"A legal battle over a finder's fee for Italy's famous Iceman mummy is set to run and run. Local authorities have appealed to Italy's highest court against a May verdict by a lower court which ruled that Austrian couple Helmut and Erika Simon found the 5,000-year-old frozen man. The lower court said that Erika, who lost her husband in a mountain accident two years ago, should be properly compensated. In its appeal to the Cassation Court, the provincial council in Bolzano argued that Mrs Simon was asking for too much, 150,000 euros, for the sensational 1991 find. 'One has to consider that we have borne all the expense of exploiting the find,' it claimed. Ms Simon countered by reiterating that the Iceman had been a goldmine for the northern Italian city. For years, Bolzano's provincial administration have been offering the Simons 50,000 euros In spurning the fee, the Simons cited the estimated four million euros a year the Iceman generates for restaurants, hotels and souvenir-sellers in Bolzano alone - not to mention a worldwide industry of TV programmes, documentaries and books..." 

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"Terry Lewis was a merchant mariner, antiques collector and comedian, but he's best known as the Mummy Man. Lewis's controversial decision to display an Egyptian mummy at his antiques shop made news around the globe in 1996. The mummy's gone, but the public has one last chance to view other objects that Lewis brought from around the world to midcoast Maine. Lewis died in June, and The Cyr Auction Co. of Gray will auction off Nonesuch House Antiques' collection, as well as the Colonial style home, at 10 a.m. Saturday on Middle Street.... In 1996, his shop made headlines and network television after the Maine Attorney General's Office learned that he had an Egyptian mummy on the premises. Lewis acquired the mummy in 1992 at a museum liquidation sale in New Hampshire. The U.S. Customs Service placed a seizure order on the mummy, which prevented Lewis from selling it. The controversy, which was reported by various news media, ended in 1997 after two Egyptologists from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston inspected the unwrapped, blackened specimen and determined that it had no cultural value to Egypt.... Sonia MacNeil, who handles public relations for Cyr Auction, said Lewis sold the mummy to the Niagara Falls Museum in Toronto in the late 1990s...."

"Embryos found within the body of a pregnant fossil also mark the most recent record of a live birth and the physically smallest known ichthyosaur embryos. 'It was pretty amazing to realize this valuable discovery had sat under a ping-pong table for 25 years,' said Dr. Michael Caldwell, paleontologist at the U of A. 'But I suppose that after 100 millions of years in the dirt, it's all relative.' A few decades ago, graduate students and a technician from the Faculty of Science collected several ichthyosaur specimens - the marine animals resembled dolphins and fish - from the Loon River Formation at Hay River, NWT. Somehow the bones ended up in several boxes underneath a ping-pong table in the science undergraduate lab. When Caldwell arrived in 2000, he started renovations, found the boxes and immediately started inquiring about the fossils. Allan Lindoe, the technician of the original dig, was still in the faculty and explained the history. Working with Erin Maxwell, an undergraduate student at the U of A at the time, Caldwell soon learned the bones were from the Lower Cretaceous period, or about 100 million years old. This finding was significant since it bridged a huge gap - the previous set of pregnant ichthyosaur specimens was dated 80 millions earlier. The Loon Lake collection was also the most northern record of ichthyosaur remains from Canada.... The research is published in the current issue of the journal Palaeontology."

"...though he discounted any direct linkage between the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands and the ancient Egyptians, a theory based on their love of mummifying their dead and which has gained ground in recent years, the professor [Antonio Tejera Gaspar] admitted that an indirect relationship was possible. 'There is no doubt about the north African origins of the inhabitants of these islands,' he said and went on to explain that it is generally accepted they were descended from Libyan Berbers who themselves probably originated west of the Nile. They began to settle in the Canaries in around the first century AD. Moving on to the vexed question of whether Guanche mummification owes anything – or everything – to Egypt, Professor Tejera said: 'It is very probable the old system of mummification so characteristic of Tenerife and Gran Canaria could have derived from ancient knowledge. These people did after all come from Africa. Some of the Berber tribes were relatively close to Egypt and many communities, say in the second or third millennium, were in contact with the Egyptians. So it would not be straining credibility too far to say that the practice could have some link with them, but not a direct one. ' "

"The mummy of a dog from the Chiribaya culture, dating from between 1100 and 1300, sits on display at El Algarrobal museum, near the port of Ilo in southern Peru. The dogs, which helped in herding llamas in the pre-Hispanic culture that predated the Incas, were given special treatment when they died. Their mummified bodies were given their own burial with food and blankets to keep them warm in the afterlife." 

