Archaeologists said this week that the ruins of Nero's Theatre, an imperial theatre referred to in ancient Roman texts but never found, have been discovered under the garden of a future Four Seasons Hotel steps from the Vatican.
Archaeologists have excavated deep under the walled garden of the Palazzo della Rovere since 2020 as part of planned renovations on the frescoed Renaissance building.
The palazzo, which takes up a city block along the broad Via della Conciliazione leading to St Peter's Square, is home to an ancient Vatican chivalric order that leases the space to a hotel to raise money for Christians in the Holy Land.
Medieval artifacts, dated between the 10th and 14th century CE, have also been found during the same excavation, providing a rare picture of artefacts and items from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance.
This head is dated to the first century CE, the time of Nero's reign (54-68 CE).
Nero remains one of the most famous emperors of Rome, and was the final member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (the family of Julius and Augustus Caesar) to rule the empire.
He was renowned for misgovernance and self-indulgence, but also viewed himself as an artist and gave public music performances at his theatre, something unthinkable to the Roman upper class at the time.
Nero's final words are reputed to be, "What an artist dies in me!"
The portable artefacts recovered from the dig site will be taken to a museum, officials said, while the remains of the theatre itself will be covered back up.
A luxury Four Seasons hotel will be built atop the site when the excavation is done.
Archaeologists working on a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery discovered in Gaza last year have found at least 125 tombs, most with skeletons still largely intact, and two rare lead sarcophaguses, the Palestinian Ministry of Antiquities said on July 25 2023.
The impoverished Palestinian territory was an important trading post for civilisations as far back as the ancient Egyptians.
In the past, local archaeologists reburied findings for lack of funding but French organisations have helped excavate this site, discovered in February last year by a construction crew working on an Egyptian-funded housing project.
"It is the first time in Palestine we have discovered a cemetery that has 125 tombs, and it is the first time in Gaza we have discovered two sarcophaguses made of lead," Fadel Al-A'utul, an expert at the French School of Biblical and Archeological Research, told Reuters at the site.
One of the two sarcophaguses was decorated with images of grapes and the other with dolphins said A'utul, whose organisation is supervising the work with help from French aid agency Premiere Urgance International.
"We need funds to preserve this archeological site so that history does not get washed away," he added.
A'utul said he hoped the site would become a tourist destination, with a museum to display the findings.
Almost 5000 coins dating back more than 500 years have been unearthed by a group of metal detectorists who said they shed 'tears of joy on finding them."
Raoul Vlad Suta said he and friends Ion Vlad and Silviu Tamas were scouring a forest in Romania on Sunday when they stumbled upon the precious find.
"I received a short but stable signal, I put the shovel to work, and when I turned the ground on top I noticed a small silver coin as if it was taken out of my pocket," he wrote in the Facebook group "The metal detector community of amateur archaeologists from Romania."
He found more coins and a pot-type vessel which appeared to have been filled with them.
"Adrenaline at its peak. I carried out a perimeter digging around the object, carefully extracting it, along with a few pieces of ceramics probably belonging to the vessel," he said.
The group has now counted 4868 Hungarian coins, three silver plates weighing approximately and four more unidentified coins.
He said they're waiting for experts to see the coins but they date from 1500-1550, most of them from the reign of Vladislau II.
"Such a discovery brings a wonderful feeling, a fulfilment and I believe it is the dream of every history and detection enthusiast," he said.
An unusual find in China suggests some early mammals may have hunted dinosaur for dinner.
The fossil shows a badgerlike creature chomping down on a small, beaked dinosaur, their skeletons intertwined.
The find comes from a site known as "China's Pompeii," where mud and debris from long-ago volcanoes buried creatures in their tracks.
"It does seem like this is a prehistoric hunt, captured in stone, like a freeze frame," University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who was not involved with the study, said in an email.
The fossil, described Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, shows two creatures from around 125 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
Even though the mammal is much smaller, researchers think it was attacking the dinosaur when they both got caught in the volcanic flow, said study author Jordan Mallon, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
The mammal is perched on the dinosaur, its paws gripping the reptile's jaw and a hind limb while its teeth plunge into the ribcage.
"I've never seen a fossil like this before," Mallon said.
