Original subtitles

[low drone]

[suspenseful music]

- Mysteries can be buried anywhere, under the earth,

[volcano erupting]

beneath the sea,

[plane flying]

or even right under our own feet.

And when we stumble upon them,

sometimes what we find can change history.

Tonight, strange discoveries

that inspire fear and awe.

From an eerie grave.

- There are skeletons weighed down with stones.

These aren't typical grave sites

that they're used to unearthing.

- [Danny] To unusual bones.

- It has a long body, two pairs of paddle-like limbs,

a tail, a pointed snout full of sharp teeth,

and creepiest of all, giant eyes.

- [Danny] To a bizarre blob.

- It begins pulsing and contracting.

This thing isn't debris, it's alive.

- Join us now because nothing stays hidden forever.

Siberia is a land known for dark, buried secrets,

and on one cold morning

a fisherman stumbles on 54 of them.

- It is March, 2018,

and a fisherman is walking along the snowy banks

of the Amur River in Siberia.

He's looking for signs of trout or pike beneath the ice.

The fisherman is alone.

The air is still the only sound, the crunch

of the snow beneath his boots.

When suddenly in the distance something catches his eye,

a pink and blue shape protruding out of the snow.

He steps closer and what he sees stops him cold.

It's a frozen human hand.

- He immediately starts looking around thinking, well,

where's the rest of the body?

But there's nothing around him.

And then he looks further down

and he notices that there's a sack

that's sticking out of the snow.

- [Danny] He opens the sack and finds more hands.

- There are 54 in total, all shapes

and sizes, each severed very cleanly at the wrist.

- [Danny] The fisherman rushes back to town

and alerts the local police.

- [Andrew] At first, the authorities treat this as a

crime scene, but the scale

of the crime, 54 human hands, forces them to escalate this

to the special committee of the Russian Federation.

- The forensic teams sweep in,

they scour the shoreline looking for evidence.

They examine the hands,

and they ultimately determine

that these 54 hands are actually pairs

from 27 different individuals.

- [Danny] The find is unsettling

and comes with an obvious question.

Who did the severed hands once belong to?

- [Alex] Authorities claim, they're only able

to lift prints from one hand,

and those prints don't match anything in the database.

Speculation runs wild, investigators wonder,

are these victims

of a serial killer or some mass execution?

- [Danny] Then, investigators discover a major clue.

- [Andrew] According to the authorities, they find

surgical bandages.

as well as hospital shoe covers scattered across the site.

This points to medical waste,

and shifts the investigation in a different direction.

- [Danny] After ruling out area hospitals

and morgues, investigators trace the trail

to a medical facility just outside Khabarovsk,

18 miles from the riverbank.

- [Alex] Records show that the lab did remove hands from over

400 unidentified corpses in the course of the last year.

- [Danny] According to experts,

some Russian morgues sever the hands

of unidentified corpses to help with future identification.

But when questioned,

the facility gives a surprising answer.

- [Adam] The lab denies any involvement

in the 54 hands that were found.

- [Danny] Before investigators can press any further,

the Russian government abruptly shuts down the case.

- [Andrew] The official report states that this was a case

of improperly disposed medical waste,

but others raised questions

about why this case was wrapped up so quickly.

- [Danny] Adding to that suspicion

is a key detail revealed

by the man who first made the discovery.

- [Alex] The fisherman who discovered the sack

claims he never saw any surgical bandages

or hospital shoe covers that were supposed

to indicate medical waste.

- [Andrew] So many wonder whether this really is a case

of a negligent medical facility,

or if that's just a convenient cover story,

that the real truth has been swept under the rug.

In the end, these 54 hands found in a snowbank next

to a frozen river remain maybe the ultimate cold case.

- [Danny] We may never know the full truth

behind this macabre discovery,

but one thing certain:

our next find is just as strange,

and it's fully alive.

- In Raleigh, North Carolina,

a city maintenance crew is examining sewer lines

underneath Cameron Village Shopping Center.

They feed a robotic camera into the sewer line,

and they're looking for any cracks, root intrusions,

or other things that might require maintenance.

- [Sami] The camera is making its way through the six-inch

pipe, and above ground,

inspectors are watching the grainy video appear

on a monitor,

and what they're seeing at first is typical.

You've got water, you've got some sludge, you've got dirt,

you've got mud, but then they come across something

that is totally unexpected.

It's this pink blob.