"Burglars in Vienna opted for a speedy getaway after they found eight severed human heads when breaking into the basement of a block of flats, Austrian police said on Friday. A dentist had stored the mummified heads, which he used for research, in a chest in the basement. Burglars stumbled upon the collection when they broke in, police said. 'The burglars were looking for loot when they discovered the heads,' said a spokeswoman for Austrian police. 'From what it looks like, they just left them lying and bolted away.'Austrian authorities said they were investigating whether there had been a breach of the regulations for storing research materials.... "

"The prehistoric hunter known as the Iceman took a bare few minutes to die after an arrow hit a vital artery, a forensic expert said Wednesday after a CAT scan on the famous mummy. 'He died of loss of blood very quickly. With a wound like that he couldn't even have taken another step,' said Bolzano Hospital pathologist Eduard Egarter Vigl. The discovery adds to the riddle over the Iceman's death. For years, the accepted version was that the hunter, also known as Oetzi, was shot by another hunter prepared to kill for deer. This version was based on flora found in his stomach, which came from a valley where deer would be expected to roam. Therefore, experts said, the Iceman was hit by the hunter's arrow in a mountain prairie but managed to stagger up to the glacier where he was found 5,000 years later. Recent evidence - corroborated by Wednesday's CAT scan - has backed a rival theory that the Iceman was assassinated by several attackers...."

Rewriting Ötzi's history: Bone study suggests that he was a shepherd, not a hunter (ansa.it) 

"Italy's famed Iceman was probably a shepherd and not a hunter as previously believed. A new study shows the Iceman was sturdier and niftier than his Neolithic (Late Stone Age) contemporaries. The bone analysis by American and Austrian scientists has found evidence that the prehistoric man was on the short side and moved a lot. 'He was more like the people who came before, in the Mesolithic Era (Middle Stone Age),' US researcher Christopher Ruff told the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE). The Iceman's squat frame and strong bones were ideal for his job, 'probably that of a high-altitude shepherd,' Ruff believes. Previous studies have concluded, by contrast, that the man from the distant past was a hunter. 'He evidently went for long walks over extremely hilly terrain,' said Johns Hopkins University lecturer Ruff, leader of a team which compared the Iceman's tibia to the remains of 139 prehistoric men..."

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"The sausage-and-cheese biscuit lay in state in a window of the former Fredericksburg Hardware building for at least three months before someone hung a banner in the window announcing the Jaycees Haunted House. 'Well,' observed a co-worker, inspecting the aged biscuit through the glass, 'it is kind of scary.' Scary indeed. The fast-food breakfast sandwich had become a curiosity since showing up in the William Street window sometime in late May. It was unwrapped but still nestled in the waxed paper, as if someone had been poised to eat it, then simply got distracted--or thought better of it. As the weeks ticked by, passersby, both nauseated and intrigued, marveled at its unchanging condition. The biscuit possessed a waxy, Leninesque complexion, the cheese having taken on a beige, translucent pallor, the sausage appearing a tad hockey-puckish. But much like the former Soviet leader, preserved behind glass long after death, the biscuit appeared remarkably lifelike, not all that different from the day it was abandoned on the windowsill...."

 "The hunters slice through the morning silence on Lake Okeechobee, airboats whining as a helicopter follows in the distance, black insect on a pink sky. The chopper thunders closer, then zooms past. The lookout in the cockpit radios down directions. He's spotted an alligator nest in the marsh. Tracy Howell revs his airboat engine and charges into the swirling blades of grass and giant cane. He and his hunting partner then leap off, trudging through the muck. Their only weapon: a plastic canoe paddle covered with the bite marks of angry mother alligators. The females fight to protect what the hunters are after. Alligator eggs. The brush parts to reveal a large nest. The mama? Nowhere to be seen, though that doesn't mean she isn't close, lurking in a mud cave only feet away...."