Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson) 
(June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962)

On August 5, 1962, movie actress Marilyn Monroe was found
dead in her home in Los Angeles. She was discovered lying
nude on her bed, face down, with a telephone in one hand.

Empty bottles of pills, prescribed to treat her depression,
were littered around the room. After a brief investigation,
Los Angeles police concluded that her death was “caused
by a self-administered administered overdose of sedative
drugs and that the mode of death is probable suicide.”

Although there is some debate about the exact date, on what was
likely July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign,
a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria.

The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written
in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists
that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V,
in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning.

The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.

Paintings of Napoleon in Egypt.

Near Montignac, France, a collection of prehistoric cave paintings
were discovered by four teenagers who stumbled upon the ancient artwork after following their dog down a narrow entrance into a
cavern. The 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly
of animal representations, are among the finest examples of art
from the Upper Paleolithic period.

On August 12, 1990, fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovered
three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota.

They turn out to be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton
ever discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its
discoverer.   

Amazingly, Sue’s skeleton was over 90 percent complete, and the
bones were extremely well-preserved. Hendrickson’s employer,
the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, paid $5,000 to
the land owner, Maurice Williams, for the right to excavate the
dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned and transported to the
company headquarters in Hill City. The institute’s president,
Peter Larson, announced plans to build a non-profit museum
to display Sue along with other fossils of the Cretaceous period.

Susan Hendrickson