King Richard III, the leader of England from 1483 to 1485, was the last English king killed in battle—struck by an arrow during a fight for the throne. His body was buried in a church, the Greyfriars in Leicester, but as centuries passed his burial grounds were lost. In September, word came from a team at the University of Leicester that they may have found the dead king’s body, buried beneath a parking lot.

Follow up work, including genetic testing, doubled-down on the assessment, an the question became what to do with the late king’s recently-exhumed remains. Some want him re-buried in Leicester, where he fell. His family wants his body brought to York, to be buried alongside his relatives. But wherever Richard III’s real skull goes, forensic artists working with the Richard III Society in Leicester are trying to make sure his visage is not lost again. They’ve created a bust of Richard III’s head, which will go on tour around England over the next few years.

The reconstructed face of Richard III. Photo: Leicester Arts & Museums

The forensic art team, says the Atlantic, tried to “ determine what the king’s face would have looked like in person (well, “in person”).”

From there, the team used stereolithography – yep, 3D printing — to convert that rendering into a physical model of the king’s face. They extrapolated details like hair color and clothing style from portraits painted during Richard’s time.

The results of this endeavor are fairly creepily Tussaudian: The twisted-spined king, in the form of a 3D-printed bust, looks essentially like a decapitated wax figure. But it’s a high-tech wax figure. The forensics-based model — which, yes, will now be going on a tour throughout England — offers a new perspective on an old story: It brings a new dimension, quite literally, to ancient history.

The first stop of that tour begins today, at the Leicester Guildhall.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Skeleton Found Under a Parking Lot May Be English King Richard III
The Battle Over Richard III’s Bones…And His Reputation

Another Mayan Ruin in Belize. Not the one that was destroyed. Image: Rita Alexandrea

In Belize, they needed to build a road. Roads require rocks, there happened to be a really convenient, large pile of rocks for the construction team to use nearby. It also happened to be one of the largest Mayan pyramids in the country. Now that pyramid is gone, destroyed by bulldozers and backhoes.

The construction company building the road appears to have extracted crushed rocks from the pyramid to use as road fill. The pyramid, called the Nohmul complex, is at least 2,300 years old and sits on the border of Belize and Mexico. It’s over 100 feet tall, the largest pyramid in Belize left over from the Mayans.

Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology said that the news was “like being punched in the stomach.” The pyramid was, he said, very clearly an ancient structure, so there’s no chance the team didn’t realize what they were doing. “These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness,” Awe told CBS News. He also said:

“Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines. To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s mind-boggling.”

And it turns out that this is an ongoing problem in Belize. The country is littered with ruins (although none as large as Nohmul), and construction companies are constantly bulldozing them for road fill. An archaeologist at Boston University said that several other sites have already been destroyed by construction to use the rocks for building infrastructure. There isn’t much in the way of protection or management of these sites in Belize, so many people who live in the country either aren’t aware of their significance, or aren’t taught to care.

The Huffington Post has photographs from the scene, showing backhoes and bulldozers chipping away at the stone structure. HuffPo ends this story on a lighter note, pointing out that due to the destruction, archaeologists can now see the inner workings of the pyramid and the ways they were built.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change
Spectral Images of a Mayan Temple

Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Underwater World
Underwater Discovery

An artist’s rendition of Acrotholus audeti. Photo: Julius Csotonyi

What’s 90 pounds, six feet long and has an adorable little bone-cased bump for a head? No, not Cubone. It’s this newly discovered dinosaur, Acrotholus audeti, which was dug up recently in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Like the dinosaur havens of the mountainous west, from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Arizona, Alberta is practically stuffed with dinosaur fossils. But by digging around in the the Milk River Formation in southern Alberta—a region traditionally not known for loads of fossils—researchers found something new: the dome-headed skull of Acrotholus audeti. Dated to 85 million years ago, this is the oldest-known North American member (and maybe the oldest in the world) of the big family of bone-headed dinosaurs.

The little dinosaur was an herbivore and, other than the occasional headbutt, might have been pretty cool to hang around. But more than just being a neat little dinosaur, says Discover, the finding is a hint that little dinosaurs may have been way more common than we think.

