Word: boisei
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...drove back to camp to tell my father Louis. As he remembered it, she rushed in crying, "I've got him! I've got him! I've got him!" What my mother Mary had discovered were the fragments of a fossil skull that was later to be named Zinjanthropus boisei. It was to rivet world attention on the Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and on the work of my parents...
...australopithecines were surely one of evolution's better experiments. But nature is an inveterate tinkerer, even with successful species. Between 3 million and 1.9 million years B.P., several variations on the Australopithecus theme popped up in eastern and southern Africa, including A. africanus, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus and A. boisei. (Just to complicate matters, the last three are assigned by some experts to an entirely different genus, Paranthropus...
...COMMENT] May be an ancestor of A. boisei and A. robustus. The fossil above, found by Richard Leakey's team, is called the Black Skull...
...boisei...
...next evolutionary generation. Between 3 million and 2 million years B.P., a healthy handful of descendants sprang from the A. afarensis line, upright primates that were similar to Lucy in overall body design but different in the details of bone structure. Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, Paranthropus boisei -- all flourished in Africa. But in the evolutionary elimination tournament, the two Paranthropus species eventually lost out. Only A. africanus, most scientists believe, survived to give rise to the next character in the human drama...