Bloody good show

IT'S official. Friday night is for digging around looking for old bones. Some belong to gladiators, others to pterosaurs. Where there're bones, there's a professor with a slightly crazed look in his eye pontificating about the fabulous finds.

Never mind that their sentences are punctuated with words such as 'suggests', 'probably', 'implies' and 'likely'. They all believe they've found the archaeological holy grail of their specialist subject.

Some academic experts are more watchable than others. The ones with foreign accents make you wonder if you've strayed into the lair of a James Bond villain bent on taking over the world. And the paleontologist investigating prehistoric bones found in Israel's Negev desert has a very suitable name - Dino.

He's the star exhibit in Sky Monsters. The Timewatch documentary has, among all the Grosschmidts and Junkelmanns, the very presentable Professor Charlotte Roberts, from Durham University. She studies Roman individuals and is billed as an expert in the study of wounds, which sounds a pretty gruesome specialist subject.

She's been called in by two Austrian forensic anthropologists who've spent the best part of five years investigating hundreds upon hundreds of bones found in a mass grave in Turkey. They include (try not to get too excited) the world's first scientifically certified find of gladiator bones. Tests can show how gladiators lived, fought and died - and that they were vegetarians.

Mention gladiators and most of us think of Russell Crowe in a little leather skirt with a big sword in his hand in the aptly-named film Gladiator, or Kirk Douglas and his fellow slaves proclaiming: "I am Spartacus" in an earlier gladiator movie.

There was - probably, possibly, maybe - more to these fighters than that. There were different kinds of gladiators, armed with a variety of weapons to ensure they were injured or died in a number of interesting, if painful, ways.

The five-year project aims to catalogue every single bone for age, injury and cause of death. That's where Professor Roberts comes in. She can tell if the wounds in the bones were made by weapons depicted in paintings of gladiators.

For a gladiator, getting the thumbs down from the crowd was swiftly followed by getting a sword rammed down your throat, past the shoulder blade into your heart.

If injured, you might have been dragged from the arena and bashed over the head with a hammer to finish you off. Just as you'd do, another expert suggested, to a horse that had failed to get over Beecher's Brook.

Gladiators fought for money and became celebrities. Far from being one-sided free-for-alls, they fought in single combat and fights had referees to ensure fair play.

Evidence shows some of their weapons were designed to injure, not kill. This ensured the bloodthirsty crowd got a good show. A bloody good show.

They were top of the bill in shows starting in the morning and going on well into the night. Criminals weren't so lucky. They were expected to suffer a painful death, so the lions were set on them to tear them limb from limb.

Set the pterosaurs on them is what I say. These are Sky Monsters, "the closest thing to living dragons the planet has ever seen" according to the enthusiastic narrator.

They come in various forms, from the size of a sparrow to that of a fighter plane. The mystery is how these strange-shaped reptiles ever managed to get off the ground and fly.

Dino Frey is trying to find out through the recent discovery of the finger bone from a pterosaur. This seems a valid project. It's more difficult to justify a team of scientists spending $500,000 to design, build and fly a pterosaur.

When this funny-looking model plane they called Hercky crashed - "we could lose him" screamed the tearful team leader - I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the waste of money.