Most dinosaur finds are of the bigger brethren: big bones are less likely to get picked over and crushed by scavengers or destroyed by time. But, with their big-boned heads strong enough to survive the trials of millions of years, dinosaurs like Acrotholus audeti are helping paleontologists flesh out the record of little dinosaurs. The new find, says the Canadian Press, “ touched off further investigation that suggested the world’s dinosaur population was more diverse than once believed.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Fossil Testifies to Pachycephalosaur Pain
“Bone-Headed” Dinosaurs Reshaped Their Skulls

Photo: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The U.S. government has decided to return looted national treasures to their respective countries. Mongolia will get a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar (a slightly smaller cousin to T. rex) skeleton back, and Cambodia will receive two life-sized 10th century Khmer statues called the Kneeling Attendants.

The reconstructed skeleton, which is 8 feet tall and 24 feet long, was unearthed in the Gobi desert in 1946 by a Soviet and Mongolian team, Reuters reports. In 2010, the skeleton arrived in the U.S. from the U.K. along with a customs document that falsely stated that the fossils originated in Britain and that they were only worth $15,000. 

Mongolia demanded that the U.S. return the T. bataar skeleton after it was auctioned for $1.05 million last spring by Floridian Eric Prokopi. Here’s how the auction house described the item:

This is an incredible, complete skeleton, painstakingly excavated and prepared, and mounted in a dramatic, forward-leaning running pose. The quality of preservation is superb, with wonderful bone texture and delightfully mottled grayish bone color. In striking contrast are those deadly teeth, long and frightfully robust, in a warm woody brown color, the fearsome, bristling mouth and monstrous jaws leaving one in no doubt as to how the creature came to rule its food chain. Equally deadly and impressive are the large curving claws, with pronounced blood grooves. The body is 75% complete and the skull 80%…

Because of the kerfuffle, the sale was eventually canceled. Charges have since been filed against Prokopi, and the skeleton was returned to Mongolia on Monday. An official from the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement told Reuters that this “is one of the most important repatriations of fossils in recent years.”

Cambodia, likewise, will soon be reunited with its missing relics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City received the two sandstone statues, which came as separate broken heads and torsos, as gifts in 1987 and 1992, Archaeology reports. But over the years, evidence mounted that the statues had been looted from Cambodia’s Koh Ker temple during the tumultuous Cambodian Civil War in the 1970s. Witnesses, Archeology writes, can remember seeing the statues in the temple up until 1970 but that they were gone by 1975.

According to the New York Times, the museum assured Cambodia in a letter last month that the statues will be returned as soon as appropriate transit arrangements can be sorted out, though no timeline has been set.

The Met’s decision reflects the growing sensitivity by American museums to claims by foreign countries for the return of their cultural artifacts. Many items that have long been displayed in museums do not have precise paperwork showing how the pieces left their countries of origin. In recent years, at the urging of the Association of Art Museum Directors and scholars, many museums have applied more rigorous standards to their acquisitions.

Cambodian officials have asked the Met to examine another two dozen artifacts that may have been looted, and, according to Reuters, the U.S. is also helping to return additional fossils to Mongolia.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Looters Destroy Dinosaur Nest Sites  
Looters Are Selling Artifacts to Fund War in Syria 

Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus skeleton, Field Museum. Image: Field Museum Dinosaurs

We generally think of dinosaurs as green, lizard-like creatures. But the actual color of dinosaur skin is still very much up for debate. During fossilization the dinosaur’s skin rarely survives, and there are just a few tiny pieces of fossilized skin in existence. Physicists are about to shoot a bunch of extremely bright lights at one of them, in order to try and identify the color of the duck-billed dinosaur to which this small piece of skin belonged.

Those extremely bright lights will come from a synchrotron, which will let physicists at the Canadian Light Source research facility examine the fossils more closely. The synchrotron will shoot a beam of infrared light at the fossil. Some of that light will be reflected. By analyzing that reflection, scientists can try to figure out what the skin was made of. That’s because the chemical bonds in some compounds create different light frequencies than others. So if there’s protein, that will look different than sugar or fat.

