39 results for your search

Mona is a beautiful, distant, mythic and mysterious island, full of amazing caves and interesting legends. Above all it is our Caribbean treasure. A completely flat island that emerged from the bottom of the sea thousands of years ago, it was a ceremonial center for the Taínos, the original inhabitants, who practiced their rituals in its amazing and diverse caves. In Mona’s caves, they created pictograms: faces, bodies with frog legs or bat wings, among other representations, which are still preserved, thanks to the inaccessibility of the island. With the Spanish arrival and later, with the subsequent influx of pirates, ships anchored at Mona to stock up on food and water, provided by the Taínos. Between the 19th and 20th century, more than 600 men extracted guano, a fertilizer, which was highly appreciated worldwide.

Presently, Mona Island is a natural reserve managed by the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. Biologists research and preserve hawksbill turtles, iguanas that are endemic to Mona as well as other animals. Once a year the “cobada” is a unique spectacle of seashells that slowly get to the shores from the “meseta” and for one night without moon, they mate and then go back to the “meseta”. For the past 10 years, an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional project called “El corazón del Caribe” [The Heart of the Caribbean] has brought together world-renowned speleologists, British and Puerto Rican archaeologists, and graduate students from the Center for Advances Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean to explore and find new meanings to the Taíno legacy. So far, they have mapped over 200 caves on the island.

This feature documentary will help us promote awareness and educate others about the rich history of Mona and the spectacular fauna that inhabits it. This documentary will be screened in theaters in December 2017, and subsequently through various channels and platforms.

Mona es una isla llena de misterio, cuevas y leyendas.Y sobre todo es nuestro tesoro. Es una isla completamente plana que emergió del fondo del mar hace miles de años. Fue un centro ceremonial para los taínos. Nuestros pobladores originarios practicaban sus rituales en las cuevas de Mona. Algunas accesibles sólo bajando por sogas ya que se encuentran hasta 40 metros bajo la meseta. Dejaron plasmadas en las paredes pictografías y pictogramas pintadas con sus dedos. Caritas, cuerpos con patas de rana y murciélagos son algunas de las representaciones que aún se preservan gracias a lo inaccesible del lugar. Con la llegada de los españoles, y el posterior paso de los piratas, los barcos anclaban en Mona para abastecerse de comida y agua que los taínos agricultores les proveían. Entre el siglo XIX y XX hubo una gran explotación de guano, poderoso fertilizante extraído de las cuevas y que ocupaba a casi 600 hombres.

En la actualidad es una reserva del Departamento de Recursos Naturales. También es el refugio más cercano donde llegan inmigrantes cubanos buscando asilo político. Un proyecto interdisciplinario llamado El corazón del Caribe reúne a espeleólogos de reconocimiento mundial como Pat Kambesis y Make Lace y a los arqueólogos británicos Jago Cooper del British Museum y Alice Sampson de Cambridge University. Participan también estudiantes de maestría y doctorado que se unen a estos expertos para aprender y convertirse en los futuros expertos de la isla. En su labor han encontrado y hecho mapas de más de 200 cuevas en Mona. Según Cooper, la nueva teoría prueba la importancia de la isla de Mona como un centro que unía a los taínos de República Dominicana y de Cuba.

Este documental de largometraje servirá para dar a conocer y educar sobre las maravillas que alberga Mona. El estreno será en Fine Arts en diciembre del 2016. Show more Show less

In this revelatory series Professor Richard Fortey, Britain’s foremost chronicler of ancient worlds, tells the extraordinary history of palaeontology through three of the world’s greatest fossil sites. These fossil ‘time capsules’ contain entire eco-systems of now-vanished worlds. Only a handful of them exist in the world, but each one of them has overturned generations of paleontological thinking and reconfigured our understanding of the past. These ‘super-sites’ are uniquely special not just because of the scale of the life preserved but because each location reveals a history of evolution of one type of creature and highlights three key evolutionary moments: early life in the seas, feathered dinosaurs and the rise of birds and the birth of mammals. Together they tell a story not just of the ancient past, but how that past was discovered.

In the second episode, Professor Richard Fortey travels to north eastern China to see a fossil site known as the 'Dinosaur Pompeii' - a place that has yielded spectacular remains of feathered dinosaurs and rewritten the story of the origins of birds. Among the amazing finds he investigates are the feathered cousin of T-rex, a feathered dinosaur with strong parallels to living pandas, and some of the most remarkable flying animals that have ever lived.