Because I found the best candidate by far. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Roman Elvis.

Roman Elvis is actually an acroterion, a decorative piece usually found on the corners of sarcophagi, and he’s going to be sold to the highest bidder in the Geddes Collection auction at Bonhams this October.

Other items going under the hammer include red and black-figure Attic and Apuglian vases, Roman mosaics, Egyptian artifacts, other classical sculptures like sarcophagus friezes.

Many of these items will sell for up to £90,000 each, and the bust, which even the collector has nicknamed ‘Elvis’, is estimated to make between £25,000 and £30,000.

It is to laugh. Elvis is going to make way, way more than that.

There was no mention that I could find on the Bonhams site or in the press about the ownership trail of these fantastical pieces. Mr. Geddes is Australian and has been collecting since the 70’s. Beyond that, who’s to know?

I cannot tell a lie, though. Shady provenance or no shady provenance, I would find it very, very hard to resist purchasing Roman Elvis if I had the funds. He’s ever so dreamy.

In 2000, Palaeontologist Paul Sereno was in Niger looking for dinosaur fossils in the Ténéré desert. He found animal remains alright, but they weren’t dinosaurs. They were people who lived and died there 10,000 – 5,000 years ago when the desert was lush with lakes, rivers and vegetation.

This map shows how the Gobero site was savannah for a while there, even as the Saharan sands still dominated. A shift in the winds brought monsoon rains to the Ténéré, making not just livable, but downright congenial as desert habitats go.

Two distinct peoples lived there at different times, first the Tiffian and then the Tenerian a few thousand years later. The former were taller and buried their dead most likely wrapped in shrouds. The latter smaller and leaner and buried their dead on their sides as if they were sleeping.

Harpoons and fishhooks found on the site suggest both peoples were fishermen, living off the lake that is now sand all the way down to the bedrock.

“At first glance, it’s hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the same place,” said team member Chris Stojanowski.

The Arizona State University bioarchaeologist added: “The biggest mystery is how they seemed to have done this without disturbing a single grave.”

Sereno did find him some dinosaurs, mind you. Good ones, too.

The site yielded fossils of huge crocodiles and dinosaurs including the complete skeleton of Sarcosuchus imperator, one of the biggest crocodiles that ever roamed the earth some 110 million years ago.

Sereno also unearthed the Nigersaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur with a huge jaw studded with 500 teeth that lived in the same geologic period, the Cretaceous, some 110 million years ago.

Read the full story and see all the gorgeous pictures on the National Geographic site.

Or if you’re really into it, you can read Sereno et al’s paper on their discovery. They’ve got tons more pics, graphs, data, you name it. Srsly fascinating stuff.

The 2500-year-old shipwreck was discovered off the coast of Gela, Sicily, by divers 20 years ago, and the local archaeological authorities have been trying to recover it ever since.

Thanks to the Italian Coast Guard, they’ve now succeeded in raising the entire wreck which will be restored in Portsmouth before going back on display in a new maritime museum in Gela.

What makes this ship particularly remarkable is that it’s the largest, most intact vessel ever found to be constructed with a ancient technique known as “sewing”. Homer mentions this ship-building method in the Illiad.

The ship’s outer shell was built first, and the inner framework was added later. The wooden planks of the hull were sewn together with ropes, with pitch and resin used as sealant to keep out water. […]

Beltrame, of the Università Ca’ Foscari, said the ship—”part of a family of archaic Greek vessels”—is something of a missing link in the evolution of naval engineering.

“It shows a mix of sewing and mortise-and-tenon joints—a different technique that later prevailed in shipbuilding,” Beltrame said, referring to joints in which a protrusion in one piece of wood inserts into a cavity in another.

Sewn-together planks isn’t so far from the first vessels people made to cross the water. It’s a transitional form where you can still see the Robin Crusoe raft inside the oil tanker. Very cool.