Word: skulling
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Inevitably, the antidrug crusade is producing some ludicrous results. A best-selling toy in the U.S. is Madballs, a set of eight rubber balls adorned with gross names and faces. One of the more grotesque Madballs, depicting a creature whose skull has been split wide open, was called Crack Head. Fearful that this charming toy might be accused of glorifying drug use, the toymakers last month changed the name to Bash Brain...
They stand outside in the haze, on the balding knoll where their house rests. The trees list permanently to the north, made arthritic by the wind. Figures in a Wyeth landscape -- except for the yardarm, with flourishing skull and crossbones, that towers wickedly behind the house. In a moment the artist is off on another ramble, toward a new attic or field or relationship or controversy. More than likely, he will wander back to Betsy. She calls Wyeth "you old pirate"; he must know she is the anchor...
...that's a big monkey, thought Paleontologist Alan Walker as he plucked the skull fragment from a gully west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. But that was no monkey. The bone belonged to a 2.5 million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue...
Last summer Walker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, was looking for baboon fossils, when he spotted the skull fragment. By studying volcanic ash and other bones nearby, his colleagues determined the skull's age. Its pedigree was trickier. It has the structure of a late australopithecine: wide palate, huge rear molars, enormous cheekbones and a pronounced crest of bone running along the top of the skull. But other features -- a for- ward-thrusting muzzle, an orangutan-size brain and an apelike jaw structure -- are primitive. Leakey believes this mosaic suggests, as he has argued for years...
...This skull is the most exciting find since Lucy," says Eric Delson, an anthropologist at the City University of New York's Lehman College. "Relationships among australopithecines will need to be somewhat revised." That will not surprise anthropologists. Although the current diagram of humanity's family tree is based on thousands of specimens, most of them are frustratingly incomplete. Walker's fossil may force a revision in the textbooks, but it is not likely to be the last...