You mean ‘exhumation’.”
“No, ‘excavation’.”
“But a jawbone – that must be proof of some locked-up nun from the old days when they were up to no good.”
My naughty godson Dante was stirring, as ever. I’d mentioned an article about the discovery of a vast jawbone uncovered during repair works to the Vatican heating system undertaken in the bitter winter of 1962.
In reality, the truth was more intriguing than Dante had imagined. At first, the unearthed treasure was thought to be a dinosaur fossil. Then the researchers realised that the jawbone was mammalian, much more recent, and not fossilised. It was that of an elephant – the remnants of the beloved Hanno.
