Poppy and Sam discovered the mineralized skeleton of a dinosaur while enjoying a walk on the beach at Stolford, Somerset, on Saturday. Their owner Jon Gopsill was walking them at low tide when they stumbled on a skeleton five and a half feet long that had been exposed by recent storm activity.

Gopsill is a paleontology fan and has found several fossils before, but they were mainly ammonites, not a large Mesozoic marine reptile. He has reported Poppy and Sam’s find to Somerset Heritage and sent photographs to the Natural History Museum in London.

Dr. Mike Day, curator in the Earth Sciences department at the Natural History Museum, confirmed the skeleton was likely to belong to an ichthyosaur, though he is unable to say for certain without inspecting it in person.

Dr. Day explained:

“Looking at this specimen, based on the number of bones in the pectoral paddle, the apparent absence of a pelvic girdle, as well as the distinctive ‘hunch’ of the back, this is likely to be the remains of an ichthyosaur.

It is not possible to identify the exact type of ichthyosaur from these images alone, however.”

NB: The news service article (carried verbatim in several media outlets) describes ichthyosaurs as “porpoise-like sea mammals,” and while they were porpoise-like in some morphological aspects, they were not mammals. The name itself should have been sufficient to overcome this basic fact-checking deficiency as any 10-year-old and/or viewer of a quarter century of blockbuster movies could tell you “saur” comes from the Greek for “lizard.” Dinosaurs, all of them, were reptiles. Everyone knows this. You can tell Poppy and Sam know it.

Monkeys depicted in a wall painting from the Late Cycladic I period (17th century B.C.) in Akotiri on the Greek island of Thera have been identified as grey langurs, a species native to southern Asia thousands of miles from Minoan Thera.

The fresco decorates the north and west walls in a room of a building dubbed Beta 6. The monkeys climb and frolic above undulating bands of blue that likely represent water, using the rocks that emerge from the waves as jumping off points for their simian games. Its composition, dynamism and bold lines convey a natural setting with an almost abstract restraint. It is known as the Blue Monkey fresco — the color of the monkeys match the waters beneath them — but they’re definitely a slate blue in the greyish family.

Marie Nicole Pareja at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia teamed up with primatologists to re-examine the mystery monkey paintings. One stood out. “When they looked at this wall painting, they all straight away unambiguously said ‘that’s a langur’,” says Pareja.

The team has identified the monkey as a grey langur (Semnopithecus). As well as its distinctive fur, the monkey was depicted holding its tail in a characteristic S shape.

Grey langurs live in southern Asia in what is now Nepal, Bhutan and India – and particularly in the Indus Valley. During the Bronze Age, the region was home to the Indus Valley Civilisation, one of the most important societies of that time. Although it was past its peak, the Indus Valley Civilisation was still advanced for its time, with large cities and elaborate water supply systems.

As there were no native species of monkey in Bronze Age Greece, it was always known that these lively fellows were exotic imports. However, most artwork from the period that features monkeys involve species native to Egypt, which was far closer to home and had an established trade network with ancient Greece.

Did Minoan Greeks visit the Indus? “I wouldn’t be surprised if someday in the future we found evidence for that kind of direct contact,” says Pareja, but right now there is none. It is also possible the visit was the other way round, but again there is no evidence.

Instead, it may be that Greece and Indus were connected via Mesopotamia, another Bronze Age civilisation centred on what is now Iraq. Langurs may have been imported to Mesopotamia for menageries, where visiting Greeks saw them.

“It’s evidence of this far-reaching trade, these relationships with these far-flung areas,” says Pareja. Even in the Bronze Age, it seems there was a lot of exchange between seemingly separate civilisations.

A unique statue of Ramesses II adorned with the “ka” sign has been discovered. The ka was the life-force of an individual, the key spirit of a person that continued the live after physical death. It was the ka, entombed with the body it once inhabited, which ate the food offerings and dwelled in the ka statue to keep itself (and therefore the deceased) eternally alive. The only other ka statue of a pharaoh that has been found is the life-sized wooden statue of the 13th Dynasty pharaoh Hor (ca. 1750 B.C.), discovered in the pharaoh’s tomb in 1894 and considered an artistic masterpiece of the period.

The statue was found on private property in the town of ​​Mit Rahina near the temple of the god Ptah in ancient Memphis. A 62-year-old man excavated under his house and came across large blocks of stone immersed in the ground water. Unauthorized excavation is illegal in Egypt due to the potential for damage to archaeological material and the risk of artifact trafficking. Police busted him earlier this month and Ministry of Antiquities archaeologists began a salvage excavation.

The team unearthed the top half of a rose granite statue of 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 B.C.). The statue is 1’10” wide and just shy of 3’5″ high and depicts the pharaoh wearing a tripartite hair wig with the symbol for “ka” (two upraised arms connected in the middle forming a u-shape) over his head. On the back pillar is the hieroglyphic inscription “Ka Nakht Mari Maat,” literally “The Powerful Loved Bull Maat”.  Ramesses’ regnal name was Usermaatre Setepenre, meaning “The Maat of Ra is powerful, Chosen of Ra.” (The Greek name for Ramesses, Ozymandias, of Shelley look-on-my-works-ye-mighty-and-despair fame, is derivation of Usermaatre.)

The blocks of stone were the remains of a temple to Ptah, patron deity of the ancient capital of Memphis. In addition to the statue, 19 blocks of rose granite and limestone engraved with dedications to Ptah, cartouches of Ramesses II and depictions of the pharaoh engaged in the Heb Sed ceremony, a ritual celebrated when a king had ruled for 30 years (and every three to four years after that, which would turn out to be a lot because his reign lasted 66 years). It’s likely the ka statue was connected to the Heb Sed celebration of Ramesses the Great’s long and successful reign.

The remains found so far have been recovered and transferred to the Mit Rahina open air museum. There they will be conserved and stabilized while excavations continue.