- [Danny] The team suspects the blockage

is a clump of roots

or a rodent nest until the camera gets closer,

and it starts moving.

- The blob begins shifting, pulsing,

and contracting almost like muscle tissue or an organ.

This thing isn't debris or a nest, it's alive.

- Needless to say, the crew has no idea what it is,

so they just hit record on the camera

to get a few minutes of footage.

- [Andrew] One of the crew then uploads the footage to YouTube

hoping that someone out there can help identify

this strange creature.

- [Danny] The video goes viral and speculation runs rampant.

- [Dr. Hakeem] On line forms just blow up.

Some say it's a mutated parasite,

some claim it's a fungus.

- [Kavitha] Some people think it could be an entirely new

species, and that it might not even be from Earth at all.

- [Danny] Eventually, biologists

from North Carolina state take a closer look.

- [Sami] They don't just watch the video,

they break this thing down

second by second, frame by frame.

They're watching the way that the object moves,

the way that it shifts,

the way that it's pulsating,

and then finally it clicks.

- [Dr. Hakeem] They realize that this isn't a single creature,

but thousands.

It's a colony of tubifex worms.

These are aquatic invertebrates

that typically live in sludge or decaying matter.

- [Jenn] You usually find tubifex worms in lakes

and wetlands, but not in a city sewer.

That's extremely rare.

- What's crazy is that these worms are tiny.

Individually, you almost can't even see one.

But when under stress, say from vibration,

heat, or the approaching light of a camera,

they clump together for safety.

They twist around

and use their mucus

to glue themselves into a single throbbing mass.

- [Danny] As freaky as it appears,

the pulsating blob isn't dangerous.

- [Andrew] Engineers confirm that it's not blocking the flow

of water through the sewer, and biologists confirm

that there's no hazard on that front either.

So because it doesn't pose any danger,

the sewer blob is left to its own devices.

- [Sami] The original footage is still online.

You can go and watch it like many people still do today.

And when you do watch it, there is something

that is weirdly transfixing about this pulsating blob.

Like, I know what it is,

but I also don't wanna know what it's.

Ugh.

- [Danny] Imagine going out for a casual stroll

and spotting something odd poking out of a hillside nearby.

Could it be old driftwood or something more alarming?

- Summer 2017, southeastern Utah,

an employee from the Utah Geological Survey

is walking along the eastern border near Colorado

when something catches his eye.

It looks like bones.

- [Andrew] He climbs up to take a closer look

and sees more bones along with plant fragments

and petrified driftwood.

Now the rock in this area is 150 million years old,

so whatever he's looking at could be very, very old.

So he calls in some experts.

- [Danny] Paleontologist John Foster

arrives on site to investigate further.

- [Kavitha] At first, he's not quite sure what he's looking at.

It appears to be fossilized plant fragments,

but they're too small to extract from the rock in order

to examine in the field, so he carves out a fossilized slab

and takes it back to the lab.

- [Danny] When Foster examines it under a microscope,

things get weirder.

- [Sami] Now his eye is drawn to a one inch section

that's particularly dense with fragments,

and when he looks closer, he recognizes

that it's not plant fragments,

it's these tiny amphibian bones.

- [Andrew] There are remains from at least three individual

animals and two different species,

and they're also mixed in with scales.

It's a mess really unlike

what you normally see in Jurassic-era fossils.

To Foster, it looks like these creatures were eaten

by some kind of ancient predator.

- [Danny] But one detail makes Foster's theory

hard to swallow.

- [Kavitha] When digested fossils are found, they usually

show signs of breakdown, erosion, or acid damage,

but these bones don't have any sign of that.

- [Don] Foster realizes this can only mean one thing.

These animals were swallowed but never digested.

- [Danny] It's a pile of vomit frozen in time.

The official name is regurgitalite,

and it's a very rare find.

- [Sami] For regurgitalite to fossilize,

the vomit, first of all, has to land just right.

It has to be buried very quickly by sediment,

and then immediately sealed from decay.

The odds of all of these things happening exactly

as they should are microscopic.

- [Andrew] Foster dates this slab to around 152 million years

ago, which makes this regurgitalite

one of the oldest samples ever discovered.

- [Danny] Since this area was underwater during the Jurassic

period, experts focused their attention on a handful

of marine creatures who could have coughed this up.

- [Don] Their best guess is that it was a bowfin,

a long bodied sharp toothed fish that still exists today,

but 152 million years ago,

it was the apex marine predator

in this area.