Physicist Mauricio Barbi told the press, “If we are able to observe the melanosomes and their shape, it will be the first time pigments have been identified in the skin of a dinosaur. We have no real idea what the skin looks like. Is it green, blue, orange…There has been research that proved the colour of some dinosaur feathers, but never skin.”

The scientists are also curious about why this particular fossil has skin. What happened to this dinosaur, unlike nearly all the others, that allowed for its skin to be preserved?

Answering these questions will not only provide more accurate pictures of dinosaurs, but also might hint at where they can find more samples of preserved skin.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Dinosaur Sighting: Colorful Stegosaurus
Dinosaurs, Now in Living Color

A computer-generated image of how the woman would have appeared when she was first laid to rest. Photo: Wessex Archaeology

For one  ancient woman, a diamond—or, at least, her jewelry—is indeed forever. At a quarry between Heathrow airport and Windsor Castle, just outside London, archaeologists just uncovered the remains of a 4,400-year old corpse that may turn out to be the first queen of Windsor. Though her clothes long since decomposed and her bones are almost completely decayed, her lavish jewelry remains behind, giving hints to her identity and possible royal status. LiveScience reports:

The woman’s bones have been degraded by acid in the soil, making radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis impossible. Nonetheless, excavators believe she was at least 35 years old when she died sometime between 2500-2200 B.C., around the era Stonehenge was constructed.

When this woman was buried, she wore a necklace of tube-shaped gold beads and black disks made from a coal-like material called lignite. Scattered around her remains, archaeologists also found amber buttons and fasteners, hinting that she was buried in an adorned gown that has long since disintegrated. Black beads near her hand were probably once part of a bracelet. A large drinking vessel, a rare find in graves from this time period and area, was also buried near her remains

From initial isotope analyses, the researchers found that the gold probably originated in southeast Ireland and southern Britain, the black beads from eastern Europe, and the amber perhaps from the Baltic region, Discover writes. As far as who she was:

According to the archaeologists in charge of the excavation, Gareth Chaffey of Wessex Archaeology, the woman was probably “an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items.”

This means, Chaffey continued, that she could have been a leader, a person of power or perhaps even a queen.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Extraordinary Discoveries 
Dispatch from Stonehenge 

An A. sediba skull. Photo: Brett Eloff

Around 2 million years ago, the first humans evolved from australopiths, our smaller-brained ape-like ancestors. Back in 2008, researchers found two skeletons in South Africa from the ape-like Australopithecus sediba. A male and female skeleton, called MH1 and MH2, were buried together, and further excavations revealed an infant and another partial adult skeleton nearby. All of the remains dated back to around 1.8 to 1.9 million years old. These skeletons began to raise questions about what we really know about human evolution and Homo origins.

The researchers published their results in the journal Science in 2010, writing:

Despite a rich African Plio-Pleistocene hominin fossil record, the ancestry of Homo and its relation to earlier australopithecines remain unresolved. Here we report on two partial skeletons with an age of 1.95 to 1.78 million years. The fossils were encased in cave deposits at the Malapa site in South Africa. The skeletons were found close together and are directly associated with craniodental remains. Together they represent a new species of Australopithecus that is probably descended from Australopithecus africanus. Combined craniodental and postcranial evidence demonstrates that this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than any other australopith species and thus might help reveal the ancestor of that genus.

Until this discovery, researchers had assumed that Lucy, the remains, more than 3 million years old, of an Australopithecus afarensis female found in 1974, represented either our direct evolutionary ancestor or else a very close ancestor. But Lucy’s skeleton was found in Ethiopia, about 4,000 miles away from the A. sediba remains uncovered in South Africa. 

Immediately,  i09 explains, researchers began to second guess whether Homo emerged from East Africa after all. Our origins instead may be more southerly. Now, a new slew of studies published by the same research team in Science answers some questions about what our ancestor was like while also opening up some new mysteries. The New Scientist gives a run down of the “bizarre mosaic” of qualities resembling both Homo and Australopithecus africanus (another South African species that lived around 2 to 3 million years ago) that a closer examination of the A. sediba specimens revealed.

