More on the Greek mummy found in lead coffin (livescience.com)

"Other museums might have more or flashier items to display. But only the mini-museum of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation can boast of possessing such an other-world oddity as the monkey from Mars. The bureau's state crime lab lobby has its requisite displays on forensic science, including an illegal moonshine still and the microscopic fibers that solved the 1981-82 Atlanta child murders. But tucked away in a glass cylinder are the preserved remains of a monkey that three pranksters passed off as an alien 55 years ago in a UFO hoax that drew headlines worldwide. At the height of UFO hysteria then sweeping the nation, two young barbers and a butcher took a dead monkey in 1953, lopped off its tail and applied a liberal dose of hair remover and some green coloring to the carcass. Then they left the primate on an isolated road north of Atlanta in the pre-dawn hours of July 8, 1953, burning a circle into the pavement with a blowtorch before a police officer came around the curve in his patrol car. "If we had been five minutes earlier, we would have caught 'em in the act," said Sherley Brown, the officer who happened on the scene. The barbers, Edward Watters and Tom Wilson, and the butcher, Arnold "Buddy" Payne, told the policeman they came upon a red, saucer-shaped object in the road that night. They said several 2-foot-tall creatures were scurrying about and the trio hit one with their pickup before the other creatures jumped back in the saucer and blasted skyward — leaving the highway scorched.... " 

"Like a religious relic, the heart of composer Frederic Chopin rests in a Warsaw church, untouched since it was preserved in alcohol after his death in 1849 at age 39. And that's how the Polish government wants to keep it. Scientists want to remove the heart for DNA tests to see if Chopin actually died from cystic fibrosis and not tuberculosis as his death certificate stated. But the government says that's not a good reason to disturb the remains of a revered native son. The heart lies in a jar sealed inside a pillar at Warsaw's Holy Cross Church - and the only time it has been removed was for safekeeping during World War II. Before it was returned in 1951, a doctor examined the heart and found it perfectly preserved in an alcohol that many think is cognac. Chopin died in France, where his body is buried, but he asked that his heart be sent to his homeland. Cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease, was not discovered until many decades after Chopin's death, and the scientists who want to examine the heart say many of his symptoms match that illness, including respiratory infections, recurrent fevers, delayed puberty and infertility...."

"After years of spirited debate over how and when people first reached the Americas, scientists finally seem poised to reach agreement. The emerging consensus: In contrast to what was long held as conventional wisdom, it now seems likely that the first Americans did not wait for ice sheets covering Canada to melt some 13,000 years ago, which would have allowed them to traipse south over solid ground. Instead, early nomads might well have traveled by boat or at least along the coast from Siberia to North America, perhaps navigating arctic waters near today's Bering Strait. The telltale evidence: ancient DNA from those early people that's been coaxed, by powerful analytical technology, into revealing its secret. Rewriting the prehistory of the Americas is perhaps the most remarkable discovery—but hardly the only one—so far achieved through the analysis of ancient DNA. Other new insights about the past are being drawn from the same emerging scientific discipline. In the past five years, the double helix has shed light, for example, on the vanished woolly mammoth, the flightless dodo, and even humanity's long-lost kin, the Neanderthals. Extracting and testing old DNA, once considered practically impossible because too little of the stuff survives the eons intact, are now at the cutting edge of archaeology, paleontology, and other fields, thanks to new techniques and more powerful technology. "Archaeologists are used to stone tools and bones," says Ted Goebel of Texas A&M. "So for us to be presented with this kind of evidence is pretty intriguing." DNA, which contains the blueprints for organisms, degrades over time, breaking down into tiny pieces or disintegrating entirely. For years, the dearth of intact DNA in ancient samples—a chunk of mammoth bone, for instance, or a human hair—stymied researchers who were trying to analyze the material. But now, using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, researchers can "unzip" minute fragments of surviving DNA and duplicate them millions of times over, until they have a sample large enough to test. Then, by comparing differences between the ancient material and modern samples of known provenance, they can analyze a long-extinct animal's genome...."