At over two feet long,

it's the only water predator at the time large enough

to swallow a meal like this whole.

Though considering it was quickly coughed back up,

we can't rule out that it was a smaller predator

that bit off a little more than it could chew.

- [Danny] It's one thing to dig up something weird

from the past.

It's another when you find something alarming

hidden inside you.

- [Sami] In June of 1999, Sanju Bhagat is a farm worker

that's living in Nagpur, India.

He's always had a bit of a potbelly,

but he's strong, he's active

and he works hard in the fields.

As he's become older, Sanju's stomach has started

to grow and swell.

Now, adding a few pounds is nothing,

but Sanjay's Stomach continues to grow.

- [Kavitha] By the time he turns 30,

his friends can't help themselves poking fun at him

and asking when the baby is due.

He tries to ignore the jokes and just keep up his farm work,

but over time, the swelling just gets worse and worse.

- [Dr. Hakeem] Then one night, Sanju bolts awake

in a panic gasping for air.

His belly is so distended,

it's pressing on his diaphragm

and preventing his lungs from filling.

He can barely breathe.

- [Andrew] His family rushes him to a hospital in Mumbai,

where doctors immediately suspect he has some kind

of abdominal tumor, but with the patient suffocating

before them, they don't have time for an X-ray or CT scan,

and they rush him into surgery.

- [Danny] When the surgeon makes the first incision,

he feels something strange.

- [Sami] It feels hard,

and the doctor swears that he thinks he can feel fingers,

like a hand is inside of Sanju's abdomen.

- [Andrew] He works to remove the object

and ultimately pulls out a fully formed human arm.

The hand even has fingernails on it

and then he pulls out another arm,

and then a pair of genitalia

and as if it couldn't get any stranger, he then removes

a partially formed human face, complete with hair.

- [Danny] It's not a tumor,

it's Sanju's undeveloped twin hidden

inside him since birth.

- [Dr. Hakeem] Roughly 3% of babies born today are twins,

and sometimes a small percentage

of those twins are conjoined,

and that's what occurs when the egg doesn't fully split

into two separate embryos.

Conjoined twins rarely survive until birth,

but then there's a small set of cases

where the larger twin can sometimes grow

around the smaller one, completely engulfing it,

and then the smaller twin can continue to grow

inside the larger twin.

- [Danny] It's known as parasitic twin syndrome.

Less than 200 cases have ever been documented,

and almost never in adults.

- [Sami] Sanju's secret sibling weighs over nine pounds,

and two of those nine pounds are just hair.

Once his sibling is fully removed from his abdomen,

all the pressure on Sanju's diaphragm goes away

and it becomes significantly easier for him to breathe.

In the end, Sanju makes a full recovery

and is able to keep on with his farm work,

despite what I would imagine

was a very traumatic experience.

- [Danny] Most weird ocean finds come from the deep,

but one of the strangest ever showed up

in a quiet little lab in Italy.

- [Andrew] It's 1988, a German graduate student

named Christian Summer studies marine biology,

and for the summer he's taken an assignment

at a marine station near Portofino, Italy.

The deep waters off Portofino's coasts are teeming with life

and have amazed scientists for centuries,

but Christian's job is a little bit less exciting.

He's stuck inside watching jellyfish in a tank.

- He's there to observe

a species of jellyfish grow from half inch polyps up

to full size foot and a half adults

called Medusas, which kind of looked

like a red stomach suspended in a transparent gel.

- [Sami] The lifecycle of these particular jellyfish

is pretty well known.

He's just there to confirm

what scientists are already very aware of.

- [Danny] After just a few mundane shifts,

Christian arrives

for work only to discover

that all the jellyfish are dead.

- He's devastated.

He was supposed to observe these animals' lifecycle.

Instead, they're all dead within days.

- Still, he's a dedicated young scientist determined

to see the project through, so he continues

to monitor the jellyfish,

hoping to document their decaying process.

- [Danny] Then, something unexpected happens.

- [Andrew] The jellyfish don't begin to dissolve or decay.

Instead, they have completely transformed.

It seems like they've turned back the clock

and then restarted.

What he sees are polyps,

the earliest stage of jellyfish life.

- [Danny] Further studies

confirm Christian's observations.

- [Austin] Essentially, when adult Turritopsis dohrnii

are exposed to stress or starvation,

or confinement, they don't die,

they revert back to their juvenile form.