The Homo-like traits included:

• Same number of vertebrae
• Human-like waist
• Bottom of the ribcage narrows
• Walked upright
• Small canine teeth.

And the ape-like traits were:

• Top of the ribcage tapered towards the shoulders, preventing the arms from swinging when walking  
• Arms and legs appear well equipped to swing and balance on branches
• When walking, rather than planting its heel first like Homo, A. sediba’s gait was more twisty and hoppy thanks to a flexible midfoot.

Where A. sediba fits into the evolutionary tree is still under debate. Based upon studied of the specimens’ teeth, it does not appear that A. sediba evolved from A. afarensis (Lucy) in East Africa. Instead, the New Scientist writes, A. africanus seems to be the most likely ancestral candidate.

That suggests the roots of both lineages of australopiths – from East and South Africa – are even older. “It appears that there may be a ‘ghost lineage’ of unrecognised hominins that goes back deeper in time than afarensis,” says Lee Berger at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who discovered A. sediba.

National Geographic points out that the questions surrounding A. sediba, such as why it seemed to return to the trees after it first evolved to walk on the ground and where it fits in on the human evolution puzzle, are far from resolved.

Are the ways that Australopithecus sediba resembles early Homo species true indicators of a close evolutionary relationship—or are they traits that evolved independently in both lineages?

Few scientists believe this question has even begun to be settled.

But A. sediba will likely leave a significant mark on science, in any case:

Regardless of what Australopithecus sediba turns out to be, however, the fossils offer an important caution about interpreting more fragmentary human remains found elsewhere.

The hominin “is so curious in its totality,” [paleoanthropologist Rick] Potts says, “it might lead to some rethinking of how we classify fossil humans and place them in our evolutionary tree.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Human Evolution World Tour 
A Human Evolution Summer Reading List 

A construction project in London turned into an archaeological dig when crews discovered the relics of ancient Rome entombed in the mud. Bloomberg News, whose new headquarters is set to go up atop the site, says that “some 10,000 well-preserved objects” have so far been found:

Museum of London archeologists have discovered good-luck charms, coins, drains and even leather shoes — dating from the mid-40’s A.D. (when the Romans founded London) to 410 A.D. The objects are in good condition because a now-lost river, the Walbrook, kept the ground wet and prevented their decay.

“What we’ve found is essentially a slice through the entire history of Roman London,” said Sophie Jackson, project manager for the Bloomberg Place excavation. “We’ve got, in one corner of this site, the whole sequence: every year of Roman occupation, represented by buildings and yards and alleyways — places where people lived and worked for 350 years, one layer above another.”

“We’re calling this site the Pompeii of the north,” said Jackson.

On top of the charms and coins, says CNN, the dig also turned up fragments from Roman writing tablets—a rare find even in the formerly-Roman and permanently-under-construction city.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Greek Subway Dig Uncovers Marble Road from Roman Empire
Scientists Think They’ve Found Richard III’s Body Under a Parking Lot

Photo by Lord Jim, art by Banksy

Modern humans are doing it all wrong—they eat wrong, they run wrong, they work wrong, they get married wrong. At least that’s the common line these days, as people push to return to our more “natural” state. The paleo-diet pushes us to eat foods our ancestors ate. Toe shoes try to make us run like them, too. Polygamy is the right way to have relationships, because that’s what pre-historic humans did. But is the life of cave people really what we should be striving for?

At Discover Magazine, Marlene Zuk says no:

As evolutionary and genetic science show, humans, like all other living beings, have always been a work in progress and never completely in sync with the natural world. If we’re going to romanticize and emulate a particular point in our evolutionary history, why not go all the way back to when our ape ancestors spent their days swinging from tree to tree?

It is hard to argue that a simpler life with more exercise, fewer processed foods, and closer contact with our children may well be good for us, but rather than renouncing modern living for the sake of our Stone Age genes, we need to understand how evolution has—and hasn’t—suited us for the world we inhabit now.  

