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      NORMAN, Okla. (AP) - The three bone fragments turned up on a
deserted South Pacific island that lay along the course Amelia
Earhart was following when she vanished. Nearby were several
tantalizing artifacts: some old makeup, some glass bottles and
shells that had been cut open.


      Now scientists at the University of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA
from the tiny bone chips in tests that could prove Earhart died as
a castaway after failing in her 1937 quest to become the first
woman to fly around the world.


      "There's no guarantee," said Ric Gillespie, director of the
International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a group of
aviation enthusiasts in Delaware that found the pieces of bone this
year while on an expedition to Nikumaroro Island, about 1,800 miles
south of Hawaii.


      "You only have to say you have a bone that may be human and may
be linked to Earhart, and people get excited. But it is true that,
if they can get DNA, and if they can match it to Amelia Earhart's
DNA, that's pretty good."


      It could be months before scientists know for sure - and it
could turn out the bones are from a turtle. The fragments were
found near a hollowed-out turtle shell that might have been used to
collect rain water, but there were no other turtle parts nearby.


      Earhart's disappearance on July 2, 1937, remains one of the 20th
century's most enduring mysteries. Did she run out of fuel and
crash at sea? Did her Lockheed Electra develop engine trouble? Did
she spot the island from the sky and attempt to land on a nearby
reef?


      "What were her last moments like? What was she doing? What
happened?" asked Robin Jensen, an associate professor of
communications at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who
has studied Earhart's writings and speeches.
     

 Since 1989, Gillespie's group has made 10 trips to the island,
trying each time to find clues that might help determine the fate
of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan.
     

 Last spring, volunteers working at what seemed to be an
abandoned campsite found one piece of bone that appeared to be from
a neck, and another unknown fragment dissimilar to bird or fish
bones. A third fragment might be from a finger. The largest of the
pieces is just over an inch long.
     

 The area was near a site where native work crews found skeletal
remains in 1940. Bird and fish carcasses suggested Westerners had
prepared meals there.


      "This site tells the story of how someone or some people
attempted to live as castaways," Gillespie said Friday in an
interview with The Associated Press. "These fish weren't eaten
like Pacific Islanders" eat fish.
    

  Millions of dollars have been spent in failed attempts to learn
what happened to Earhart, a Kansas native declared dead by a
California court in early 1939.


      The official version says Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and
crashed at sea while flying from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland
Island, which had a landing strip and fuel.


      Gillespie's book "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart
Disappearance," and "Amelia Earhart's Shoes," written by four
volunteers from the aircraft group, suggest the pair landed on the
reef and survived, perhaps for months, on scant food and rainwater.


      Gillespie, a pilot, said the aviator would have needed only
about 700 feet of unobstructed space to land because her plane
would have been traveling only about 55 mph at touchdown.


      "It looks like she could have landed successfully on the reef
surrounding the island. It's very flat and smooth," Gillespie
said. "At low tide, it looks like this place is surrounded by a
parking lot."


      However, Gillespie said, the plane, even if it landed safely,
would have been slowly dragged into the sea by the tides. The
waters off the reef are 1,000 to 2,000 feet deep. His group needs
$3 million to $5 million for a deep-sea dive.


      The island is on the course Earhart planned to follow from Lae,
New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel.
Over the last seven decades, searches of the remote atoll have been
inconclusive.


      After the latest find, anthropologists who had previously worked
with Gillespie's group suggested that he send the bones to the
University of Oklahoma's Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, which
has experience extracting genetic material from old bones.
Gillespie's group also has a genetic sample from an Earhart female
relative for comparison with the bones.


      The lab is looking for mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along
only through females, so there is no need to have a Noonan sample.


      Cecil Lewis, an assistant professor of anthropology at the lab,
said the university received a little more than a gram of bone
fragments about two weeks ago. If researchers are able to extract
DNA and link it to Earhart, a sample would be sent to another lab
for verification.


      "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's
why we're trying to downplay a lot of the media attention right
now," Lewis said. "For all we know, this is just a turtle bone,
and a lot of people are going to be very disheartened."


      Under the best circumstances, the analysis would take two weeks.
If scientists have trouble with the sample, that time frame could
stretch into months, Lewis said.


      "Ancient DNA is incredibly unpredictable," he said.

      Other material recovered this year also suggested the presence
of Westerners at the isolated island site:


      - Someone carried shells ashore before cutting them open and
slicing out the meat. Islanders cut the meat out at sea.


      - Bottles found nearby were melted on the bottom, suggesting
they had been put into a fire, possibly to boil water. (A Coast
Guard unit on the island during World War II would have had no need
to boil water.)


      - Bits of makeup were found. The group is checking to see which
products Earhart endorsed and whether an inventory lists specific
types of makeup carried on her final trip.


      - A glass bottle with remnants of lanolin and oil, possibly hand
lotion.


      In 2007, the group found a piece of a pocket knife but didn't
know whether it was left by the Coast Guard or castaways. This
year, it found the shattered remains of the knife, suggesting
someone had smashed it to extract the blades. Gillespie speculated
a castaway used a blade to make a spear to stab shallow-water fish
like those found at the campsite.


      Following Earhart's disappearance, distress signals picked up by
distant ships pointed back to the area of Nikumaroro Island, but
while pilots passing over saw signs of recent habitation, the
island was crossed off the list as having been searched, Gillespie
said.


      In 1940, a British overseer on the island recovered a partial
human skeleton, a woman's shoe and an empty sextant box at what
appeared to be a former campsite, littered with turtle, clamshell
and bird remains.


      Thinking of Earhart, the overseer sent the items to Fiji, where
a British doctor decided they belonged to a stocky European or
mixed-blood male, ruling out any Earhart connection.


      The bones later vanished, but in 1998, Gillespie's group located
the doctor's notes in London. Two other forensic specialists
reviewed the doctor's bone measurements and agreed they were more
"consistent with" a female of northern European descent, about
Earhart's age and height.


      On their own visits to the island, volunteers recovered an
aluminum panel that could be from an Electra, another piece of a
woman's shoe and a "cat's paw" heel dating from the 1930s;
another shoe heel, possibly a man's, and an oddly cut piece of
clear Plexiglas.


      The sextant box might have been Noonan's. The woman's shoe and
heel resemble a blucher-style oxford seen in a pre-takeoff photo of
Earhart. The plastic shard is the exact thickness and curvature of
an Electra's side window.


      The body of evidence is intriguing, but Gillespie insists the
team is "constantly agonizing over whether we are being dragged
down a path that isn't right."


      Associated Press Writer Kelly P. Kissel contributed to this
report from Oklahoma City.

Gallery

Searching for Amelia Earhart

History

Three bone fragments were found on a deserted South Pacific island that lay along the course Amelia Earhart was following when she vanished.  Scientists at the University of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA from the tiny bone chips to prove whether they are Earhart's -- who disappeared in her 1937 quest to become the first woman to fly around the world.

Bones found on island might be Amelia Earhart's

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