"Is Bigfoot for real? Maybe... A Clayton County Police officer says he and a friend have the body of a Bigfoot. The animal -- a legendary, hairy hominid that supposedly lives in remote forests -- is said to be dead, frozen, and "shocking." Matthew Whitton, a 28-year-old, who has been with the department for six years, and Rick Dyer, a 31-year-old former correctional officer, posted a video on youtube.com, last week, claiming to have the male Bigfoot corpse. Whitton and Dyer co-own bigfoottracker.com, offering exploration expeditions in the North Georgia Mountains. On their web site Whitton and Dyer announced an alleged discovery: "We have located a family of Bigfoot, and besides the clear photos and video, we have something even more shocking, a BODY." Stay tuned... The Clayton County Police Department responded to the news with an official statement giving the department some distance...." 

"Phoenix police have identified the man whose mummified body was found in the bathtub of a rental cottage near 19th Avenue and Bethany Home Road in February. The body is that of the home's renter, Richard Olejnik, who was last seen about seven years ago, police said Thursday. Police were not calling the death a homicide or seeking homicide charges because the body was "simply too decomposed" to determine the cause or manner of death, said Detective Reuben Gonzales of the Phoenix Police Department. An investigation revealed that Olejnik had been dead for at least six years, Gonzales said. Olejnik was likely about 50 years old when he died. Roughly around the time that Olejnik was last seen, another man, identified as 58-year-old Larry Allen, took up residence in Olejnik's home. It was not clear whether the two men lived together at some point, but detectives believe Allen had been living at the residence for quite some time with the body in the home. Officials believe Allen had used Olejnik's identity to forge documents, Gonzales said...." 

"Phoenix police are investigating a mummified body found in a bathtub, buried under layers of sand, dirt and plywood in a deserted home. Owners of rental cottages in the 1600 block of West Rose Lane became suspicious when the occupant stopped paying rent and apparently abandoned the building. On Friday about 6 p.m., they began to clean up the residence, which is in "deplorable" condition. The home, about 700 square feet in size, was filled with trash, human waste and personal belongings, Sgt. Joel Tranter of Phoenix police said. When the owners entered the bathroom, they saw the tub was filled with dirt and sand and covered by plastic and a sheet of plywood, Phoenix police said. As they dug the sand from the tub, they found a human leg and called police...."

"As anthropologists gingerly removed the layers of ancient textiles swaddling the thirtysomething elite male last month at a Lima lab, offerings both strange and familiar came to light—slingshots, corn, a figurine in identical dress. Taken together, the artifacts, the mummy, and the excavation site suggest that the mysterious, little-studied Chancay civilization held a surprisingly tight grip on the fertile north-central Pacific coast of Peru during the culture's heyday, between A.D. 1000 and 1500, when it finally fell to the unstoppable Inca Empire, experts say. Until now most Chancay remains have come from sites that had been looted or bulldozed for expanding farms, making the specimens' context and origins uncertain. That spotty record makes the discovery of the new mummy in an untouched, corncob-lined tomb in the Chancay farming village of Rontoy a breakthrough. "We know exactly where [this mummy] is from, and we are finding things that we always thought were Chancay. We actually have a male [wearing] what we've always called male tunics," Tulane University anthropologist Kit Nelson said. All of these things come together so we can say, in fact, yes this is Chancay, [and] this is what it looks like," said Nelson, who, along with Arturo Ruíz Estrada of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima received funding for the project from the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society...." 

