A giant penguin more than 4ft (1.2m) tall roamed New Zealand about 27 million years ago, according to paleontologists who have reconstructed it from fossil remains.

Discovery reignites debate over transportation of smaller standing stones

Evidence for a hitherto totally unknown prehistoric war has been discovered in northern England. Archaeologists excavating the remains of a large fortified Iron Age settlement at Fin Cop in the Peak District have so far found the skeletons of nine victims of what they believe was a massacre which took place around 2400 years ago.

Around 30,000 years ago, while the sun was setting on the last Neanderthals in Spain, people in what is now Germany carved figurines from mammoth tusks. The known examples include a bird, sufficiently naturalistic as to suggest a cormorant, and a couple of figures that seem to combine human bodies with lions' heads. Deep in the prehistory of art, even as people taught themselves to represent natural creatures, they channelled their creativity into images of unnatural beings. We can only speculate on what these images meant, but we can hardly doubt that they meant a great deal.

England captain Rio Ferdinand has defended referees' assistant Sian Massey against the "prehistoric views" of Sky Sports duo Richard Keys and Andy Gray.

Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer, remains utterly unrepentant about his crimes and if ever released would kill again as easily as "swatting a fly", according to the criminologist who has carried out the first face-to-face interviews in a decade with the notorious serial killer.

Neanderthal cuisine was far more sophisticated than previously thought, according to a new analysis of fossilised teeth.