She calls ideas for turning back time “paleofantasies.” But science doesn’t necessarily back up claims like “Our hunter-gatherer ancestors overwhelmingly consumed meat.” Nor does it prove that, even if our ancestors did live that way, we should strive for the same lifestyle.

Take the paleo-diet for example. First, our ancestors did not consume exclusively meat. They ate all sorts of grains and plants, as well. Second, simply because they ate a lot of meat doesn’t mean that our modern bodies and genes would do best with the same diet. We evolve along with our technology, and farming is certainly one of those technologies. Zuk puts it this way:

What we are able to eat and thrive upon depends on our 30 million years plus of history as primates, not a single arbitrarily more recent moment in time.

The pattern continues for workouts, for monogamy, for cancer and for parenting.

Yes, Zuk says, there are advantages to eating better, getting more exercise, and hanging out with your kids more. But that’s not the same thing as striving to return to cave days. The overall message: stop trying to live like a caveman.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Caveman Cereal Raises a Question: Do Humans Need Grains?
Backwoods Workouts With the World’s Fittest Man

Photo: Kyle Rush

The famous story of Cleopatra’s suicide gets points for drama and crowd appeal: Her lover, Mark Antony, had been defeated in battle by Octavian and, hearing that Cleopatra had been killed, had stabbed himself in the stomach. Very much alive, after witnessing his death, the beautiful last Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt pressed a deadly asp to her breast, taking her own life as well.

But what if Cleopatra didn’t commit suicide at all?

Pat Brown, author of the new book, The Murder of Cleopatra: History’s Greatest Cold Case, argues that the “Queen of Kings” did not take her own life. Rather, she was murdered, and her perpetrators managed to spin a story that has endured for more than 2,000 years.

Brown, writing for The Scientist, says she decided to treat Cleopatra’s story as any typical crime scene.

I was shocked at the number of red flags that popped up from the pages of the historical accounts of the Egyptian queen’s final day. How was it that Cleopatra managed to smuggle a cobra into the tomb in a basket of figs? Why would the guards allow this food in and why would they be so careless in examining them? Why would Octavian, supposedly so adamant about taking Cleopatra to Rome for his triumph, be so lax about her imprisonment? Why would Cleopatra think it easier to hide a writhing snake in a basket of figs rather than slip poison inside one of the many figs? How did all three women end up dead from the venom? Wasn’t it unlikely that the snake cooper­ated in striking all three, releasing sufficient venom to kill each of them? Why was the snake no longer present at the crime scene? Was a brand-new tomb so poorly built that holes remained in the walls of the building? Why did the guards not look for the snake once they thought it had killed the women? Why were the wounds from the fangs of the snake not obvious? Why did the women not exhibit the symptoms of death by snake venom or even by poison? Why did the guards not see any of the women convulsing, vomiting, or holding their abdomens in agony? Why didn’t they see any swelling or paral­ysis of face or limbs or any foaming at the mouth?

Brown began pursuing these answers through historical texts and more recent scholarly works. She spoke with Egyptologists, poison experts, archeologists and historians of the ancient world, slowly forming her own version of what really took place August 12, 30 BC.

With each step back in time from the end of Cleopatra’s life to the beginning, I discovered more and more evidence pointing to a radically different explanation of history than the ancients and Octavian wanted us to believe.

In this story, Cleopatra never loved Antony or Julius Caesar. Antony was murdered, and Cleopatra was tortured and strangled to death.

I believed Cleopatra may have been one of the most brilliant, cold-blooded, iron-willed rulers in history and the truth about what really happened was hidden behind a veil of propaganda and lies set in motion by her murderer, Octavian, and the agenda of the Roman Empire.

This book, Brown hopes, will set the record straight.

*This post has been updated.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Who Was Cleopatra? 
Rehabilitating Cleopatra 

Photo: Society of Antiquaries

In February, scientists announced that a pile of bones they found under a parking lot in Leicester belong to Richard III, the former king of England who ruled for just two years, from 1483 until his death on the battlefield in 1485.

Now, his relatives want his body back.

As the Guardian reports, fifteen distant relatives are threatening to sue unless their kingly ancestor’s remains are returned for a reburial in York. Before he became king, Richard III went by Richard of York, where he grew up.

