Under the soil are objects from the past, rich either in history or mystery.

Heeding a doctor's advice to exercise more, Norwegian Erlend Bore, 51, set out on a farmer's land near Stavanger with his newly bought metal detector last month.

The device beeped while Bore was walking on a hillside, and he dug up the spot. He found nine gold medallions, gold pearls that once formed an opulent necklace, and three gold rings.

Archaeologists said that Bore's hundred grams of jewels, with a design of a mythical horse, were from 500 A.D.

"It's the gold find of the century in Norway," Ole Madsen, the head of the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archeology, said. "To find that much gold all at once is extremely unusual."

Meanwhile, a dome-shaped specimen was discovered on 30 August by American scientists during an expedition off the Gulf of Alaska. Dubbed "golden egg," it is over 10 centimeters (4 inches) in diameter and has a small tear near its base.

A remotely operated survey vehicle's imagery of the thing fanned speculation that it could be a dead sponge attachment, coral, or egg casing, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

To determine if the golden dome is associated with a known species, a new species, or represents an unknown life stage of an existing one, it was brought to a laboratory for examination.

"While we were able to collect the 'golden orb' and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin," NOAA said after the thing was extracted from the Pacific Ocean floor.

"Isn't the deep sea so delightfully strange?" wondered NOAA Ocean Exploration coordinator Sam Candio.

WITH AFP