A newly discovered distress telegram sent from the Titanic has shed new light on the luxury liner's last hours, revealing the ship owners knew of the disaster unfolding - something they vehemently refuted at that time.

The world's biggest passenger liner left Southampton, England, for New York on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912. The RMS "unsinkable" Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic four days later, on the night of April 14. It sank within hours on April 15 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

In the inquiry that followed, Philip Franklin, the boss of shipping company White Star Line, swore on oath he had not received any word from the ship after it had hit the iceberg.

Franklin declared in a U.S. Congressional hearing that there was not "a word or communication of any kind or description" from the ship.

He insisted he had only heard the news of the sinking from Bruce Ismay, general manager of White Star Line, who had been on board but was brought to safety aboard rescue ship the Carpathia.

Now a newly discovered telegram challenges Franklin's claim.

Campus employees at New York University made a grisly discovery while carrying out maintenance work as they came across coffins and skeletons buried beneath a famous Greenwich Village square. Anthropologists now hope to try and identify those buried for over two centuries.

The workers were replacing a water main next to Washington Square Park, one of New York's best loved public spaces and long a hangout for intellectuals, musicians and protesters, when they found the remains of what is believed to be part of a Presbyterian church cemetery, an archeologist said.

"You never know what you can find beneath the city's streets," Alyssa Loorya said at the site in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood. "You bury people to memorialize them, and these people were forgotten," she added, as cited by AP.

They found two burial vaults, which are stated to be around 200 years old. One of the crypts was roughly 4.5 meters by 5.5 meters in size, while the archeologists found evidence that it had been disturbed, with up to a dozen skulls and skeletons found piled up, while a number of coffins were discovered in the second vault.

Despite the remains being so old, the anthropologists and archeologists have not given up hope of perhaps identifying some of the dead who have been lying below New York City's streets. Loorya added that she and her team would also look through newspaper records and death records if necessary.

"We knew we could be encountering remains or other items in this area," said Thomas Foley, an associate commissioner with the city's Department of Design and Construction told AP. "We'll do some exploring to discover what other lanes we might have."

He was referring to a city policy that is to leave burial grounds intact when possible. Therefore engineers are looking at the possibility of developing a new route.

A treasure trove of valuable findings has been unearthed at an ancient Chinese cemetery. Multiple tombs, gold, bronze, iron and other precious items were found in the graveyard, the best-preserved Western Han Dynasty cemetery ever discovered.

A team of archeologists at Haihunhou cemetery in Nanchang, the capital of east China's Jiangxi Province, were given a rare treat when they unearthed more than 10 tons of Wuzhu bronze coins, along with more than 10,000 other gold, bronze and iron items.

Jade articles, wood tablets, and bamboo slips were also among the unearthed treasures, Xin Lixiang of the China National Museum, who led the team of archeologists, told Xinhua.

Who knew innocent little Fluffy could be so devious? Cats' reputations have often swayed from good to evil over the years as they have been both revered and feared around the world. One of the most famous malevolent associations cats have had is undoubtedly with witchcraft. Another, arguably lesser-known connection comes from Japan, in the form of the mythical and legendary Bakeneko and Nekomata creatures.

The Mythical Bakeneko

Bakeneko has sometimes been translated as "Monster Cat" or "Ghost Cat", but the best definition in English may simply be "Changing Cat". The mythological Bakeneko are yōkai (supernatural creatures) that allegedly begin as regular domestic cats. Legends say that as cats get older, they change. The process starts with them walking on their hind legs, although with time the cats gain more powers and grow larger (even to the size of a human), they then have the ability to change their forms and sometimes peak human languages.

Stories about Bakeneko suggest that the favorite form to shift into for these devious cats is their owners or other humans. This change reportedly makes the cats so happy that they put napkins on their heads and dance.

Other powers of the mythical Bakeneko include: summoning fireballs, their tails acting as torches to set fires, controlling the dead, and cursing (or killing) their previous owners, if they see fit.

About 1,400 years ago, the Loma Caldera volcano of El Salvador erupted, covering the small Maya village of Ceren in ash and preserving it in pristine condition to the present day. Unlike at Pompeii in Italy when Mount Vesuvius blew in 79 AD and surprised and killed the residents, the villagers of Ceren were able to make it out and so apparently were not killed in the eruption.