"Since he first perfected his technique for replacing body fluids and fat with a silicone polymer, Gunther Von Hagens has attracted infamy and fascination in equal measure for his production line of corpses frozen in time. Never before, though, has he turned his attention to a cadaver weighing in excess of a ton and measuring 15ft in height. A female giraffe was unveiled yesterday as the centerpiece of the latest exhibition by the German pathologist turned anatomical showman, to be staged at the O2 – formerly the Millennium Dome – in Greenwich, south-east London, in October. The giraffe, donated by a zoo after dying naturally, will appear alongside a partially plucked ostrich in a show featuring 200 bodies preserved using the "plastination" process which allows Von Hagens to reveal the anatomy of his subjects. His specially embalmed bodies are stripped of their skin to reveal the muscle, bone and organs, before being moved into different poses, which their creator insists provides a unique insight into physiology. Previous exhibitions by Von Hagens, who is referred to as Dr Frankenstein by his critics, have attracted protesters, angry at his treatment of human remains. The giraffe exhibit, which was produced by Von Hagens at his laboratory in Germany, has been dissected to show the animal's enormous heart and the intricate framework of muscle and bone which support its neck. All of the animals in the Body Worlds exhibition were donated or purchased after dying natural deaths, following a court case in Germany five years ago when an animal rights group claimed that a plastinated gorilla corpse had been illegally removed from Hanover Zoo. Von Hagens was cleared of any wrongdoing...." 

"The DNA of a bacterium that causes ulcers has been discovered in the stomach of a Mexican mummy, showing that ancient Americans were afflicted with the painful condition nearly 700 years ago. Based on its location and articles it was buried with, the researchers believe the mummy dates from around 1350. This suggests that the bacterium (Helicobacter pylori) came to the Americas with the first people from Asia 11,000 years ago, rather than with European colonists in the last 500 or so years. The find is detailed this week in the journal BMC Microbiology. Studies like this are reshaping our understanding of the history of disease. H. pylori has been found in stool samples from mummies in Chile and Egypt, but this is the first time it has been found in a North American mummy. As well as stomach ulcers the bacterium can cause cancer, and is transmitted when food or water is contaminated with faeces. Several other pathogens have been identified by DNA analysis in mummies, including the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and leprosy. Lead author Yolanda Lopez Vidal, a microbiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the corpse was naturally mummified when it was left in a dry cave in the northern state of Chihuahua. The rapid drying stopped bacteria and fungi from degrading the body, preserving the internal organs and bacterial DNA in the stomach...." 

"Peru is threatening to sue Yale University for the return of ancient mummies, bones and ceramics taken from the "Lost City of the Incas", Machu Picchu, by an American explorer nearly a century ago. In the latest of a series of legal moves by nations trying to recover archaeological relics, Peru's ambassador to Washington, Eduardo Ferrero, has delivered a warning to the university in Connecticut. "Peru has notified [Yale's president] Richard Levin that a lawsuit is prepared if its rights to the archaeological pieces are not recognized," the Peruvian foreign ministry said in a statement. Oscar Maurtua, the foreign minister, added: "We are convinced that we have sufficient proof to win in court." He added that Lima would prefer an out-of-court settlement. Any court action would probably be held in Connecticut. A spokesman for Yale, Tom Conroy, told the Associated Press news agency that the university had been having discussions with the Peruvian government. "We are hoping for a resolution that is satisfactory to all involved," he said. Peru is seeking to retrieve about 5,000 artifacts, including mummified corpses and pottery that the American historian and explorer Hiram Bingham excavated in three expeditions to the ancient high-mountain Incan city of Machu Picchu in 1911, 1912 and 1914...." 

"The coroner's office is asking for the public's help in identifying a man whose mummified body was discovered in an abandoned house in Beverly Hills last week. The man's body was found in the 700 block of North Alta Drive near Elevado Avenue on June 26, Lt. John Kadas of the coroner's office said. Coroner's detectives do not believe foul play was involved. They estimate the man was dead for roughly a year, according to the Beverly Hills Weekly reported. Teenagers skateboarding near the vacated house smelled a foul odor, which lead them to the corpse inside, Beverly Hills police Lt. Executive Officer Tony Lee told the newspaper. The body was curled in a fetal position and appeared mummified, Lee said. The teens were "terrified" and had a relative call police, according to the newspaper. Based on an assortment of old bags and an old bicycle near the body, officers determined that the deceased was a homeless white man in his 40s or 50s, the newspaper reported...."