Discoveries

A brilliant green tree frog with huge black eyes joins jumping spiders and a striped gecko among the more than 50 new animal species that scientists have discovered in a remote, mountainous region of Papua New Guinea. The discoveries were announced Wednesday by Conservation International, which spent the last several months analyzing more than 600 animal species the group found during its expedition to the South Pacific island nation in July and August.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to locate a rare, vintage copy of the nation's founding document, try looking behind the filing cabinet. That was a lesson learned the hard way at the Supreme Court, where a 185-year-old facsimile of the Declaration of Independence gathered dust for seven years, tucked behind the office furniture, a court spokeswoman acknowledged this week.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known farming village in Egypt, a 7,000-year-old site whose residents grew wheat and barley and raised sheep, goats and pigs. Farming probably occurred much earlier in Egypt, experts agree, but those first settlements would most likely have been along the banks of the Nile River and would have been obliterated by the periodic flooding and course changes of the river.

An ancient stone plaza unearthed in Peru dates back more than five millenniums and is the oldest known urban settlement in the Americas, according to experts here. Archaeologists say the site, uncovered amid a complex of ruins known as Sechin Bajo, is a major discovery that could help reshape their understanding of the continent's pre-Columbian history.

DNA from fossilized human feces found in an Oregon cave is 14,300 years old, at least 1,200 years older than previous evidence for humans in North America, researchers said Thursday. The find provides the strongest evidence in an archaeological controversy about whether people of the Clovis culture, which manufactured distinctive stone tools and weapons, were the first to populate the Americas. The new evidence, reported online in the journal Science, indicates they were not.

Most California schoolchildren learn the basic facts about the state's mission history in the fourth grade. Established from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscan monks from Spain to spread the Roman Catholic faith among the area's Native American population, the series of strategic-religious outposts spanned 650 miles of California coastline, from San Diego to Sonoma, providing Spain with a powerful presence on the Pacific frontier.

After weeks of testing the soil in the Martian arctic, NASA's Phoenix lander has for the first time confirmed through chemical analysis the presence of water on another planet, scientists said Thursday. Several weeks ago, Phoenix uncovered convincing visual evidence that it had landed on an ice field when it set down on Mars' northern plain May 25.

Desert winds blow, sands shift, archaeologists dig, and one day you find a pyramid. Egyptian authorities announced Tuesday that they had discovered what's left of the base of a pyramid estimated to be 4,300 years old. The site near Saqqara has been under excavation for 20 years, and its pyramid is believed to have belonged to Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti, who ruled the Sixth Dynasty about 2291 BC.

Reaching a milestone in the search for Earth-like planets in the universe, two teams of astronomers say they have parted the curtains of space to take the first pictures of planets beyond our solar system. The first team, led by UC Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. "It's almost science fiction," said Berkeley astronomer Eugene Chiang.

Biologists exploring the ocean floor for new sea creatures have stumbled upon one of the largest known single-celled creatures, a bland, grape-sized distant cousin of the amoeba that may solve a thorny evolutionary question that has puzzled researchers for decades.