Word: headlessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Marsh uncovered Bronto's remains in a quarry in Como Bluff, Wyo. The bones were headless, as all Brontosaurus skeletons ever found have been, because of fragile connections between head and neck. Marsh did what paleontologists often do when they are missing pieces in a fossil puzzle: he capped the reassembled beast with skull fragments found elsewhere/Unfortunately, they came from another long-necked dinosaur called Camarasaurus. At least partly because of Marsh's prestige, his flat-nosed monster became the model for other museums as well as Brontosaurus representations in books, comic strips, even advertisements...
Many scientists, however, were suspicious of Marsh's Brontosaurus. As far back as 1909 a Carnegie expedition found two headless Brontosaurus skeletons in Utah with an elongated skull lying a few feet away. But by the time the bones had arrived back East, a smaller skull was found mixed with the larger dinosaur skeletons, making an improbable Mutt-and-Jeff match, so the discovery was ignored...
There may be more to it than that. Perhaps folk tales are so enduring because now, as in the days of outlaw heroes and headless horsemen, legends endow life with the mystery, awe and romance that make it endurable. Or perhaps folk tales, old and new, urban and rural, are so full of life themselves that they will not lie still in their graves. Consider the modern classic about the woman in Ohio (or was it Oregon? or Maine?) who is doing the laundry in her basement when she impulsively decides to remove her soiled dress...
...After Rodin, one of the recent pastel drawings of a nude woman sprawled on her back, rosy, firm and decapitated. To what does this repugnant, though not very gory, piece of sadism owe its title? On the face of it, to Rodin's fondness for making fragmentary figures, headless torsos, isolated arms or legs. But then one is reminded that this, in Rodin's own day, was ceaselessly guyed by satirists as literal mutilation; so much so that during the Turkish atrocities in Armenia, one French cartoonist drew some observers in front of a hut festooned with severed...
...discovered, near the farmer's field, the imposing Tell Mardikh with telltale pottery shards strewn across its surface. The dig began in 1964. What was found raised more questions, but no sensational finds-till four years later. Then, on a scorching day, workers uncovered a 2nd millennium headless basalt statue of a man wearing a robe inscribed with the first cuneiform signs found on the site. In the 26 columns of writing one electrifying word stood...