Eight Million Year Old Cypress Trees Found in Turkey with Perfectly Preserved Wood

Miners digging for lignite, a type of coal, discovered a patch of cypress forest that's eight million years old. The palaeontological site is in Bukkabrany in northeastern Hungary, and it has been luring scientists because of the perfect preservation of the wood of the trees, which, logic would dictate, should have been petrified after so long.

The state of the trees may give climatologists clues to what happened to the region at that time, when the Pannonian lake, which submerged much of Hungary began to retreat and caused much of the Mediterranean sea to dry up.

"How to Enhance Children's Imagination of the Past When Teaching History"

Villagers Dine on Dinosaurs in China

Villagers in central China have acquired a taste for dinosaur bones, thinking they are the bones of flying dragons. Valued for their supposedly curative powers, the bones are extracted from the ground, pound to a powder, and used as ingredients in food and medicine. The concoctions are fed to children to alleviate dizziness and cramps, among other ailments. Scientist Dong Zhiming said that the dinosaur fossils were being sold in markets in Henan province as "dragon bones" since 2006 at about fifty cents per kilogram, until the villagers were told they were actually the remains of dinosaurs. They promptly donated 200 kilograms to him to study. The villagers had been selling and eating dinosaur bones for twenty years.