the night sky. 

In this way, the quasars act "like spotlights in a dark room, illuminating this intervening matter," Lopez said. 

In the midst of the cosmic maps, a structure began to emerge. "It was sort of a hint of a big arc," Lopez said. "I remember going to Roger [Clowes] and saying 'Oh, look at this.'"

Clowes, her doctoral adviser at UCLan, suggested further analysis to ensure it wasn't some chance alignment or a trick of the data. After doing two different statistical tests, the researchers determined that there was less than a 0.0003% probability the Giant Arc wasn't real. They presented their results on June 7 at the 238th virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

A depiction of the structure of the Giant Arc  shown in grey, with neighborhood quasars superimposed, shown in blue. A tentative association can be seen between these two datasets. (Image credit: Alexia Lopez/UCLan)

But the finding, which will take its place in the list of biggest things in the cosmos, undermines a bedrock expectation about the universe. Astronomers have long adhered to what's known as the cosmological principle, which states that, at the largest scales, matter is more or less evenly distributed throughout space. 

The Giant Arc bigger than other enormous assemblies, such as the Sloan Great Wall and the South Pole Wall, each of which are dwarfed by even larger cosmic features. 

"There have been a number of large-scale structures discovered over the years," Clowes told Live Science. "They're so large, you wonder if they're compatible with the cosmological principle." 

The fact that such colossal entities have clumped together in particular corners of the cosmos indicates that perhaps material isn’t distributed evenly around the universe. 

But the current standard model of the universe is founded on the cosmological principle, Lopez added. "If we're finding it not to be true, maybe we need to start looking at a different set of theories or rules."

Lopez doesn't know what those theories would look like, though she mentioned the idea of modifying how gravity works on the largest scales, a possibility that has been popular with a small but loud contingent of scientists in recent years.

Daniel Pomarède, a cosmographer at Paris-Saclay University in France who co-discovered the South Pole Wall, agreed that the cosmological principle should dictate a theoretical limit to the size of cosmic entities. 

Some research has suggested that structures should reach a certain size and then be unable to get larger, Pomarède told Live Science. "Instead, we keep finding these bigger and bigger structures."

Yet he isn't quite ready to toss out the cosmological principle, which has been used in models of the universe for about a century. "It would be very bold to say that it will be replaced by something else," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

This 3-Billion Light-Year Long Galaxy Chain Could 'Overturn Cosmology'

'This is a very big deal.'

By Brad Bergan

Jun 11, 2021

Galaxies and stars in the night sky.ArtEvent ET / iStock

For a long time, scientists have thought the distribution of matter was evenly spread throughout the observable universe. It's the bedrock of cosmology. Or so we thought.

Researchers discovered a colossal arc of galaxies that spans an unconscionably vast distance of more than 3 billion light-years in a distant corner of the universe, according to a virtual briefing of the American Astronomical Society on June 7.

This could fundamentally "overturn cosmology as we know it," said Alexia Lopez, a cosmologist at the virtual briefing, in a Science News report. "Our standard model, not to put it too heavily, kind of falls through."

The 'Giant Arc' of touching galaxies would span twenty times the moon's width in the night sky

The "Giant Arc", as Lopez and her colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England call it, was observed via the studying of light from roughly 40,000 quasars, during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are thought to be nightmare-provokingly large supermassive black holes actively feeding at the center of a galaxy. And this massive feeding frenzy creates a light so bright that it can be seen at greater distances than almost any other phenomenon can. But while the quasar-borne light is in transit to Earth, some of it is absorbed by atoms in and around the galaxies in our relative foreground, in an aggregation of specific signatures in the light's pattern. And when it reaches astronomers' telescopes, they can tell.

The signature of the Giant Arc lies in magnesium atoms that've lost a single electron, while passing through the halos of galaxies roughly 9.2 billion light-years away. Interpolating the quasar light absorbed by the atoms, the astronomers uncovered a picture of a symmetrical curve of dozens of galaxies, stretching roughly one-fifteenth the radius of the entire observable universe. Obviously, this structure is invisible to the naked eye, but if we could see it in the night sky, the arc of interpenetrating galaxies would span roughly 20 times the full moon's width. Twenty times!

'Tantalizing' evidence for a 'Giant Arc,' but not convincing enough for some

"This is a very fundamental test of the hypothesis that the universe is homogeneous on large scales," said astrophysicist Subir Sarkar at the University of Oxford, who researchers colossal structures of the cosmos, but wasn't involved in the recent work, in the Science News report. If the Giant Arc of the distant universe is confirmed, "this is a very big deal." But Sarkar has doubts. "Our eye has a tendency to pick up patterns," and some people have even unswervingly bizarre claims, like seeing Stephen Hawking's initials written in fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. This would make Stephen Hawking's initials as old as the oldest light in the universe. Which is absurd.

To determine the odds of galaxies lining up in such a gigantic cosmic march, Lopez executed three statistical tests, and all of them suggested it was no delusion. In fact, one of the tests surpassed the gold standard of physicists: when the chances of an observation being a statistical exception are less than 0.00003 percent. This is impressive, but not convincing enough for Sarkar. "Right now, I would say the evidence is tantalizing but not yet compelling," he said in the Science News report.

As Sarkar said, this is a big deal. But until additional observations are made to further confirm or falsify Lopez and colleagues' Giant Arc hypothesis, we shouldn't throw the whole of cosmology out the window. Even if it turns out to be a fluke, the reality of facing paradigm-shattering discoveries in modern astronomy is a testament to the staggering pace of the field.