The mammal's left "hand" is seen grasping the dinosaur's lower jaw.
That mammals ate dinosaur meat had been proposed before: another fossil showed a mammal died with dinosaur remains in its gut. But the new find also suggests that mammals may have actually preyed on dinosaurs several times their size, and didn't just scavenge ones that were already dead, Mallon said.
"This turns the old story on its head," Brusatte said.
"We're used to thinking of the Age of Dinosaurs as a time when dinosaurs ruled the world, and the tiny mammals cowered in the shadows."
The mammal's skull bites into the dinosaur's ribs.
The study authors acknowledged that there have been some fossil forgeries known from this part of the world, which Mallon said was a concern when they started their research. But after doing their own preparations of the skeletons and analysing the rock samples, he said they were confident that the fossil — which was found by a farmer in 2012 — was genuine, and would welcome other scientists to study the fossil as well.
The mammal in the fossil duo is the meat-eating Repenomamus robustus, about the size of a house cat, Mallon said. The dinosaur — Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis — was about as big as a medium-sized dog with a parrotlike beak.
This species was a plant eater, but other dinosaurs were meat eaters or ate both. In the end, dinosaurs were probably still eating mammals more often than the other way around, Mallon said.
"And yet we now know that the mammals were able to fight back, at least at times," he said.
Researchers have discovered hidden details in ancient Egyptian paintings using a cutting-edge chemical imaging technique.
The two paintings are located within tombs inside a chapel in the Theban Necropolis, near the River Nile and date back more than 3,000 years.
The researchers identified alterations made by the artists that are rare in Egyptian paintings, commonly thought to be the product of highly formalised workflows.
This painting shows Menna - an official who served under pharaoh Amenhotep III - and his wife adoring Osiris, one of ancient Egypt's most important gods, and Menna raises his hands in front of his face.
A third hand, however, is hidden under the white background layer, making it clear that the figure had been retouched.
"We already knew it was there. We have a very clear view of the secondary arm that was changed afterwards. But we cannot say when it was changed, or even why it was changed," said Philippe Martinez, an Egyptologist at the Sorbonne University in Paris and lead author of the study.
"The interesting thing is that even if it was just seen as a mistake to be corrected, the way it is corrected differs very, very strongly from the original.
Here is a detailed view of the missing hand from the painting.
This small detail could suggest new clues about the painting process.
While tomb decorations are generally believed to be the work of several people working in parallel, these modifications open the possibility that the paintings were instead done by different groups over different sessions, the study noted.
The second painting is in the tomb of Nakhtamun, a cleric. Unlike those in the tomb of Menna, these artworks are underrated and "simply inaccessible," according to the study.
The analysis of the painting of a pharaoh, Ramesses II, uncovered various alterations to his crown, necklace and other royal items, most likely due to some change in symbolic meaning over time.
"This representation of Ramesses II, interestingly, shows him with a budding beard," Martinez said.
"And that's very weird because we almost have no images of pharaohs with a stubble — they usually look dreamlike, like superheroes, shown in stances that are sort of eternal in some ways. But showing someone with a beard means showing someone in a moment of his life, and that is very rare."
Some of the details that chemical imaging has uncovered are especially puzzling, Martinez added.
"Chemical imaging was giving us not only different colors, but also different shapes for the neck of the king; the Adam's apple is never shown in Egyptian art, but here we have one clearly visible. The corrections also show an image that was not perfect.
"Egyptians liked perfection and beauty, but this is not that, because the shape of the scepter is slightly weird: It touches the face of the king.
"This shows how the artist was actually working and how corrections can lead to something that is less perfect than before. It must have meaning, but that still escapes us," he said.
It's just been revealed the largest theropod fossil in Eastern North America was discovered during a dig experience program at Maryland Dinosaur Park on April 22, 2023.
Other fossils were also found nearby it, with the collection marking the first fossils found in the US state since 1887.
The large fossil has been identified as a one-metre long shin bone.
Experts have classified it as a 'therapod' - a branch of the dinosaur family that contains carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.
It's believed the fossil is an Acrocanthosaurus, the largest theropod in the Early Cretaceous period, estimated to measure about 11.5 metres long.