- [Dr. Hakeem] The process is called trans differentiation.

The cells spontaneously change their identity

and reorganize themselves

into completely new types of tissue.

- [Sami] So they don't die and it's not exactly

like a healing factor, it's more of a rebirth,

and in theory,

they can do this over

and over again forever.

- [Danny] This incredible phenomenon

has scientists wondering,

is this nature's version of immortality?

- [Dr. Hakeem] Of course, they can still die by accident

or be eaten by predators,

but left undisturbed, it is possible

that they may never die from natural causes.

- [Sami] Researchers are still trying

to figure out how this process works,

what triggers the change,

and if other creatures can do this,

and most intriguingly,

if they could replicate this phenomena

in human beings.

- [Dr. Hakeem] For now, one thing is clear.

Turritopsis dohrnii

doesn't just challenge the notion of life and death,

they may be the first known organism

to cheat death entirely.

- [Danny] What's small, has big feet,

and is featured in a Hollywood blockbuster?

If you said Hobbits, you'd be right.

And you also believe they couldn't be real.

But what if one unusual find makes you rethink that?

- [Austin] It's 1950 on the Indonesian island of Flores,

and Dutch Catholic missionary Father Theodor Verhoeven

spends his day-to-day teaching classical languages

to the residents,

but his free time, he's out there exploring the island.

- [Kavitha] One day while wandering the countryside,

Verhoeven spots some strange objects scattered

on the ground near the entrance to a cave.

Curious, he starts digging,

and soon he finds a bunch of fossils.

- [Adam] Eventually,

Verhoeven stumbles on something much stranger.

It is a small, fully formed human-like skeleton

that's barely three and a half feet tall.

But because the skull is fully formed,

Verhoeven realizes this little skeleton

can't be from a child.

- [Danny] Baffled, Verhoeven publishes his findings,

but the mystery stays buried

until decades later

when another archeologist picks up the trail.

- [Adam] In 2003, Septomo

and his team are excavating deep in Liang Bua,

one of the caves that Verhoeven explored.

And as they dig through layers of sediment,

they also begin finding loads

of smaller human-like bones.

- [Kavitha] Before long, the team unearths an entire

human skeleton.

It's a fully adult woman, but she's only three

and a half feet tall and only weighs 66 pounds.

- [Danny] She comes to be known as the Little Lady

of Flores, or Flo for short.

- [Adam] Her bones show absolutely no signs of any kind

of disease or disorder.

They're completely normal healthy bones.

They are just smaller,

with the exception

of her strangely oversized feet.

- [Andrew] Eventually scientists find 13 more skeletons,

all of the same stature, all with unusually large feet.

- [Kavitha] Carbon dating indicates

that the bones date back about 50,000 years.

That means that they're too recent

and too small to be an early human ancestor

known as homoerectus, and neanderthals

never reached this part of the world.

- [Danny] So who are these mysterious people,

and why were they so small?

- [Adam] Researchers determine that this

is an entirely new species

of an early human ancestor.

They end up naming it homo floresiensis,

and paleoanthropologists consider it to be one

of the most important finds in terms of human evolution

in decades.

- [Danny] Despite their small stature,

they were just as capable

as their larger human cousins,

and researchers think geography might have played

a role in their tiny physique.

- [Andrew] Scientists hypothesized that it was the

pressures of island life that led to their small stature.

Cut off from the mainland by a deep ocean,

resources would've been scarce.

- [Austin] Over the generations, homo floresiensis

evolved to need less food.

In this limited environment, being small was an advantage.

- [Danny] The discovery makes headlines around the globe,

sparking an immediate comparison.

- [Adam] At the time,

"The Lord of the Rings" films are arguably some

of the most popular films on planet earth.

And this sudden of tiny humans that were small in stature

with big feet gets a load of attention.

But being that Tolkien wrote his books back in the '30s

and '40s, it's pretty unlikely that he was inspired

by homo floresiensis when he conceived of "The Hobbits."

- [Andrew] Today, replicas of the flores Hobbit bones

are on display at a museum in Australia, and a 3D model

of Flo is on display at the Smithsonian.

But anyone hoping to spot the one ring

will have to look elsewhere.

- [Danny] One night in Poland 200 years ago,

a storm shook loose more than mud.

It stirred up a strange find

the villagers hoped would stay buried forever.

