Part of a recently discovered hoard of gold is seen at Birmingham Museum in Birmingham, England, Sept. 24, 2009. An amateur treasure hunter was prowling English farmland in Staffordshire with a metal detector when he stumbled upon what has been described as the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever discovered, a collection of gold and silver crosses, sword decorations and other items, British archaeologists said.
A Roman polychrome millefiori dish on display at the Museum of London Docklands Wednesday, April 29, 2009. The dish was discovered at an excavation site in east London and made from hundreds of glass petals, and dates from the 3rd century AD. The delicate artifact has been painstakingly pieced together from the many fragments found during excavations.
Utah geologists say they've discovered prehistoric animal tracks so densely packed they're calling it a "dinosaur dance floor." More than 1,000 tracks found on a 3/4-acre site straddling the Utah-Arizona border could date back 190 million years. Geologist Winston Seiler poses next to a set of prints made by the same dinosaur. A new study appears in the October 2008 issue of the science journal Palaios.
In this undated photo, a fossil of a type of saber-toothed cat is seen. An ancient tar pit exposed when Venezuelan oil workers laid a pipeline has yielded a rich trove of fossils, including a type of saber-toothed cat that paleontologists never found in South America before, and scientists say it holds the promise of many discoveries to come.
The upper jaw of a prehistorical anthropoid ape, the Anapithecus hernyaki, is shown a the Hungarian State Institute of Geology in Budapest, July 31, 2008. The uniquely complete fossils were found by a joint Hungarian and Canadian expedition in Rudabany. The lower jaw of the same species was found July 30, and other major finds were unearthed during the past decade. Anapithecus hernyaki lived around 10 million years ago.
Japanese and Mongolian scientists successfully recovered the complete skeleton of a young dinosaur that likely died 70 million years ago. Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences said in July 2008, that scientists uncovered a Tarbosaurus - related to the Tyrannosaurus - from a chunk of sandstone they dug up in August 2006 in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.
Visitors view the fossilized remains of mammoths at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs in Hot Springs, S.D. The site, still an active paleontological dig, now hosts scientists and researchers from across the world, not to mention curious tourists. More than 100 tusks from Columbian and woolly mammoths have been found so far.
This photo provided by the Archaeological Society SAP in Mantua, northern Italy, on Wednesday, Feb, 7, 2007, shows a pair of human skeletons found on Feb. 5 at a construction site outside Mantua. Archaeologists unearthed the skeletons, believed to be a man and a woman, from the Neolithic period, buried 5,000-6,000 years ago. It could be humanity's oldest story of doomed love.
This handout photo shows a model of a newly discovered species described as the "missing evolutionary link" between fish and tetrapods. Tiktaalik roseae, with a crocodile-like head, apparently moved on land like a seal. It's considered an important discovery for understanding how fish evolved into land animals with four limbs and a backbone. The specimens were found in Canada above the Arctic Circle.
Nearly complete 160,000-year-old human skull found in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The fossilized skull is the oldest known fossil of modern humans, or Homo sapiens.
A skeleton of a prehistoric horse on display at Peru Museum of Natural History, Lima, Peru, Feb. 28, 2003.
"Skull 5", an ancient hominid (member of the family of humans) skull.
Dinosaur track imprints discovered on a rock plate in Courtedoux, Switzerland, Nov. 11, 2002. Nearly 500 well-preserved footprints were discovered in a layer of limestone. The tracks belong to sauropods, a group of dinosaurs consisting of large, four-legged herbivores with very long necks and tails.
Paleontologists uncover a whale fossil at the Prima Deshecha Landfill site, San Juan Capistrano, Calif., May 14, 2002.
A woolly mammoth skeleton on display at Pratt Museum of Natural History, Amherst, Mass., Dec. 18, 2001.
Skull of Kenyanthropus platyops which was discovered in Kenya. The early hominid (member of the family of humans) dated to roughly 3.5 million years ago. It is thought to represent a completely new branch of the hominid family tree.
Fossil of skull of early ape-man, found in Sterkfontein Caves, Johannesburg, South Africa. At least 500 hominid specimens have been recovered, making Sterkfontein the world's richest hominid site.
Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil skull of "Sue," discovered in South Dakota. "Sue" is the world's most complete, best preserved, and largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
A 4.4-million-year-old tooth of Australopithecus, oldest known member of human family tree.