Although the last English king to die in battle perished almost 500 years before the European convention on human rights came into force, his distant relatives are claiming they were not consulted and that their rights have been breached.

An application for judicial review is to be lodged by lawyers in Leeds on behalf of the Plantagenet Alliance. They are bringing the action against the Ministry of Justice, which granted the archaeological excavation licence to Leicester University.

As the Guardian points out, wherever Richard III winds up, the tourist buses will likely follow, which translates into economic incentives for locals. Others from the Richard III Society prefer the monarch to remain in Leicester and have already begun discussions about his memorial site. 

The York family members are evoking article 8 of the European convention, which the Guardian explains deals with human rights, specifically with regards to family. Richard III has no known direct relatives, and anyone living today with relation to the former king is a descendant of his siblings.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Scientists Think They’ve Found Richard III’s Body Under a Parking Lot 
The Battle Over Richard III’s Bones and His Reputation 

Mussolini and Hitler in Munich in 1940. Photo: National Archives

From 1922 to 1943, when Allied troops took Sicily nearing the end of World War II and his power began to wane, Benito Mussolini ruled Italy as its fascist dictator. As Italy suffered defeats throughout the war and as the Allied forces pushed ever closer, Mussolini became increasingly paranoid, says The Telegraph, fearing that the Royal Air Force, “was planning to launch an audacious raid on his headquarters in an attempt to kill him and knock Italy out of the war.”

His fears were well founded – the RAF had indeed drawn up a plan to launch a bombing raid on the palazzo, as well as his private residence in Rome, Villa Torlonia, using the 617 Squadron of Dambusters fame.

In response to the encroaching forces, Mussolini set about constructing a series of fortified bunkers. One such bunker, buried beneath Mussolini’s headquarters in Rome, was discovered recently during maintenance. The bunker will soon be opened to the public.

The bunker was discovered three years ago when engineers carrying out structural work on the foundations of Palazzo Venezia noticed a small wooden trap door.

It opened out to a narrow flight of brick stairs which in turn led to the bunker, divided into nine rooms by thick concrete walls.

The structure was so deep that it had exposed some Roman remains, which are still visible today.

This is not the first of Mussolini’s bunkers discovered, says Yahoo! News, but rather the twelfth. The building it is buried beneath, the Palazzo Venezie, “currently houses a national museum and has been a historically significant structure for centuries, having been used by high ranking members of the Roman Catholic Church and other important figures over the years.”

The bunker was first discovered in 2011, says La Stampa, “but has only been revealed now.”

If you’ve brushed up on your Italian (or if you don’t mind not knowing what’s going on), here’s a tour of the relic bunker.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Glory That Is Rome
Team Hollywood’s Secret Weapons System

A reconstruction of Daisy Morris’ dinosaur, Vectidraco daisymorrisae. Photo: Naish et al.

It’s been a big week in the news for English Kids With Fossils, and a reminder that getting outside and playing in the dirt is still pretty much the best way to use your time. While on a walk on the beach with her family four years ago, says the BBC, a young Daisy Morris, now 9, “stumbled upon the remains” of a previously unknown pterosaur—one of the giant winged creatures that soared the skies during the time of the dinosaurs.

The new pterosaur, says Jess Zimmerman for Grist, “is not only a previously unknown species, but an unknown genus, making Daisy’s find a really big deal.”

The new pterosaur was named in Morris’ honor, Vectidraco daisymorrisae, after Daisy and her family took the fossil find to Martin Simpson, a fossil expert at Southampton University. After a few years work, Simpson and his colleagues announced the find in a new paper.

Meanwhile, a hundred miles to the north in Oxford, 10-year-old Bruno Debattista brought a fossil (which he, too, found while out with his family) to show-and-tell at an “after-school club at Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History,” says the Daily Mail. That fossil, says The Independent, “turned out to be an ancient footprint of a horseshoe crab, which would have scuttled across a pre-historic landscape at a time when the super-continent Pangaea was being formed” — a 300-million-year-old relic.

