Spain badger searching for food over the winter has dug up a stockpile of 209 Roman coins.

Sometime in the fourth century CE, during a fairly peaceful and economically stable time during the rule of the Roman Empire in what is currently Switzerland, someone buried a clay pot filled with coins in the border area between three Roman estates near the modern city of Bubendorf.

The hoard of coins remained there undisturbed until 17 centuries later, when amateur archaeologist Daniel Lüdin discovered them while surveying a forest area with a metal detector in September.

Practicing good citizenship, Lüdin covered his find and alerted the authorities at Archäologie Baselland, who were able to excavate the pot in one complete block allowing them to document the coins and expose them under laboratory conditions.

But the question remains as to why the coins were buried but never recovered.

This was the largest Roman hoard found in Spain to date.

They noted that it was a period of political instability, perhaps during the time of the founding of the Kingdom of Asturias during the Late Roman period, when the barbarians who attacked the Iberian Peninsula in 409 CE began arriving on the Roman Empire’s shores.

Thousands of 10,000-year-old hunting pits have been discovered at the heart of the Stonehenge monument area in southwest England by the University of Birmingham and Ghent University researchers.

One of the pits was described by the researchers as “the most ancient trace of land use” ever discovered, at 4 meters wide and 2m. deep.

It was most likely dug as a hunting trap for large game such as aurochs, red deer and wild boars, the research team noted.

Aurochs are thought to be predecessors of modern cattle that became extinct about 3,000 years ago.

The researchers, who displayed their findings in a study published this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science, were able to make this discovery by using a combination of unique archaeological tools available to them at the prehistoric site.

By using geophysical data from the first extensive electromagnetic induction survey at Stonehenge, which contains evidence from over 60 geoarchaeological boreholes, and 20 targeted archaeological excavations on the site, the researchers were able to create computer-generated analyses of thousands of subsurface features, such as pits.

Indeed, the Anglo-Belgian joint study shows hunter-gatherers may have roamed the British Isles some 10,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic period.

According to previous archaeological findings, the isles were reinhabited at that time following an ice age.

Out of the thousands of pits found at the site, 400 of them were identified as being over 2.5m. in diameter, with six of those excavated by the research team.

Those six were evaluated to be from sometime between the early Mesolithic period around 8,000 BCE to the Middle Bronze Age approximately 1,300 BCE.

Oftentimes, where there are trees, there are birds, whether the landscape is woodland, forest, an urban park or rural farmland.

In Australia, farmland is being revegetated to attract woodland bird species, a team of researchers wrote.

Trees bordering paddocks are being planted, and stands of trees and shrubs that run beside creeks are being replenished.

The research team included four researchers from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia — professor of ecology Andrew F. Bennett; research fellow Angie Haslem; associate research fellow Greg Holland; principal research fellow with the Research Centre for Future Landscapes Jim Radford — as well as the director of the Monash Drone Discovery Platform and senior lecturer in ecology at Monash University Rohan Clarke.

Their new study showed how the replanting of trees and shrubs on farmland is helping woodland birds to return.

The researchers’ findings, “Restoration promotes recovery of woodland birds in agricultural environments: A comparison of ‘revegetation’ and ‘remnant’ landscapes,” were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

After comparing communities of birds living on farmland that had varying numbers of trees, the researchers said that increasing the amount of vegetation on open farmland from one to ten percent led to twice the number of species of woodland birds.

In many rural areas of Australia, more than 90 percent of native woodland vegetation that was once home to many species of woodland birds has been cleared and replaced with intensive farmland.

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have caught a particularly elusive deep-sea fish on camera.

The highfin dragonfish (Bathophilus flemingi) can grow to be seven inches long and usually lives at depths of 740 to 4,500 feet below sea level, according to NPR.

Dragonfish are a type of deep-sea predator that can grow to be up to 20 inches and live as far down as 14,800 feet below sea level, according to MBARI.

They typically catch their prey – usually fish or crustaceans – by staying still in the water and catching them as they swim by.

They are aided in this endeavor by their coloring: They are tinted with some of the blackest blacks in the natural world.

Like the black of its deep-sea cousins, the highfin dragonfish’s bronze might also help it to camouflage because it absorbs the bit of blue light that can still reach the fish’s habitat.

