This one's for Gary:

Atoll yields clue to Amelia Earhart's last days

WASHINGTON: The riddle of Amelia Earhart's disappearance has only grown more complex in the 73 years since the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic went missing attempting to fly around the equator.

One theory had it that she crashed into the sea after running out of fuel over the Pacific Ocean. Others claimed Earhart was executed by the Japanese for spying, or that she secretly returned to the US under an assumed identity.

But now an array of artefacts from the 1930s and bones found on the uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, endured lingering deaths as castaways on a desert island and were eventually eaten by crabs.

Researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery have found what appears to be a phalanx from a finger and two other bones, alongside a host of other clues after two decades attempting to solve the mystery.

The suspected finger is being tested for human DNA. It may turn out to be from a turtle, which have similar bones in their flippers.

But other discoveries lend credence to the theory that Earhart died on the atoll after going missing in July 1937 at the age of 41.

They include part of a mirror from a woman's compact, a zip from a Pennsylvania factory and travel-sized bottles made in New Jersey as well as a pocket knife listed on her aircraft's inventory, all manufactured in the 1930s.

Alongside the goods are the remains of small fires with bird and fish bones, and empty oyster shells laid out in a row as if to collect water.

Guardian News & Media