An Egyptian granite sculpture of a sphinx that risked ending up on the black market for antiquities is destined instead for a Rome museum.

Italian Tax Police Maj. Massimo Rossi says the sphinx, perhaps as old as the 4th century B.C., was found on the outskirts of Rome last week. It was in a box hidden in a greenhouse near an ancient Etruscan necropolis.

Plans by an Islamic group to build a giant mosque able to accommodate more than 9,000 worshippers in the shadow of London's Olympic Park have been rejected by the local authority.

Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary group with roots in India, has been trying since 1999 to build the mosque on a former chemical site in West Ham in east London, which would have become one of the biggest Islamic centres in western Europe.

Berlin will open a major new exhibition Thursday celebrating the centenary of the discovery of the 3,400-year-old fabled bust of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti as a feud with Cairo over its ownership rages on.

The show at the city's New Museum showcases its most famous treasure, considered the most priceless depiction of the female visage after the Mona Lisa, and other booty carted home by German archaeologists after the December 6, 1912 find.

Cavemen were better at drawing four-legged animals in motion in their art than modern artists, a study said Wednesday.

Most four-legged animals have a similar sequence in which they move each limb. These sequences were studied in the early 1880s by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

At the end of a research trip to an oil field in east Iraq, Ruba Husari took a detour to visit a site she had wanted to see for some time. When she arrived it was barren -- but still she was delighted.

Less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Iranian border, Husari's destination was nondescript and unremarkable -- a 20 minute walk from a pothole-filled road and several kilometers (miles) from the tiny village of Qalaat Muzeibleh, with the Badra oil field barely visible in the distance.

Maria Menendez, a 25-year-old caught in Spain's job-destroying economic crisis, would love to work in Germany as a veterinarian. Germany, facing an acute shortage of skilled workers, would love to have her.

A perfect match, it seems, but something's holding her back: She doesn't speak German.

Thanks to the election, socialism and capitalism are forever wed as Merriam-Webster's most looked-up words of 2012.

Traffic for the unlikely pair on the company's website about doubled this year from the year before as the health care debate heated up and discussion intensified over "American capitalism" versus "European socialism," said the editor at large, Peter Sokolowski.

China will charge anyone caught aiding or inciting Tibetan self-immolations with murder, state press said Wednesday, after more than 90 Tibetans set themselves alight in protest at Beijing's rule.

A joint legal opinion issued by China's supreme court, top prosecution body and police said the charge of "intentional murder" should apply to anyone urging Tibetans to set themselves alight, the state-run Gannan Daily reported.

The largest single piece of cut-gem aquamarine in the world is going on permanent exhibition from Thursday in Washington alongside the Hope Diamond and Marie Antoinette's earrings.

Mined from a Brazilian pegmatite in the 1980s, and named for Brazil's first two emperors, the Dom Pedro Aquamarine will take pride of place at the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Fossilised bones unearthed by a British palaeontologist in colonial Tanzania in the 1930s may be those of the oldest dinosaur ever found, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The bones are either those of the earliest dinosaur or of the closest relative of dinosaurs discovered to date, they said.