Photos of 'Yeti Footprints' Hit the Auction Block

Ardent believers in the existence of a mythical creature known as the Yeti may be excited to learn that rare photographic "evidence" of this mysterious beast is now up for auction.

In 1951, British mountaineer Eric Earle Shipton was leading an expedition on Mount Everest when he took a series of photographs of what he believed might be the footprints of a bipedal, apelike creature known as the Yeti. The photos sparked debate in Europe about the existence of themythical Himalayan creature, according to Christie's, the auction house handling the online sale.

Four of Shipton's 12-inch by 13-inch (30 by 33 centimeters) photographs will be sold to the highest bidder in a two-week-long online auction that began on Aug. 27. Two of the photos feature the alleged Yeti footprints alongside human footprints for the sake of comparison. The other two photos give the viewer a better sense of the scale of these enigmatic prints — showing the Yeti footprint next to an ice ax and a booted foot, respectively. [ See more photos of the supposed Yeti footprints ]

CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. VIA LIVESCIENCE

Four photos depicting the supposed footprints of a mythical creature known as the Yeti are currently for sale online.

The 63-year-old photos could fetch up to $8,300, according to Christie's.

Other highlights from the " Out of the Ordinary: The Online Edit " auction include an iguanodon vertebrae fossil from the early Cretaceous period. The bidding for this ancient prize starts at $829. An egg from an extinct species of elephant bird (Aepyornis maximus) from Madagascar will likely cost more, with a starting bid set at $10,000.

For science-fiction fans, the online auction also features an original poster from the 1958 film "I Married a Monster from Outer Space" (which could fetch $3,975). However, a bolder choice may be the full-size replica of the extraterrestrial creature from the 1979 film "Alien." Expected to sell for at least $4,000, the replica was one of 100 models that were used to create alien costumes for the iconic film.

And, of course, there's something for space fans, too. Christie's is also auctioning off a fragment of the Bible that accompanied American astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell to the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in February 1971. The specimen could sell for $16,500, according to the auction house.

High-Flying Radar Uncovers Hidden Faults After Napa Earthquake

The Aug. 24 Napa earthquake woke several small, previously unrecognized Napa Valley faults, according to the first results from a high-flying NASA radar instrument. The magnitude-6.0 Napa earthquake, the biggest to shake northern California in 25 years, injured 170 people and killed one woman. Most of the damage was centered on the West Napa Fault. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that the West Napa Fault moved a total of 18 inches (46 centimeters) along a 9.3-mile-long (15 kilometers) length, USGS scientist Dan Ponti said Sept. 4 at a USGS earthquake seminar. New radar images of Napa Valley also confirm that the West Napa Fault caused the deadly earthquake.

But the images also reveal a handful of smaller faults running roughly northwest to southeast, parallel to the West Napa Fault. "These really tiny ones are probably not big enough faults to have a significant earthquake, but it's a good thing to have people go out and check whether they are part of a larger fault system," said Eric Fielding, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The radar images were created from UAVSAR (uninhabited aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar) data collected during flights on May 29, 2014, and on Aug. 29, 2014.

NASA / JPL-CALTECH / ASI / GOOGLE EARTH

Ground deformation from the Aug. 24 earthquake in Napa, California. Each color fringe corresponds to deformation of 4.7 inches (12 centimeters).

2d Hologram?

Physicists at Fermilab in Illinois have turned on a laser-based experiment that could reveal whether the three-dimensional world we perceive is merely a "Matrix"-style illusion generated by a cosmic two-dimensional hologram.

The Holometer experiment is the result of years of work by particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan and his colleagues at the federally funded Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and it could provide the first clear evidence for the existence of the holographic universe. The concept has been debated fordecades, but it's devilishly difficult to show whether it can ever be anything more than a concept.

Hogan aims to find out whether the universe is a hologram by looking for telltale quantum jitters in the fabric of space-time itself. "If we see something, it will completely change ideas about space we've used for thousands of years," he said in a news release.

REIDAR HAHN / FERMILAB

A photo taken with a wide-angle lens from above shows the heart of the Holometer as a Fermilab researcher works on the apparatus.

The Holometer — short for "holographic interferometer" — consists of two interferometers, each of which fires a 1-kilowatt laser beam at a beam splitter, and then down two perpendicular 130-foot (40-meter) arms. The laser light is then reflected back to the beam splitter and recombines. If the splitter has moved slightly due to jitters in the space-time continuum, subtle fluctuations in the light should reveal the effect.

The apparatus is moving all the time, of course — but the Holometer is tuned to detect differences on the scale of less than a millionth of a second. Scientists should be able to filter out the effects of physical motion as well as radio noise from the electronics in the lab.