- [Andrew] After a heavy summer storm,

villagers in Pien, Poland begin the work

of clearing away runoff and debris from a nearby hill.

But as they work to clear the road,

something unsettling emerges from the mud.

It's a human skull.

- [Sami] As they continue to dig, they find more bones

from more than one skeleton,

and they all seem to be coming

from the hill that's just above them.

- There was something very disturbing about that hill.

Animals avoided it,

parents told their children not to go near it,

and every time there was a heavy rain,

more bones emerged from the side of it,

almost as if the earth was trying to give something back.

- [Danny] Locals stay away

and the site sits untouched for almost 200 years until 2022,

when two archeologists arrive to investigate further,

and what they find is disturbing.

- [Sami] As they start excavating,

the ground is riddled

with bodies, but these aren't the typical grave sites

that they're used to unearthing.

- [Andrew] There are skeletons weighed down with stones.

There's even a skeleton with a body

of a child laid across its legs, forming a kind of cross.

- [Danny] The team uncovers 100

of these strange unmarked graves,

but is confused by their purpose,

until one digger's discovery helps make it more clear.

- His trial hits something with a clink.

Working carefully, he brushes away the dirt

and he uncovers a long curved metal piece.

It's a sickle and it's been deliberately placed

over the neck of a young woman's skeleton.

- [Sami] But then they make another unsettling discovery.

There's a padlock that has been clamped around her foot

as if it were chaining her to the earth.

- [Andrew] They then turn to not only history

but folklore to help understand why this woman

and all of the other burials are here.

- [Danny] It turns out that over 400 years ago,

a wave of panic swept across Poland,

one driven by fear of the undead.

- [Sami] The villagers believed

that the dead were rising

from the graves to hunt the living.

Described as pale with sharp claws and sharp teeth,

these beings would feed on the blood of the living

and spread disease and fear.

- [Nicola] The Polish called these people upier,

which is an early version

of the word vampire.

These beings were resurrected bodies of people

who had died early or violent deaths,

and if you had suffered that kind of a fate,

the danger is that you might come back as an upier.

- [Hugo] To stop them,

communities took drastic measures.

Some were bound in rope.

Others had bricks stuck in their mouths

to try to stop them from biting.

- [Nicola] The most feared were actually padlocked to the

ground or buried with a sharp sickle arranged over their neck,

so if they suddenly sat up,

they would effectively decapitate themselves.

- [Danny] The researchers document

the young woman's grave in full,

then transfer her remains back to the lab for analysis.

But there's one thing they leave alone.

- [Sami] The padlock is never opened

because sometimes, even in science,

it's better to be safe than sorry.

- Next up, another strange body, but this one wasn't buried,

it was propped up in a dusty basement.

- [Andrew] Katoomba, New South Wales, is a quiet town known

for its misty mountain views and abundance of antique shops.

Bea Bellingham is browsing the basement

of the Katoomba Vintage Emporium.

This is the type of place

where you might pick up an old lamp

or a piece of vintage furniture.

- As she turns a corner, she freezes.

She sees something strange.

She moves closer and inspects it.

There's a human figure in front of her.

It's tied to a dolly kneeling and completely nude.

- [Andrew] It's extremely lifelike and strange mannequin,

and the face is awfully familiar.

- [Danny] She snaps a photo and uploads it to Instagram.

It doesn't take long to get a response.

- [Dr. Hakeem] The post quickly goes viral,

and in no time, people identify this freaky figure.

It's Sylvester Stallone,

or more specifically,

it's Stallone as a character John Spartan

from his 1993 movie "Demolition Man."

In one of the movie's most iconic scenes,

his character is cryogenically frozen, nude, vulnerable,

and suspended in midair.

And this figure looks very much

like Stallone's character from that movie.

So it must have been a prop from the actual production.

- [Danny] Once that connection is made, the mystery shifts

to how did it get here.

- [Andrew] Another poster quickly chimes in

that he's seen this Stallone before,

only it wasn't at the movies,

it was at a restaurant in Sydney, Australia.

- [Danny] Not just any restaurant,

one of the most famous Hollywood ventures of the 1990s,

Planet Hollywood.

- [Kavitha] In the early 1990s,

Planet Hollywood exploded onto the scene.

It was a restaurant chain backed by big Hollywood stars

with movie memorabilia plastered on the walls.

- [Andrew] In 1996, Planet Hollywood opened its doors in

Sydney, and on hand for the festivities was none other

than one of the chain's celebrity investors,

Sylvester Stallone.