Chris Jarvis, the education officer at the Museum, said: “Footprints of this age are incredibly rare and extremely hard to spot, so we were amazed when Bruno produced them at our After-School Club.”

Debattista, like Morris, decided to donate his fossil to the museum, a gift to the future. We’re pretty sure that Daisy Morris would win the fight at recess over whose find was cooler, though.

More from Smithsonian.com:

“Tiny Paleontologist” Loves Dinosaurs

Image: Joe Mabel

Shrunken heads are a key part of the “scary tribal people” setup. And some cultures did, in fact, create miniature heads for religious and spiritual purposes. But how does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?

The process is gruesome, according to Today I Found Out. First, the skin and hair had to be separated from the skull to allow them to shrink at different rates. Then, the eyelids were sewn shut and the mouth was stuck closed with a peg. And for the actual shrinking, the heads were put in a big pot and boiled for a very specific amount of time. Then, Staci Lehman writes:

Once removed from the pot, the head would be about 1/3 its original size and the skin dark and rubbery. The skin would then be turned inside out and any leftover flesh scraped off with a knife. The scraped skin was then turned with the proper side out again and the slit in the rear sewn together. The process wasn’t done yet. The head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside. This also “tanned” the inside, like tanning an animal hide, in order to preserve it.

Once the head reached the desired size and was full of small stones and sand, more hot stones would be applied to the outside of the face to seal and shape the features. The skin was rubbed with charcoal ash to darken it, and as tribesmen believed, to keep the avenging soul from seeping out. The finished product was hung over a fire to harden and blacken, then the wooden pegs in the lips pulled out and replaced with string to lash them together.

When Westerners and Europeans started traveling and discovering cultures that practiced head shrinking, they were both terrified and fascinated. Many of them brought back shrunken heads and souvenirs. In the 1930s, a shrunken head sold for $25—$330 in today’s dollars. In fact, they were popular and lucrative enough that unscrupulous head-peddlers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths and other animals. And telling the difference between a real and fake shrunken head can be hard. In fact, one researcher claims that most shrunken heads on display at museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) are fake. Forensic researchers write about some of the ways to tell:

Tsantsas, or shrunken head, are an ancient traditional technique of the Jivaro Indians from Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador. Tsantsas were made from enemies’ heads cut on the battlefield. Then, during spiritual ceremonies, enemies’ heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy’s spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge. However, forgers have made fake tsantsas out of sloth heads, selling them as curios to international travelers. Morphologic criteria can help in the distinction of forged and authentic tsantsas. Presence of sealed eyelids, pierced lips with strings sealing the mouth, shiny black skin, a posterior sewn incision, long glossy black hair, and lateral head compression are characteristic of authentic tsantsas. On the other hand, fake tsantsas usually present few or none of those criteria. To establish authenticity of the shrunken head, we used all of the above-mentioned morphologic criteria along with microscopic hair examination and DNA analysis.

If you don’t have a DNA sequencer handy to identify your human head, William Jamieson Tribal Art says to look at the ears:

Imitation tsantsa are classified under two categories, being either non-human or human but prepared by someone other than the Jivaro tribesmen. As the most common non-human fakes are often made out of goat or monkey skin, one must pay particular attention to distinguishing between authentic and replicas. Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and non-human replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear. The ear should remain in its original form only smaller. Fakes generally cannot match the intricate details of the human ear.

As for many topics of cultural anthropology in which the culture in question still exists and its members would like to be treated as people, head shrinking is a bit contentious. In the Shuar culture, shrunken heads (or ”tsantsas”) are extremely important religious symbols. One anthropologist writes:

That Shuar have killed people to make powerful objects, whereas we have made powerful objects to kill people, does not sustain any meaningful distinction between the savage and the civilized.

Is is hard for many people to not see shrinking of heads as a gruesome act. (Shrunken heads were found in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, but never identified.) And many say that no new shrunken heads have been made for twenty years. In South America, many countries outlawed selling human heads in the 1930s. Whether or not heads have been shrunk since is still up for debate, but at least now you know how it happens.

More from Smithsonian.com:

An Evolving Ritual
Egyptian Mummification Rituals Uncovered at Natural History