NEW YORK - Since the remains of a wooden ship were unearthed at the World Trade Center construction site in mid-July, a horde of researchers has been putting the vessel under the microscope - sometimes literally - in a quest to piece together the true story of the resurrected ship, and save it from decay.

On Thursday, three of the experts most intimately involved with the 18th-century mystery ship - Michael Pappalardo, an archeologist, Norman Brouwer, a maritime historian, and Nichole Doub, a conservator - convened on a tiny stage here at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) in front of a packed house, to discuss what science and history detectives have uncovered about the ship so far.

The 32-foot- (9.7 meters) long timber structure is the back end and bottom quarter of what researchers believe was a two-masted trade vessel, a workhorse of its day. The area where it was found was part of the Hudson River in the late 18th century, and it's not clear if the ship sank, or if it was stuck in the river bottom on purpose to act as fill to make more "land" for Manhattan....