Extract of Homer’s Odyssey discovered

Dino bones found

ATHENS, July 10, (Agencies): Archaeologists in Greece have discovered what they believe to be the oldest known extract of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey”.

A team of Greek and German researchers found it on an engraved clay plaque in Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games in the Peloponnese peninsula, the Greek culture ministry said on Tuesday.

It holds 13 verses from the Odyssey’s 14th Rhapsody, where its hero, Odysseus, addresses his lifelong friend Eumaeus. Preliminary estimates date the finding to the Roman era, probably before the 3rd century AD.

The date still needed to be confirmed, but the plaque was still “a great archaeological, epigraphic, literary and historical exhibit,” the ministry said.

The Odyssey, 12,109 lines of poetry attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, tells the story of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, who wanders for 10 years trying to get home after the fall of Troy.

The Odyssey is the second major poem attributed to Homer after the “Iliad” and scholars date its writing to around 675-725 BCE. It is widely considered to be among the world’s greatest works of literature.

Apaldetti

Bones fuels ‘Triassic’ rethink:

Giant dinosaurs lived on Earth much earlier than previously thought, according to a team of excavators in Argentina who discovered the remains of a 200-million-year old species.

The species, baptized Ingenia prima, was about three times the size of the largest Triassic dinosaurs from its era. It was discovered in the Balde de Leyes dig site in San Juan province, 1,100 kms (680 miles) west of the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

The find was published in the specialist Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday and revealed in Argentina by the La Matanza National University’s Scientific Dissemination Agency.

“As soon as we found it, we realized it was something different. We found a shape, the first giant one among all the dinosaurs. That’s the surprise,” said Cecilia Apaldetti, a government and San Juan University researcher.

Excavators found several vertebrae from the neck and tail as well as fore and hind leg bones.

The species “exhibits a growth strategy that was unknown until now and indicates that gigantism originated much earlier than was thought,” said Apaldetti, the study’s co-author.

These were “herbivore dinosaurs, quadrupeds, easily recognizable by their very long neck and tail, and from the sauropod group,” she added.

Before this discovery, it was thought that gigantism developed during the Jurassic period, around 180 million years ago.

Fellow co-author Ricardo Martinez believes the Ingenia prima is from “a Late Triassic period, possibly 205 million years” ago.

The Triassic period extended from around 250-200 million years ago and the Jurassic from 200-145 million years ago.

Oldest biological colours:

Australian researchers have uncovered the world’s oldest biological colour in the Sahara desert, in a find they said Tuesday helped explain why complex lifeforms only recently emerged on earth.

The pink pigments were produced by simple microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria more than 1.1 billion years ago, some 500 million years older than previous colour pigment discoveries.

That makes the samples around “fifteen times older” than the Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur species, according to senior Australian National University researcher Jochen Brocks.

Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old and researchers said the latest find shed light on why more sophisticated plant and animal life only came into existence 600 million years ago.

Previous research argued that low oxygen levels in the atmosphere held back the evolution of complicated lifeforms, but the discovery of cyanobacteria at such an early date suggests that the organisms crowded out more plentiful food sources such as algae.

“Algae, although still microscopic, are a thousand times larger in volume than cyanobacteria, and are a much richer food source,” Brocks told AFP.

“The cyanobacterial oceans started to vanish about 650 million years ago, when algae began to rapidly spread to provide the burst of energy needed for the evolution of complex ecosystems, where large animals, including humans, could thrive on Earth.”