Archaeologists, who've been excavating Ceren since it was discovered in 1978, have speculated that an earthquake rumbled before the volcanic eruption, giving the 200 villagers enough warning to get away in time.

Unlike some Maya villages, the society's rulers did not lord it over the residents of Ceren, says a press release from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The journal Latin American Antiquity published an article on the 10-acre Ceren research area, which UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site in 1993.

Everybody knows a Smith. There's Will Smith. Of course, who can forget Kevin Smith? And for a short time, a nazi-fighting archaeologist you might have heard of was disturbingly called—you guessed it—Indiana Smith? (Before George Lucas thankfully changed Indy's surname to Jones).

You get the point: Smith is ubiquitous. It's the most common last name in England (where the word originated), Australia, and, of course, the United States—in fact, there's over 2 million of them in the US alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This begs the question wondered by Reddit user rphillip in the Ask Historians community: Why are there so many Smiths in the world?

An investigation of King Tut's tomb to find secret chambers will begin tomorrow and will last until Friday, Egypt's Minister of Antiquity announced on Wednesday.

The announcement, reported in the Egyptian media, comes on the 93rd anniversary of the tomb's discovery in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. On this day in 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter found the entrance to King Tutankhamun's treasure-filled tomb.

A team from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation will investigate the tomb using infrared thermography.

The non-invasive search follows a claim by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, that high-resolution images of the tomb's walls show "distinct linear traces" pointing to the presence of two still unexplored chambers behind the western and northern walls of the tomb.

According to Reeves, one chamber contains the remains, and possibly the intact grave goods, of queen Nefertiti, the wife of the "heretic" monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father.

Archaeologists in Jerusalem may have just solved one of the city's greatest geographical mysteries.

Excavators recently unearthed what they think are the ruins of the Acra, a fortress constructed more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215-164 B.C.). At one time mercenary soldiers and Hellenized Jews controlled the ancient fortress, enforcing a brutal rule over Jerusalem's residents.

The Acra's existence is recorded in historical documents, but archaeologists and historians have debated its location.

The religious Books of Maccabees and a work by historian Flavius Josephus seemed to point to the City of David.

Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews 12:252 - 253, wrote, "... and when he had overthrown the city walls, he built a citadel [Greek: Acra] in the lower part of the city, for the place was high and overlooked the temple, on which account he fortified it with high walls and towers, and put into it a garrison of Macedonians."

Sixty-six million years ago, a giant raptor with feathered arms chased prey around the ancient South Dakotan landscape, according to a new study.

Researchers named the newly identified species Dakotaraptor steini, after the state and the Dakota First Nations Tribe, as well as raptor, which is Latin for "plunderer." The species name also honors paleontologist Walter Stein, said the researchers, who found the remains in South Dakota's Hell Creek Formation, a famously fossil-rich area.

Dakotaraptor is one of the largest known dromaeosaurids (raptors) on record, according to D-Brief, a Discover Magazine blog. An analysis of the dinosaur's partial skeleton suggests it measured 16 feet (4.9 meters) long, making is larger than the turkey-size Velociraptor, but smaller than the 22-foot-long (6.7 m) Utahraptor, D-Brief reported.

Dakotaraptor also had "quill knobs" or papilli, on its ulna (arm bone), which "is our first clear evidence for feather quills on a large dromaeosaurid forearm," the researchers wrote in the study, published online Oct. 30 in the journal Paleontological Contributions. It's unlikely Dakotaraptor could fly given its large size, but perhaps it used its feathers for display or to keep its eggs warm, D-Brief reported.

The remnants of the Acra, a fortress built by the Greek King Antiochus IV more than 2,000 years ago and sought for over 100 years, has emerged from a parking lot in Jerusalem, Israeli archaeologists said Tuesday.

Mentioned in Jewish biblical sources and by historians like Josephus Flavius, the fortress was unearthed after 10 years of excavations under the parking lot.

The discovery solved "one of Jerusalem's greatest archaeological mysteries," the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said.