- Rocky, Rocky!

- [Andrew] And on display, a life-size replica

of Stallone's character cryogenically frozen

in "Demolition Man."

- [Danny] Unfortunately,

Planet Hollywood went bankrupt in 1999,

and when its doors closed, much of the memorabilia vanished.

- [Kavitha] No one's quite sure how it ended up in Katoomba,

but Bea says it was so bizarre that she had to document it.

- [Danny] You never know when

or where you're going to find something strange.

For one man in England, his freaky discovery began

with nothing more than a nagging cough.

- [Adam] It is 2017 in Preston in the north of England,

and a man by the name of Paul Baxter

for months has been plagued by severe coughs

and chest infections

that just keep coming back again and again and again.

At first he thinks it's maybe bronchitis or pneumonia,

but it's not going away,

so he finally decides to see his doctor.

- [Dr. Hakeem] His doctor sends him for a chest X-ray,

and they do see that there is something in his lungs,

but it's inconclusive.

So the doctor sends him for a CT scan.

- [Danny] The results reveal

a mass deep inside Paul's lung.

- [Andrew] The mass is irregular, dense,

and lodged deep in the bronchus.

Doctors assume the worst.

This could be a tumor, maybe cancerous.

- [Jenn] Paul is referred to the respiratory team

at the Royal Preston Hospital.

They schedule a bronchoscopy, which is a procedure

that lets doctors look directly

into the lungs using this flexible tube

that has a light in a camera on it.

- [Danny] Pulmonologist, Dr. Mohammed Munavvar

begins what should be a routine procedure.

- [Andrew] Watching from the monitor,

Munavvar guides the scope down Paul's trachea

into the bronchial tree

until the mass comes into sight.

But this is not like any tumor the doctor has ever seen.

- [Adam] It's about half an inch long.

It's bright orange, and it seems to be made of plastic.

So Munavvar carefully inserts mini biopsy forceps

to retrieve the object,

and he looks at it on the screen, and it's a toy.

It's a mini plastic traffic cone.

- [Danny] When Paul wakes up,

doctors hand him the strange orange object.

At first, he's confused,

but then a long forgotten memory comes rushing back.

- [Jenn] When Paul was seven, he got a playmobile toy set

for his birthday.

It came with orange vested construction workers,

stop signs, and traffic cones.

- [Dr. Hakeem] One day, like a lot of young curious kids, he

put one of these little toy traffic cones in his mouth

and accidentally inhaled it.

He cough a few times, felt fine,

so he just went right back to playing.

- [Danny] Incredibly, the cone slipped into his lung

and stayed there for 41 years.

- [Andrew] Over time, the lung formed a protective layer of

tissue around the traffic cone.

The cone itself remained fine,

essentially mummified in Paul's lung,

not causing any problems

until it began to impact his breathing.

- [Danny] The unusual find is published

by the British Medical Journal.

- [Dr. Hakeem] Experts called it one

of the most unusual bronchial obstructions ever documented,

and they all agreed that Paul was incredibly lucky.

- [Adam] Four months after surgery, Paul fully recovers.

The cough is gone.

His lungs are clear.

Oh, and that little orange traffic cone,

it sits on his mantle as a conversation piece.

- [Danny] If you think a toy inside a lung is freaky,

just wait until you see

what one young girl finds inside a stone cliff.

- [Don] On the whim swept cliffs of Lyme Regis

in Dorset, England, 12-year-old Mary Anning

and her brother Joseph are out exploring after a storm.

As they walk by the shoreline,

Joseph spots something poking out

of some limestone in the cliff side.

- They get closer and realize

that half buried is a strange fossilized skull.

This doesn't look like a normal animal skull.

It's got sharp teeth, unusually large eye sockets,

and it's abnormally long.

- [Don] Most 12 year olds would move on and forget about it,

but not Mary.

- She returns to the site day after day for nearly a year

as she excavates the fossil from the cliff side.

- [Don] Eventually, she digs out a massive 17-foot long skeleton.

It has a long body, two pairs of paddle like limbs, a tail,

a pointed snout full of sharp teeth,

and creepiest of all, giant eyes.

- [Danny] Mary becomes a local legend,

but her strange discovery doesn't look

like anything anyone's seen before,

leaving experts divided and baffled.

- [Kenneth] At first, scientists brush it off

as maybe just the remains of a crocodile.

