Glamis Castle is situated beside the village of Glamis in Angus, Scotland. It is the home of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, is open to the public. Glamis Castle has been the home of the Lyon family since the 14th century, though the present building dates from the 17th century. Glamis was the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, wife of King George VI, their second daughter, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was born there. The castle is protected as a category A listed building, the grounds are included on the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland, the national listing of significant gardens. Glamis is set in the broad and fertile lowland valley of Strathmore, near Forfar, county town of Angus, which lies between the Sidlaw Hills to the south and the Grampian Mountains to the north 20 kilometres inland from the North Sea; the estate surrounding the castle covers more than 57 square kilometres and, in addition to parks and gardens, produces several cash crops including lumber and beef.

There are two streams running through the estate, one of them the Glamis Burn. An arboretum overlooking Glamis Burn features trees from all over the world, many of them rare and several hundred years old; the vicinity of Glamis Castle has prehistoric traces. In 1034 King Malcolm II was murdered at Glamis. In William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, the eponymous character resides at Glamis Castle, although the historical King Macbeth had no connection to the castle. By 1372 a castle had been built at Glamis, since in that year it was granted by King Robert II to Sir John Lyon, Thane of Glamis, husband of the king's daughter. Glamis has remained in the Lyon family since this time; the castle was rebuilt as an L-plan tower house in the early 15th century. The title Lord Glamis was created in 1445 for grandson of Sir John. John Lyon, 6th Lord Glamis, married Janet Douglas, daughter of the Master of Angus, at a time when King James V was feuding with the Douglases. In December 1528 Janet was accused of treason for bringing supporters of the Earl of Angus to Edinburgh.

She was charged with poisoning her husband, Lord Glamis, who had died on 17 September 1528. She was accused of witchcraft, was burned at the stake at Edinburgh on 17 July 1537. James V subsequently seized Glamis. In 1543 Glamis was returned to 7th Lord Glamis. In 1606, Patrick Lyon, 9th Lord Glamis, was created Earl of Kinghorne, he began major works on the castle, commemorated by the inscription "Built by Patrick, Lord Glamis, D Anna Murray" on the central tower. The English architect Inigo Jones has traditionally been linked to the redesign of the castle, though Historic Scotland consider the King's Master Mason William Schaw a more candidate, due to the traditional Scottish style of the architecture. During the Commonwealth of England and Ireland, soldiers were garrisoned at Glamis. In 1670 Patrick Lyon, 3rd Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, returned to the castle and found it uninhabitable. Restorations took place including the creation of a major Baroque garden. John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, succeeded in 1753, in 1767 he married Mary Eleanor Bowes, heiress to a coal-mining fortune.

He set about improving the grounds of the castle in the picturesque style in the 1770s. The south-west wing was rebuilt after a fire in the early 19th century. In the 1920s a huge fireplace from Gibside, the Bowes-Lyon estate near Gateshead, was removed and placed in Glamis' Billiard Room; the fireplace displays the coat of arms of the Blakiston family. Several interiors, including the Dining Room date from the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1900, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born, the youngest daughter of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and his wife, Cecilia, she spent much of her childhood at Glamis, used during the First World War as a military hospital. She was instrumental in organising the rescue of the castle's contents during a serious fire on 16 September 1916. On 26 April 1923 she married Prince Albert, Duke of York, second son of King George V, at Westminster Abbey, their second daughter, Princess Margaret, was born at Glamis Castle in 1930. Since 1987 an illustration of the castle has featured on the reverse side of ten pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Glamis is the home of Simon Bowes-Lyon, 19th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, who succeeded to the earldom in 2016. The most famous legend connected with the castle is that of the Monster of Glamis, a hideously deformed child born to the family; some accounts came from singer and composer Virginia Gabriel who stayed at the castle in 1870. In the story, the monster was kept in the castle all his life and his suite of rooms bricked up after his death. Another monster is supposed to have dwelt in Loch Calder near the castle. An alternative version of the legend is that to every generation of the family a vampire child is born and is walled up in that room. There is an old story that guests staying at Glamis once hung towels from the windows of every room in a bid to find the bricked-up suite of the monster; when they looked at it from outside, several windows were towel-less. The legend of the monster may have been inspired by the true story of the Ogilvies. Somewhere in the 16-foot-thick walls is the famous room of skulls, where the Ogilvie family, who sought

Antonio Pigafetta was an Italian scholar and explorer from the Republic of Venice. He joined the expedition to the Spice Islands led by explorer Ferdinand Magellan under the flag of King Charles I of Spain and, after Magellan's death in the Philippines, the subsequent voyage around the world. During the expedition, he served as Magellan's assistant and kept an accurate journal which assisted him in translating the Cebuano language, it is the first recorded document concerning the language. Pigafetta was one of the 18 men who returned to Spain in 1522, under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, out of the 240 who set out three years earlier; these men completed the first circumnavigation of the world. Pigafetta's surviving journal is the source for much of what is known about Magellan and Elcano's voyage. At least one warship of the Italian Navy, a destroyer of the Navigatori class, was named after him in 1931. Pigafetta's exact year of birth is not known, with estimates ranging between 1480 and 1491.

