THE skull of the lost pilot Amelia Earhart may have been found more than 80 years after she mysteriously vanished.
Archaeologists say they found the doomed explorer's remains on a remote Pacific island near where she's presumed to have crash-landed in 1937.
Amelia vanished alongside navigator Fred Noonan in July 1937 as she sought to take the crown as the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
The pair of Americans had taken off from Papa New Guinea and were headed for nearby Howland Island when their radio went dark, spawning decades of searches and speculation.
Based on their flight path, it's believed Amelia and Fred crashed off an uninhabited atoll called Nikumaroro. They may have survived there for days before dying of thirst or heat exposure.
Now a National Geographic expedition to find out what happened has turfed up skull fragments that experts say may have belonged to Amelia.
Led by Robert Ballard, the deep-sea explorer who famously found the wrecked Titanic, the group say the bones were housed in a museum on the Pacific island of Tarawa.
They're believed to have come from a discovery on Nikumaroro in 1940.
That year, a partial human skeleton believed to be Amelia's was reportedly found by British colonists on the atoll.
The bones – only 13 in total – were sent to Fiji for examination and subsequently lost.
Nat Geo Society archaeologist Fredrik Hierbert claims he tracked down the long lost bones and has sent them for DNA testing.
The results are expected in a couple months.
Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle said the skull, which experts are reconstructing for testing, belonged to an adult female.
"We don’t know if it’s her or not but all lines of evidence point to the 1940 bones being in this museum," she told Nat Geo.
If tests prove the bones belonged to Amelia, the find will mark a huge step in Ballard's quest to solve the mystery.
Ballard, 77, confirmed the team will return to the island should the tests come back positive.
The retired US Navy officer – who is famous for finding high-profile wrecks – is primarily attempting to find Amelia's plane: A twin-engine Lockheed Vega 5B.
His team has used remotely operated underwater vehicles to search the deep ocean around Nikumaroro, which is part of the Phoenix Islands.
The life and times of Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart was a ground-breaking pilot born in July 1897.
The pioneer of the skies made her first transatlantic fight in 1929 with Wilmer Stultz as the pilot. Her duties included keeping the flight log.
Earhart quickly became something of a celebrity and the US papers dubbed her “Queen of the Air”.
Her fame reached new heights in 1932 when she became the first female pilot to make the transatlantic crossing, setting off from Newfoundland and landing in Culmore, Northern Ireland, 14 hours 56 minutes later.
For her efforts she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Earhart also set a number of other records, most notably becoming the first pilot to fly solo from Honolulu in Hawaii to California in 1935.
She first tried to fly around the world on March 17, 1937 but due to technical problems the attempt had to be abandoned.
After raising more funds, she set off again, this time from Miami on June 1 and arrived at Lae, New Guinea on June 29.
Earhart took off once more the next day but mysteriously vanished, and was never seen again.
Her last known position was near the Nukumanu islands, around 800 miles into the flight.
An archaeological team has investigated a potential Earhart campsite with search dogs and DNA sampling.
Nat Geo will air a two-hour special on October 20.
Amelia became famous in the 1930s for breaking a number of aviation records, including becoming the first female pilot to make the transatlantic crossing in 1932.
She was 40 years old when she disappeared, and the riddle of exactly what happened to her has never been solved.
Many believe her aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, but this had been disputed.
After the crash, it's possible she survived on an uninhabited Pacific Island for months before finally perishing.
Last week, members of the Nat Geo team suggested Amelia's corpse had not yet been found because giant crabs may have eaten it.
Coconut crabs – of which there are thousands on Nikumaroro – are the world's largest crustaceans, and are known to eat birds and rodents, as well as the decaying flesh of other animals.
Ballard's hunt for Amelia's plane follows his successful missions to find several famous ships, including the sunk World War 2 vessel the USS Yorktown and President John F. Kennedy's patrol boat lost in the Solomon Sea.
His search for the "unsinkable" British passenger liner the Titanic – which famously sank in 1912 – was used as a cover for a US Navy mission to find lost nuclear submarines.
He eventually found the Titanic, and had four days left over to film the wreckage – because the ship was due to be rented out by someone else.
The archaeologist recalled being immediately excited by the find, but the mood quickly turned sombre.
"We realised we were dancing on someone's grave, and we were embarrassed," he said.
"The mood, it was like someone took a wall switch and went click. We became sober, calm, respectful, and we made a promise to never take anything from that ship, and to treat it with great respect."
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A 500-year-old ship was found in near-perfect condition at the bottom of the icy Baltic Sea earlier this week.
These haunting "bog bodies" with their throats slit from ear to ear and nooses around their necks were found perfectly preserved after thousands of years.
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