"If we find a noise we can’t get rid of, we might be detecting something fundamental about nature — a noise that is intrinsic to space-time,” said Fermilab physicist Aaron Chou, lead scientist and project manager for the Holometer. "It's an exciting moment for physics. A positive result will open a whole new avenue of questioning about how space works."

How space-time (might) work

The traditional view is that our universe has three spatial dimensions, with time serving as the fourth dimension. String theorists say the equations that govern quantum mechanics and gravity become more elegant if the universe has six or seven additional dimensions. Physicists will be looking for evidence of those higher dimensions when Europe's Large Hadron Collider starts up again next year.

Ancient 'Dragon' Pterosaur Flew Right Out of 'Avatar'

A sprawling ancient flying reptile looked so much like a dragon that could have flown with the aerial predators called "ikran" in the film "Avatar" that its discoverers named the newfound beast after those mountain banshees.

The pterosaur, dubbed Ikrandraco avatar ("draco" means "dragon" in Latin), may have stored food in a throat pouch like a pelican does, the researchers said.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to flap wings to fly. Before pterosaurs went extinct in the catastrophic impactthat ended the Age of Dinosaurs, they were the biggest animals that ever flew, with wingspans measuring up to 39 feet (12 meters). (Although pterosaurs lived alongside dinosaurs, these flying reptiles were not dinosaurs.)

CHUANG ZHAO

The pterosaur known as Ikrandraco avatar may have stored food in a throat pouch similar to a pelican's.

Scientists investigated two partial skeletons of Ikrandraco dating back about 120 million years, to the Early Cretaceous Period. They unearthed these fossils in arid hills in northeastern China's Liaoning province, which has become famous for the trove of feathered dinosaurs unearthed there over the last decade. Back when this reptile was alive, the area where it was found was a large freshwater lake. [Images of Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs]

The pterosaur was about 2.3 feet (0.7 meters) long and had a wingspan of about 4.9 feet (1.5 meters). It had an elongated skull and a unique crest or bladelike bulge of bone on the tip of its lower jaw. The head of this newfound pterosaur is similar to that of the ikran in "Avatar," said lead study author Xiaolin Wang of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

The back of Ikrandraco's jaw crest had a little hooklike structure. The researchers suggested this notch may have served as an anchor for soft tissue, and they proposed that Ikrandraco had a throat pouch like the one a pelican uses to store food.

The researchers plan to conduct experiments to see whether Ikrandraco's jaw crest could have supported a throat pouch. The scientists detailed their findings online Thursday inScientific Reports.

Mind Reading? Brain-to-Brain Message Sent From India to Paris

In an experiment that sounds more like science fiction than reality, two humans were able to send greetings to each other using only a digital connection linking their brains.

Using noninvasive means, researchers made brain recordings of a person in India thinking the words "hola" and "ciao," and then decoded and emailed the messages to France, where a machine converted the words into brain stimulation in another person, who perceived the signals as flashes of light. From the sequence of flashes, the French recipient was able to successfully interpret the greetings, according to a new study published Friday (Sept. 5) in the journal PLOS ONE. [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]

The researchers wanted to know if it is possible for two people to communicate by reading out the brain activity of one person and injecting that activity into a second person.

PLOS ONE

Using the brain link, a person in India transmitted greetings to people in France, using thoughts alone.

"Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of [the] Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other, in India and France?" co-author Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone said in a statement. Pascual-Leone is a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mysterious Mushroom-Shaped Deep-Sea Creatures Found off Australia

Mysterious animals discovered offshore Australia resemble floppy chanterelle mushrooms but feel like dollops of gelatin, according to a new study.

The ocean-dwelling creatures are so unusual that an entire new taxonomic family was created to classify them, scientists report today (Sept. 3) in the journal PLOS ONE. Yet nothing is known about their lifestyle, their feeding habits, how they reproduce or if they float or attach to the seafloor.

"We don't even know if they're upside down," said lead study author Jean Just, a taxonomist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

JEAN JUST / PLOS ONE

Photographs of 15 Dendrogramma specimens. The ocean-dwelling creatures are so unusual that an entire new taxonomic family was created to classify them.

The two new species described in the study were officially named Dendrogramma enigmatica and Dendrogramma discoides. Their tops are flat discs about 0.5 inches (about 1 centimeter) wide. Inside the discs, a fan of digestive tubes delivers nutrients, radiating outward like bicycle tire spokes. The center "mouth" opens into the stalk, and is probably for both eating food and excreting waste, Just said. (Many primitive species have this single gut.) Of the two new species, one has a shorter stalk and smaller disc compared with the other, though the difference is only a few millimeters. [ Image Gallery: Mysterious Ocean-Dwelling 'Mushrooms' ]

A Lost-and-Found Nomad Helps Solve the Mystery of a Swimming Dinosaur

The first bones came in a cardboard box. Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist, was in the Moroccan oasis town of Erfoud at the edge of the Sahara, returning from a dinosaur dig in the sands. Inside the box, brought to him by a nomad, were sediment-encrusted pieces more intriguing than anything he had found himself, including a blade-shaped bone with a reddish streak running through the cross section. He took the bones to a university in Casablanca.