At more than two million years old and more than a mile above sea level, Lake Tahoe sits on the border of California and Nevada in the Northern Sierra Nevada mountains.

The water is so pure that it isn’t even required to be filtered by water suppliers.

Despite the remarkable purity of its water — 99.994 percent — Lake Tahoe does have a problem with debris.

Determined to tackle the problem, California nonprofit Clean Up the Lake organized volunteer scuba divers to remove litter from the lake’s entire 72-mile shoreline.

The divers were tasked with removing garbage from the first 25 feet beneath the surface of the lake and what they collected was astounding.

According to nonprofit the Tahoe Fund, the divers recovered 25,281 pounds of trash that included engagement rings, Nikon cameras from the 1980s, large pieces of boats, lampposts, wallets and, of course, plastic bottles.

According to Clean Up the Lake, 24,797 items of debris were removed from the lake. The trash included 4,527 aluminum cans, 295 pairs of sunglasses, 171 tires and 127 boat anchors.

According to West, most of the litter made it into the lake accidentally, reported The Guardian.

Lake Tahoe has a maximum depth of more than 1,600 feet. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, between 1968 and 1997, the deep-water clarity of Lake Tahoe suffered a decline from 100 to 64 feet — about a 30 percent reduction — due to algae and particles of fine sediment. The fine sediment particles are the cause of about two-thirds of the impairment of the lake’s clarity.

Etchmiadzin Cathedral is an old Armenian cathedral which is located in the city of Vagharshapat in the Armavir Province of the Republic of Armenia.

Considered to be one of the greatest parts of the Armenian identity and spiritual life, the Etchmiadzin Cathedral is definitely one of the oldest ones in the world, as it is usually called the oldest cathedral in the world.

Built sometime in 301 AD, during the reigning of the Kingdom of Armenia, it has a total length of 33 meters (108 feet), and total width of 30 meters (98 feet).

As there is no official source about the height of the cathedral, it is considered to be over 27 meters (89 feet), and it was built in a traditional Armenian style of church architecture by King Tiridates III when Armenia officially adopted the Christianity as a state religion.

At first, it replaced a preexisting temple, which was seen as a good sign to conversion to Christianity, and from what we can see today, the core of the structure, was built in 483 and 484 by the great Armenian nobleman, Vahan Mamikonian.

During the many centuries, the cathedral has seen good and bad times, where it suffered more from neglect and damages during the invasions of the former ancient neighbors.

As the capital of Armenia moved from one to another city, it was the Romans who moved the capital from Artashet to Vagharshapat, and the importance of the cathedral grew even bigger.

Soon after that, the Persians invaded the area and severely damaged the cathedral.

Nevertheless, even in a desperate condition, the cathedral did not lose its significance and the first official restoration occurred in 1441 when it became the official administrative headquarters of the governing body of the Armenian Apostolic Church, better known as the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin.

Unfortunately, the Etchmiadzin Cathedral was once again plundered in 1604 by the Safavids, when relics and stones were taken out of the cathedral to New Julfa in Iran, with hope and also effort to undermine the Armenians’ attachment to their homeland.

Yet again, there were certain renovation throughout the centuries, and in the late 17 century belfries were added to the structure in order to get a better picture as a whole Christian temple.

Still, today what can be visible is the different architectural styles which were applied with every renovation, however, the structure successfully retained its traditional Armenian church architecture.

The exterior has been always described like an austere, ascetic, not ostentatious, like a massive cube surmounted by a faceted cone on a simple cylinder.

What everyone can see is a cruciform plan with a central cupola, four free-standing piers, and four projecting apses which are semicircular on the interior and polygonal on the exterior.

The central piers, cruciform in section, divide the interior space into nine equal square compartments.

One of the most impressive reliefs on the exterior is the relief of the Gregory the Illuminator, the patron saint and first official head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which can be found on the western’s belfry.

Nevertheless, following Stalin’s death, the cathedral became more and more revived under the rule of the Catholicos Vasken I, as there were excavations carried out throughout the 1950s, and a major renovation was done in the same period, with the help of the Armenian diaspora.

Nowadays, the Etchmiadzin Cathedral is one of the greatest treasures, not just for Armenia, but also for the world, which is why it is protected by UNESCO, and since 2000 it has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage list. A