A birth year of 1491 would have made him around 30 years old during Magellan's expedition, which historians have considered more probable than an age close to 40. Pigafetta belonged to a rich family city of Vicenza in northeast Italy. In his youth he studied astronomy and cartography, he served on board the ships of the Knights of Rhodes at the beginning of the 16th century. Until 1519, he accompanied Monsignor Francesco Chieregati, to Spain. In Seville, Pigafetta heard of Magellan's planned expedition and decided to join, accepting the title of supernumerary, a modest salary of 1,000 maravedís. During the voyage, which started in August 1519, Pigafetta collected extensive data concerning the geography, flora and the native inhabitants of the places that the expedition visited, his meticulous notes proved invaluable to future explorers and cartographers due to his inclusion of nautical and linguistic data, to latter-day historians because of its vivid, detailed style. The only other sailor to maintain a journal during the voyage was Francisco Albo, Victoria's last pilot, who kept a formal logbook.

Pigafetta was wounded on Mactan in the Philippines, where Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in April 1521. He recovered and was among the 18 who accompanied Juan Sebastián Elcano on board the Victoria on the return voyage to Spain. Upon reaching port in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the modern Province of Cadiz in September 1522, three years after his departure, Pigafetta returned to the Republic of Venice, he related his experiences in the "Report on the First Voyage Around the World", composed in Italian and was distributed to European monarchs in handwritten form before it was published by Italian historian Giovanni Battista Ramusio in 1550–59. The account centers on the events in the Mariana Islands and the Philippines, although it included several maps of other areas as well, including the first known use of the word "Pacific Ocean" on a map; the original document was not preserved. However, it was not through Pigafetta's writings that Europeans first learned of the circumnavigation of the globe.

Rather, it was through an account written by a Flanders-based writer Maximilianus Transylvanus, published in 1523. Transylvanus had been instructed to interview some of the survivors of the voyage when Magellan's surviving ship Victoria returned to Spain in September 1522 under the command of Juan Sebastian Elcano. After Magellan and Elcano's voyage, Pigafetta utilized the connections he had made prior to the voyage with the Knights of Rhodes to achieve membership in the order. Antonio Pigafetta wrote a book, in which a detailed account of the voyage was given, it is quite unclear when it was first published and what language had been used in the first edition. The remaining sources of his voyage were extensively studied by Italian archivist Andrea da Mosto, who wrote a critical study of Pigafetta's book in 1898 and whose conclusions were confirmed by J. Dénucé. Today, four manuscripts survive. One of the three books is in French. Of the four manuscripts, three are in French, one in Italian. From a philological point of view, the French editions seem to derive from an Italian original version, while the remaining Italian editions seem to derive from a French original version.

Because of this, it remains quite unclear whether the original version of Pigafetta's manuscript was in French or Italian, though it was in Italian. The most complete manuscript, the one, supposed to be more related to the original manuscript, is the one found by Carlo Amoretti inside the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and published in 1800. Amoretti, in his printed edition, modified many words and sentences whose meaning was uncertain; the modified version published by Amoretti was translated into other languages carrying into them Amoretti's edits. Andrea da Mosto critically analyzed the original version stored in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and published this rigorous version of Pigafetta's book in 1894. Regarding the French vers

Megalonychidae is a group of sloths including the extinct Megalonyx. Megalonychids first appeared in the early Oligocene, about 35 million years ago, in southern Argentina. There is one possible find dating to the Eocene, about 40 Ma ago, on Seymour Island in Antarctica, they first reached North America by island-hopping across the Central American Seaway, about 9 million years ago, prior to formation of the Isthmus of Panama about 2.7 million years ago. Some megalonychid lineages increased in size; the first species of these were small and may have been tree-dwelling, whereas the Pliocene species were approximately half the size of the huge Late Pleistocene Megalonyx jeffersonii from the last ice age. It was believed, based on morphological comparisons, that Caribbean sloths and extant arboreal two-toed sloths were part of this family. However, molecular results based on sequences from collagen and mitochondrial DNA have shown that the former represent a basal branch of the sloth radiation, while the latter are more related to mylodontid sloths.

The megalonychids plus nothrotheriid and megatheriid sloths, together with living three-toed sloths, make up the sloth superfamily Megatheroidea. Megalonychid ground sloths became extinct in North and South America around the end of the Pleistocene. Megalonyx, which means "giant claw", is a widespread North American genus that lived past the close of the last glaciation, when so many large mammals died out. Remains have been found as far north as the Yukon. Ongoing excavations at Tarkio Valley in southwest Iowa may reveal something of the familial life of Megalonyx. An adult was found in direct association with two juveniles of different ages, suggesting that adults cared for young of different generations; the earliest known North American megalonychid, Pliometanastes protistus, lived in Florida and the southern U. S. about 9 million years ago, is believed to have been the predecessor of Megalonyx. Several species of Megalonyx have been named. A broader perspective on the group, accounting for age, sex and geographic differences, indicates that only three species are valid in the late Pliocene and Pleistocene of North America.

Although work by McDonald lists five species. Jefferson's ground sloth has a special place in modern paleontology, for Thomas Jefferson's letter on Megalonyx, read before the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, in August 1796, marked the beginning of vertebrate paleontology in North America; when Lewis and Clark set out, Jefferson instructed Meriwether Lewis to keep an eye out for ground sloths. He was hoping. Megalonyx jeffersonii was named after Thomas Jefferson. Family Megalonychidae Gervais 1855 Brandoni, Diego. 2014. A new genus of Megalonychidae from the Late Miocene of Argentina. Revista Brasileira de Paleontologia 17. 33–42. Accessed 2018-10-08. Brandoni, Diego. 2011. The Megalonychidae from the late Miocene of Entre Ríos Province, with remarks on their systematics and biogeography. Geobios 44. 33–44. Accessed 2018-10-08. Brandoni, Diego. 2008. Nuevos materiales. Temas de la Biodiversidad del Litoral 17. 11–20. Accessed 2018-10-08. Smithsonian National Zoological Park: At the Zoo - Slow and Steady Sloths