Lost Treasure Newsletter

The remains of a 'new' dinosaur with a long neck, whip-like tail and a mysterious extra hole in its skull have been discovered in the US.

The 150-million-year-old creature has been named Suuwassea emilieae after a Crow Indian word meaning "ancient thunder" and for the late Philadelphia socialite Emilie de Hellebrath.

The dinosaur, found in southern Montana, is a type of sauropod, plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks and tails, small heads, and four elephant-like legs.

At 50 feet long, it is a smaller cousin of better-known sauropods Diplodocus and Apatosaurus.

"It has a number of distinguishing features, but the most striking is this second hole in its skull, a feature we have never seen before in a North American dinosaur," researcher Peter Dodson said.

The dig has unearthed more than 50 bones, including a 43-inch shoulder blade, a 53-inch rib and a two-holed skull that has left scientists stumped.

"The extra hole in the skull is still a mystery," said researcher Jerry Harris. "It has only been seen before in two dinosaurs from Africa and one from South America."

The bones were unearthed in 1999 and 2000 but had to be recovered, cleaned up, and subjected to a lengthy research process before being classed as a new dinosaur.

Suuwassea emilieae's new home is the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Let's start with the present and move back in time. The Canadian online newspaper The Province (registration required) has a story about a lawsuit filed in Atlanta which claims that the "U.S. helped the Ferdinand Marcos regime remove the gold from the Philippines and convert it."

If this little piece of news made it to the local dailies, I must have missed it. A Google search shows that the same story was published by China Daily two days ago. The lawsuit was filed by an Atlanta corporation pursuing the claims of treasure hunter Roger Roxas. How the Atlanta corporation acquired Roxas' rights is not clear from either report.

Court documents state that Roger Roxas, an amateur treasure hunter, began searching in 1961 for the booty of Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who plundered it from various Southeast Asian countries during World War II.
In 1970, Roxas found a series of tunnels on state land in the Phillipines, the documents said. The following year, Roxas and his excavators allegedly found the Yamashita Treasure, which included a 3-foot (1-meter) Buddha made of gold and several boxes full of gold bricks, the documents said.

Court documents state that between 1971 and 1974, the Philippines' then-President Ferdinand Marcos ordered his agents to torture Roxas to find the location of the gold. Stone, an attorney for Golden Buddha, an Atlanta corporation now pursuing Roxas' claim against the government, said the US government helped the Marcos regime remove the gold from the Phillipines and convert it.

Stone said his firm and a San Francisco attorney have gathered documents, taken several depositions and have determined that the Americans involved "were working under the auspices of the CIA.''
...

Under Filipino law, anyone who finds gold on state land is entitled to half of it, the court papers said. Stone estimates that the gold in today's market would be worth $5.3 trillion. [China Daily]

British and German scientists are developing memory glasses that record everything the user sees.

The glasses can play back memories later to help the wearer remember things they have forgotten such as where they left their keys.

Researchers at the University of Bielefeld and the University of Surrey Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering are behind the invention.

They say the glasses do not just record what the user sees but also allows the user to "label" items so information can be used later on.

The wearer could walk around an office or factory identifying certain items by pointing at them. Objects indicated are then given a blank label on a screen inside the glasses that the user then fills in.

Boffins who developed it say it could be used in industrial plants by mechanics looking to identify machine parts or by electricians wiring a complicated device.

A spokesman for the project, headed in the UK by the University of Surrey's Dr Josef Kittler and in Germany by Professor Gerhard Sagerer, said: "A car mechanic for instance could find at a glance where a part on a certain car model is so that it can be identified and repaired.

"For the motorist the system could highlight accident black spots or dangers on the road."

In other cases the glasses could be worn by people going on a guided tour, indicating points of interest or by people looking at panoramas where all the sites could be identified.

The team is continuing to work on the system which it hopes will be commercially available next year.