The tracks were made 166 million to 168 million years ago, when three dinosaurs traversed the shoreline of a sea. The site was then at the planet's surface, but geological processes have buried and tilted the sediments, and the prints are now on the cave's roof, 500 metres underground.

Dinosaur footprints have often been discovered in mines and railway tunnels, but they are rarely found in natural caverns.

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"When the Roman Empire collapsed, we did not really know much about how new communities formed, yet many of these communities would go on to be the basis for modern European countries,"

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During the 19th century, US economy endured three major financial crashes: in 1837, 1857, and in 1873. Each crash triggered major economic depressions with mass-scale culling of smaller banks and other businesses. The collapse enabled the ruling oligarchy to consolidate monopolies over all the key industries.

It would appear that the sequence of booms and busts followed by major wars is a feature of Western-style "free market capitalist economy." How and why this happens is never properly explained nor understood, but somehow, it's become our normal. Where explanations should be sought and offered we get shrugs and blank stares: "It's complicated..."

Sure. It's complicated, so let's not try too hard to understand it. Keep calm and carry on: get into debt, mortgage your property, enjoy some temporary prosperity, then struggle and go bankrupt. Then you may get to send your sons off to war. They'll tell you which enemy to hate and you may resign yourself to the unfolding dystopia. We've always been at war with Eurasia. What could you possibly do?

He was Reichsbank President from 1923 to 1930 and from March 1933 to January 1939 and Reich Minister of Economic Affairs from 1934 to 1937. He later fell out of favor with the regime and was deported to concentration camps because of his contact with the resistance against National Socialism.

Schacht was one of the 24 leaders of the National Socialist regime accused in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals before the International Military Tribunal. He was acquitted of all charges on October 1, 1946.

It was seized by the Allies after World War II and split into its constituent companies; parts in East Germany were nationalized.^[a]

IG Farben was once the largest company in Europe and the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world.^[4] IG Farben scientists made fundamental contributions to all areas of chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry.

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia as well as 44 other countries^[1] after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold (or 0.88867 gram fine gold per dollar). It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.^[2]

Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still being fought, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference. The delegates deliberated from 1 to 22 July 1944, and signed the Bretton Woods agreement on its final day. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, these accords established the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of the world's gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the US dollar. Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that the institutions they had created were "branches of Wall Street".^[3] These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. According to Barry Eichengreen, the Bretton Woods system operated successfully due to three factors: "low international capital mobility, tight financial regulation, and the dominant economic and financial position of the United States and the dollar."^[4]

On 15 August 1971, the United States "temporarily" suspended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.^[5] Shortly thereafter, many fixed currencies (such as the pound sterling) also became free-floating,^[6] and the subsequent era has been characterized by floating exchange rates.^[7] The end of Bretton Woods was formally ratified by the Jamaica Accords in 1976.

In 1973, Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia to trade oil only in US dollars, thus pegging the US dollar to oil and birthing the petrodollar.^[8]

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"If you think the government is hiding things about aliens, you're only scratching the surface of the mystery."

"We're not dealing with little green men or flying saucers. We're dealing with phenomena that challenge our very notions of reality." - Laura Knight-Jadczyk