And it does have a crocodile-like snout,

but others aren't so sure.

- [Don] After a few years of debate,

the scientific community finally agrees,

this is no croc.

They also agree it is very, very old.

- [Danny] Eventually, paleontologists call

the strange find ichthyosaurus, or fish lizard,

but it takes four more years

to figure out exactly what it is.

- [Don] It isn't until 1821 that scientists determined

that this isn't a fish or a mammal,

but actually, a previously

unknown 200 million year old marine reptile.

- [Kavitha] Meanwhile, Mary continues

to actively explore the world around her.

In 1823, she finds a nearly complete plesiosaurus skeleton.

- And a few years later she digs up

Britain's first ever pterosaur.

- [Danny] With each new discovery,

Mary Anning's reputation grows

as one of the most remarkable fossil hunters of her time.

- [Kavitha] Mary Anning dies of breast cancer in 1847,

and her death is noted in the Journal

of the Geological Society, which is a big deal

for a woman at the time.

- Then in 2015, she gets another honor,

when the name

of her first find is updated to icthyosaurus anningae,

which is the credit she deserves as one

of the most skilled self-taught paleontologists of her time.

- [Danny] In the jungles of southern Mexico,

a routine swing of a machete is about

to strike something unexpected.

- [Nicola] It's the early 1860s near the remote Mexican village

of Tres Zapotes,

and a farm worker is clearing away some brush

so he can plant some crops there,

when he notices something unusual.

His blade hits something in the soil,

so he starts clearing away the earth

to try and see what he's hit.

- [Hugo] What he finds is hard, smooth, and absolutely huge.

As he clears more dirt, contours start to emerge,

they look like lips, a nose, an eyelid.

- [Danny] To his surprise, it's no ordinary stone.

It's a nine foot tall head.

- [Sami] Word spreads quickly

and locals begin to gather around it,

unsure of what exactly has been found.

- [Andrew] Some in the village think they've uncovered a God.

Others worry that they've disturbed something,

something that might even be cursed,

and so advocate to leave this alone.

- [Danny] The strange stone sits there untouched

for the next 70 years,

until an American archeologist named Matthew Stirling

hears about the massive stone head

and decides to investigate.

- [Sami] Sterling locates the statue,

and then begins excavating around the area.

Soon he digs up more heads, many more, 17, in fact,

the largest of which weighs around 40 tons.

Not only that, they look unlike anything archeologists have

ever seen in this area, and they're not alone,

because alongside these statues,

they find things like altars, thrones,

and other items carved in the same style.

- [Danny] Sterling thinks this could be evidence

of an ancient civilization no one knew existed.

- [Hugo] He names the ancient people the Olmec,

which means people from the land of rubber,

a reference to the fact

that this region is important

in a natural rubber production.

- [Sami] Radiocarbon dating

of materials located near these sculptures dates them back

to anywhere between 1500 to 400 BCE,

which suggests that it is possible

that the Olmec people may have been the mother culture

that would later give way

to other civilizations like the Aztec

and the Maya.

- [Danny] If true,

the Olmec's techniques would've been revolutionary

for their time,

with stone crafting

as advanced as Stonehenge

or the pyramids of Giza.

- [Nicola] Geologists identified the stone that was used

for the heads as basalt comes from the Tuxtla mountains,

which were about 50 miles away.

So imagine these people were able

to transport 40 ton pieces of stone

50 miles over thick jungles.

- [Sami] Experts think that they might have used rafts, rollers,

or ramps to move them, but nobody's entirely sure.

- [Danny] Moving them is one challenge.

Understanding them is another.

- [Andrew] Some experts believe

that these are the faces of ancient Gods.

Others suggest that they're simply too lifelike

to not refer to living people,

and so maybe these were used to honor important leaders

or to mark their territory.

- [Nicola] Today, some of these sculptures

are housed in archeological museums,

but others remain in their original sites just feet away

from where they were really discovered.

- [Sami] And honestly, maybe it's for the best that they stay

where they were found, because 3,500 years ago,

the EC moved these 40 ton stones, carved them,

and then set them down in a very specific location

for a very specific reason and purpose.

What that purpose is though remains the big mystery.

- [Danny] From graves to sewers,

and even inside the human body,

strange finds come crawling out

of places you'd never expect.

I'm Danny Trejo.

Thanks for watching "Mysteries Unearthed."