Another Week's Digging

Within ten days after it left Peking, the third Asiatic expedition of the American Museum of Natural History (TIME, April 28), under the leadership of Roy Chapman Andrews, unearthed a fossil carnivorous dinosaur in the Mongolian desert. The giant, lizard-like reptile has not been identified with other known species, but belongs probably to the Triassic period (4,000,000 to 10,000,000 years ago). The legs are nine feet long, almost as large as the great herbivorous brontosaurus, some specimens of which in American museums have legs ten feet long, a total length of 50 to 90 feet and a weight of 20 to 40 tons. Their brains were comparatively minute, a fact which perhaps contributed no little to their extinction.

Buenos Ayres scientists who have examined the alleged Tertiary skull discovered by Dr. J. G. Wolfe in Patagonia claim it is merely a curiously shaped stone of no scientific value. The Field Museum expedition, under Dr. E. S. Riggs, which went to verify the skull, is reported to have discovered the femur of a dinosaur on the way.

Dr. Herbert J. Spinden, penetrating south from Yucatan, found outposts of ancient cultures allied to the Maya, in eastern Honduras, Nicaragua, and as far south as Costa Rica. There are fortified villages, tremendous walls, pottery, statues and stone corn-grinding machines on hilltops, possibly pointing to a curious cult of " corn worship."

F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, British explorer, submitted proofs to the British Museum that he had found, also in Central America, a hitherto unknown stock which had never before seen a white man and has apparently made no cultural progress for several thousand years.

Under a layer of volcanic lava in the state of Colima, Mexico, James Philomon, Scotch mining engineer, discovered an ancient city estimated to be at least 4,000 years old. The Mexican Government has sent an expedition to investigate.

In an Inca tomb near Cajamarca, Peru, Francisco Loaysa, of Lima, found an elaborate " quipu," or knotted and decorated cord 16 yards long, used by the Incas as a calculating device for their decimal arithmetic system.