You never know what you are going to find when you go digging around. I often wonder if we go into places were people with the plague were sent in the middle ages, is there any danger that someone could catch the plague today? It hasn't seemed to have happened yet, but it would only take one germ that was somehow mutated and able to be in a state of hibernation to start things all over again. The germ wouldn't harm the person that discovered it, it might merely get out and infest itself into a flea or such and that flea might bite someone and then the plague starts all over. On the other hand, we have gone into many places where plague victims had been huddled into in the middle ages and then sealed in and yet nothing has happened, so I am probably wrong on this issue. I am talking about this for a reason however. Scientists have found an ancient flesh-eating fungus that is over 100 million years old. It was preserved in amber. To be more exact it was called a fungus like creature. Scientists say we have noting to fear, because they are not going to try and revive it. Well that is very nice of them, don't you think so?

How did this fungus operate? There was a clue in the amber. Along with the fungus, nematodes were found. I bet you would like to know what a nematode actually is, am I right? Well it is a what is commonly called a roundworm. Roundworms are one of the most common creatures on earth. They are found everywhere on the land and in the sea. There would have been plenty of food available for this fungus to eat. This fungus was believed to have sticky parts that snared these tiny worms. Here is the even stranger part. I bet you think that this fungus was found in some exotic location? Well when I tell you where it was found you might think the location is exotic, but I bet it is nowhere that you were thinking of. The amber that contained the flesh eating fungus was found lying in the basement of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Museum basements are generally where things are thrown that curators want to keep, but don't think would be of too much interest to the general public. Every once in a while a discovery is made in the basement of a museum. The last great one that I remember was the discovery of an ancient Greek mechanical computer that was found in the wreck of an ancient greek ship. It was know as the Antikythera Mechanism.

I guess this begs the question, what other advanced technology did the ancient Greeks have that has been lost in time? Oh we have all seen those shows on the History Channel that show us some pretty advanced ancient Greek gadgets, but could there have been more? Apparently the ancient Greeks had an understanding of how things worked, like the rotation of the planets for example. The also knew that steam could power something, even though it doesn't seem that they got past Hero's steam device, but maybe they did and we just haven't found the evidence yet? Look at the Antikythera Mechanism, before it was found we believed that metal gears didn't appear until late in the middle ages, when the first clocks came about. Yet there it was, a device who's works resembled a modern day windup clock, gears and all, yet this device was thousands of years old. The bronze gears were all precision cut. It was obvious that the cuts that made the teeth in the gears had to have been mapped out mathematically before the gears were filed down, since we believe that no machinery capable of doing this existed. Not only did the gears have to have been precision cut, but the entire gear train had to be worked out, so that a turn of the gears would equal a precision moving of the planets and moon around the sun This remarkable device lay in a museum basement from the time of it's discovery in 1901, until just a few years ago. A scientific historian said that there must be more devices like this around somewhere, "There has to have been a chain of development behind it. Otherwise it is like finding a high-speed 20th-century train without any of the earlier trains."

Dinosaur

Someone is always digging around looking for new dinosaur species. I guess that is because everyone loves dinosaurs, it is just a fact of life. One scientist decided that he would do a little digging. Instead of going out in the field land getting his hands dirty, he decided to do his digging in the basement of the British Museum. Now everyone knows that you won't find anything new down there with reference to dinosaurs, because experts have looked this stuff over before packing it away. Well our friend didn't know this, I guess, because that is exactly where he began to look. Guess what he found? There it was, a dinosaur fossil that had been sitting in the basement since 1890. Yes I said 1890. It was the fossil of an undiscovered dinosaur species that has been named Xenoposeidon proneneukus. The problem was that the person that found this fossil was a graduate student and I guess no one told him that the stuff in the museum's basement had already all been examined. This has to make you wonder what the heck else could be found in these basements and storage rooms, if we really examined all of them.

Back to the basement of the Cairo Museum. Here is how it has been described in a New York Times article, "Step through a small, Hobbit-sized door, down a steep flight of stairs and through a locked gate. The basement is a maze of arched passageways and bare light bulbs hanging from decaying wires. It is packed with wooden crates, hundreds of them, sometimes piled floor to ceiling. Cobwebs cling to ancient pottery and tablets engraved with hieroglyphics." It is important to know beforehand that this is a huge place and is in complete disarray. Some mummies have been discovered that no one knew were down there. To be exact so far 170 of them along with 600 coffins. It is hard to believe that such massive numbers could have gone undetected, but they did. Since no one knows what was really down there, there is no one that knows if anything might have been stolen over the years. Gee I thought that my check book was confusing. Wouldn't it be something if there was some sort of ancient Rosetta Stone to previous civilizations laying down there and no one knew it?

University basements are very much like museum basements and to prove that I offer the following evidence. A recent discovery was made in the basement of Cambridge University. While it was neither as old as a dinosaur or as mysterious as missing mummies, it was never the less of historical value. It was a chalkboard drawing. How could that be of any value you say? Well I guess it depends on who drew the drawing and what the drawing represented, doesn't it. First I have to tell you that it was drawings of penguins. The persons that drew them were two legendary explores. They were Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton. We know it was them, because they signed the sketches. They were dated 1904 and 1909. Both these men saw penguins for the first time during their Antarctic expositions. The university has no idea how the drawings got there and no records to indicate why they were drawn.

Sometimes things are found while creating a museum basement and that was the case for workers digging a basement for the new Transport Museum. Archaeologists were brought in to routinely check the area while digging and construction were going on. To their surprise they discovered a rectangular shape in the earth. They carefully excavated it and found human bones. On further examination an entire skeleton was found lying on its side. Archeologists are not sure yet, but they believe that the skeleton dates back somewhere between the 7 - 9 centuries. It is assumed that this was a Saxon burial.

A very famous skeleton, perhaps the most famous skeleton in all of Britain was thought to have been destroyed during World War II. It was the skeleton of a barber-surgeon. It had been found underneath a buried megalith in 1938. Coins were found there that helped to date it. The skeleton was found with a medical probe and a pair of scissors. It is a sad story, apparently early in the 14th century, a megalith was being buried in a ceremony called a rite of destruction. The poor guy was accidentally crushed during the ceremony. It had been on display in the Royal College of Surgeons The College of Surgeons was heavily bombed during the war and the skeleton was presumed destroyed. Enter the good old Natural History Museum in Britain again. It turns out that someone found the skeleton in the basement. Wow you never know what that basement has to offer. Records were found that show that the entire collection of skeletons and bodies from the Royal College of Surgeons had been transferred to the museum who stored them, you know where.

I would just like to end this article with a little twist. Here is the headline from a news article, "Museum Loot Found In Guard's Basement", I don't know why I found this funny, I guess it was because it is almost a play on words about what we were talking about?