Amelia Earhart Died on Nikumaroro Island, Famous for It's Huge Coconut Crabs. Discovery Channel Reports Sexton Box Found

On Nikumaroro Island, home to the Coconut Crabs, a sexton box was found was found whose serial numbers were consistent with the type known to be carried by Amelia Earhart's navigator, Fred Noonan.

Partial skeletal bones were found in an earlier expedition in 1940. The coconut crabs that inhabit the island carried the remainder away. The bones found in the 1940 British exhibition have since lost.

According to the Discovery Channel, it is believed Amelia Earhart was stranded on Nikumaroro Island - reports the researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR.) This theory is developed from the items found around an old campsite on Nikumaroro Island which include women's compact and cosmetic items from Amelia's era.

Other items besides the cosmetics and a sexton were a women's shoe also from that time frame and a bottle.

Nikumaroro Island could have possibly been Amelia Earhart's final home if all of these findings are indeed hers.

Nikumaroro Island is some 300 miles southeast of Earhart's target destination, Howland Island and believed by the researchers to be her final home.

The tall and slender Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937 while flying over the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to make a world's record of flying around the world at the equator.

Richard Gillespie, the executive director of TIGHAR's and author of the book "Finding Amelia," has been searching Nikumaroro Island along with his crew for evidence of Earhart.

Their feelings are that they have enough evidence to say that Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made an emergency landing on Nikumaroro Island's flat coral reef. They believed they were stranded there and lived the rest of their lives on this island.

British Colonial Service officer Gerald Gallagher recovered a partial skeleton of a castaway on Nikumaroro in 1940. Gillespie said that those bones have since been lost. He also said the reason for the partial skeleton is due to the giant coconut crabs that carried many of the bones away.

Gallagher's archival record suggests that the bones were found in a remote area of the island, and they were in an area that was unlikely to have been seen during an aerial search.