Amelia Earhart and Bone Found - Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan Mystery Solved?

A recent discovery of what could be an Amelia Earhart finger bone fragment has many wondering if the long unsolved mystery of the navigator's fate has finally been unraveled.  The tiny bone fragment was just recently discovered on a remote tropical island.

Amelia Earhart disappeared over 70 years ago while flying here twin-engine Lockheed named "Electra" above the Pacific Ocean.  At the time she was attempting to set a record by flying around the world at the equator.  Now just recently a tiny bone fragment was found on Nikumaroro which is an uninhabited tropical island in the southwest Pacific area.

So will this bone fragment help solve the Amelia Earhart mystery?  Not so fast.  According to Discovery News, the phalanx bone fragment may be from a human, but it may also belong to a turtle.  DNA tests will need to be conducted to determine exactly who or what the bone is from.

The people from TIGHAR, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, are holding to the original hypothesis over Earhart's fate.  It's believed she and navigator Fred Noonan were castaways on the island, eventually perishing there.  Ric Gillespie, the executive director of TIGHAR says, "After 22 years of rigorous research and 10 grueling expeditions, we can say that all of the evidence we have found on Nikumaroro is consistent with the hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died there as castaways."

So it's now up to the Molecular Science Laboratories located at Oklahoma University in Norma, Oklahoma.  They'll run the deciding tests there to determine if this bone was from a turtle or Amelia Earhart, and possibly add more evidence to the conclusion that Earhart suffered an unfortunate fate on the island.  Let's hope that this mystery can be put to rest and the history books can finally be conclusively written on the Amelia Earhart mystery.