Over the last few years a pool of Italian biologists, anthropologists and geochemists conducted a series of forensic tests on the skull and accompanying lower mandible, which were unearthed 120 years ago on a shore not far from Pompeii. On Jan. 23 the scientists presented their findings at a conference in the museum. The skull, they concluded, squared with what was known about Pliny at his death, but the jawbone belonged to someone else. – The New York Times