A Federal Court judge in Tampa has ordered Odyssey Marine Exploration to hand over 17 tons of gold and silver coins to Spain. Odyssey had code-named the treasure-laden shipwreck it discovered the Black Swan, and refused to reveal its location, but Spain believes the wreck to be the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, which sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804. “The Judge saw that the ship and its contents belong to Spain. It’s a hugely important ruling and one that will set a precedent for future claims,” said Angeles Gonzales-Sine, Spain’s minister of culture.  Odyssey will appeal the decision.

An intact seventeenth-century witch bottle was discovered in Greenwich, England. The stoneware bottle contained sharp objects, human hair, urine, fingernail clippings, belly-button fluff, and sulfur, or brimstone. “There was a genuine fear of witches. It was believed the bottle would reflect the spell on whoever cast it, and inflict excruciating pain on them when they passed urine,” said chemist Alan Massey.  

Experts from the University of Florida claim that a bone found by a local fossil hunter is inscribed with a 12,000-year-old image of a mammoth or mastodon. “It would be ancient evidence that people living in the Americas during the last Ice Age created artistic images of the animals they hunted,” said anthropologist Barbara Purdy. “I did everything in my power to show this thing was a fake,” she added.   

The nearly complete skeleton of one-million-year-old mammoth has been unearthed in an open-pit coal mine in Serbia.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, June 4, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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