laboratoryequipment:

Researchers Find 50 Skulls in Sacred Aztec Temple

Mexican archaeologists say they uncovered the largest number of skulls ever found in one offering at the most sacred temple of the Aztec empire dating back more than 500 years. The finding reveals new ways the pre-Colombian civilization used skulls in rituals at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor, experts say. That’s where the most important Aztec ceremonies took place between 1325 until the Spanish conquest in 1521.

The 50 skulls were found at one sacrificial stone. Five were buried under the stone, and each had holes on both sides — signaling they were hung on a skull rack. Archaeologist Raul Barrera of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History says the other 45 skulls appeared to have just been dumped on top of the stone.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/10/researchers-find-50-skulls-sacred-aztec-temple

elegantbuffalo:

Macrauchenia: was a long-necked and long-limbed, three-toed South American ungulate mammal dating back to around 7 million years ago.

In life, Macrauchenia resembled a humpless camel with a short proboscis, though it is not closely related to either camels or proboscideans.  It was first discovered on February 9, 1834 at Port St Julian in Patagonia (Argentina) by Charles Darwin.

…he’s a weird one.

cosmicportal:

Kunturwasi ruins (Pre Inca - Peru)

ikenbot:

Sky ‘Crucifix’ in Ancient Text May Be Mystery-Solving Supernova

According to an Old English manuscript chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons, a mysterious “red crucifix” appeared in the “heavens” over Britain one evening in A.D. 774. Now astronomers say it may have been the supernova explosion that sprinkled unexplained traces of carbon-14 in tree rings that year, halfway around the world in Japan.

Jonathon Allen, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made the connection this week after listening to a Nature podcast. He heard a team of Japanese scientists discussing new research in which they measured an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings from the year A.D. 774 or 775. They thought the spike must have come from a burst of high-energy radiation striking the upper atmosphere and triggering an increase in the rate of carbon-14 formation.

(Carbon-14, a radioactive version of a carbon atom with six protons and eight neutrons, forms when gamma rays from space strip atmospheric atoms of their neutrons, which then collide with the isotope nitrogen-14 and cause it to radioactively decay into carbon-14.)