Archaeology

LOS ANGELES -- The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex.

With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side.

The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.

KANAB -- Ancient Native American bones that were unearthed during a dam construction project near Kanab are set to be put to rest again soon.

OGDEN — Elim Lutheran Church, 575 23rd St., is offering a class on Biblical archaeology.

BALTIMORE -- Ronn Wade gingerly picked up the package wrapped in a simple white sheet and placed it on an examining table before slowly peeling away the layers.

And there it was.

The mummified remains of a small child that had disappeared from the University of Maryland School of Medicine years ago. With one look Wade knew it was part of the famed Burns collection, an obscure set of medical mummies once used for dissection and the training of medical students and acquired by the university in 1820.

Early manlike creatures may have been smarter than we think. Recent archaeological finds from the Mediterranean show that human ancestors traveled the high seas.

A team of researchers that included an North Carolina State University geologist found evidence that our ancestors were crossing open water at least 130,000 years ago. That's more than 100,000 years earlier than scientists had previously thought.

GRAND JUNCTION, Tenn. -- Here once was the home of American Indians with a culture far removed from the tepees, wigs and wigwams of TV Indians.

A village slowly being unearthed on the Ames Plantation was a distant neighbor to Memphis' Chucalissa Indian Village. The residents were among hundreds of Mississippian Culture villages along the waterways of the Mississippi River Valley.

"In many ways their surroundings would be like a church today," says Ames cultural resource manager Jamie Evans.

A multitheistic society, the American Indians worshipped the sun, trees, land and water. In the end, they may have been punished by the same forces and driven away.

Their fate is one of the questions University of Memphis archaeology professor Andrew Mickelson ponders when he brings students to the site beside the north fork of the Wolf River for field work each summer. The students dig, scrape and filter soil through mesh screens in search of any shard or fragment that might hold a clue to how the Indians lived and why they left.