The next year, he was in Italy visiting colleagues at the Milan Natural History Museum who showed him bones that seemed to be from Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a strange-looking predatory dinosaur larger than Tyrannosaurus rex that lived in northern Africa about 95 million years ago.
He looked at the spines, part of a giant distinctive sail on the back of Spinosaurus. He saw a familiar red line — possibly a passageway for blood vessels long since decayed away — in the cross section of a bone. “My mind started racing,” he said.
Photo

An artist's interpretation of how Spinosaurus aegyptiacus might have looked and how its size might have compared with that of a human. CreditDavide Bonadonna
Amazingly, the pieces in Milan and those he had seen a year earlier and 1,200 miles away were from the same ancient skeleton.
That was the start of an odyssey of diligence and serendipity that led to the unveiling on Thursday of a new skeleton of Spinosaurus. The largest known predatory dinosaur, growing to at least 50 feet in length, Spinosaurus is also the only dinosaur known to be a swimmer that spent a large fraction of its life in the water.
“It’s probably the most bizarre dinosaur out there,” said Dr. Ibrahim, a graduate student when he saw the first bones, and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.
Spinosaurus had been an intriguing mystery for decades. The original fossil of the dinosaur, discovered in Egypt a century ago and moved to a German museum, was destroyed during World War II, leaving paleontologists with little more than a few drawings to ponder.
The new partial skeleton is of a Spinosaurus not fully grown, about 36 feet long. Its forelimbs were large and strong, with scythe-like claws; its hind legs were short, with paddle-shaped feet.
In an article published online on Thursday by the journal Science, Dr. Ibrahim and an international team of colleagues describe the features that made the dinosaur well suited for swimming and feasting on giant fish that lived in the rivers there.
Conical teeth in a crocodilian snout overlapped like a snare for trapping fish, and it had nostrils halfway up the skull so it could stick its snout into the water and still breathe.
With its flat feet, Spinosaurus may have paddled like a duck. It had a long, flexible tail, which it may have used for propulsion. “It’s like a cross between an aquatic bird and a crocodile,” 

said Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who was part of the research team.
On land, Spinosaurus was ungainly. The researchers calculated that its center of mass would have been too far forward for it to have stood easily on its hind legs, like other predator dinosaurs; instead, it ambled on all four legs.
“It does add significantly to the strangeness,” said Matthew C. Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who was not involved with the research. He described the evidence for Spinosaurus’s semiaquatic existence as “quite convincing.”
Photo

A life-size model of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus made from polystyrene, resin and steel. The model was created from computer scans of fossils, images of lost bones and educated guesses using bones from related dinosaurs. CreditMike Hettwer/National Geographic
An exhibition on Spinosaurus opens Friday at the National Geographic Museum in Washington. The National Geographic Society provided financing for the research.
The new findings may return prominence to Ernst Stromer, the German paleontologist who first described Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, meaning “Egyptian spine lizard.”
Stromer’s fossil, mounted in the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology in Munich, included the lower jaw and parts of the spine.

In April 1944, the British Royal Air Force dropped a bomb on the museum, and Spinosaurus — and every Egyptian dinosaur fossil known at the time — burned.
After that, some isolated bones of Spinosaurus were found, but nothing as complete as Stromer’s specimen. Some evidence, like the conical teeth, suggested Spinosaurus ate fish, but perhaps it just waded into a river and caught them like a grizzly bear.

An artist's interpretation of how Spinosaurus aegyptiacus might have looked and how its size might have compared with that of a human. 

Credit

Davide Bonadonna

One fossil, uncovered in Morocco around 1975, had been thought to be part of the lower jaw of a crocodile, but a decade ago, Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Milan museum realized that interpretation was upside down. “There were too many bones to be the lower jaw,” he said.

It was actually from the top half of a snout of a huge adult Spinosaurus.

In 2008, an Italian geologist showed the new Spinosaurus bones to Dr. Dal Sasso, who then showed them to Dr. Ibrahim.

But the scientists were missing crucial geological information about where the bones had been excavated.

Dr. Ibrahim needed to find the nomad, so last year, he returned to the Erfoud area.

Photo

A life-size model of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus made from polystyrene, resin and steel. The model was created from computer scans of fossils, images of lost bones and educated guesses using bones from related dinosaurs. 

Credit

Mike Hettwer/National Geographic