Word: skeleton
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...farmer digging a cellar near Irkutsk made a find which brought Soviet archeologists on the run. In ground which they called 30,000 years old, they found the skeleton of a young child wearing a necklace of bone beads. From the necklace depended a small plaque apparently carved from a mammoth tusk and bearing the image of three entwined snakes. Nearby were bone weapons and 20 bone images of women, perhaps goddesses. Archeologists outside Russia doubted the antiquity of the deposit, principally because even the crudest bone weapons had not come to light before the late Paleolithic period...
...skeleton was discovered some years ago by diggers from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum which had long been probing the great dinosaur graveyard in the desolate badlands near Jensen, Utah. Having sent an abundance of bones back to Pittsburgh, the Carnegie men left the skeleton partly exposed for tourists to gape at, other diggers to retrieve. In due time a party from Washington's Smithsonian Institution arrived, began busily to exhume the remains. They quickly discovered that the neck vertebrae were missing. When high & low search failed to disclose them, it was decided to remove the neck from another...
Next on the site was a group of scientists from the University of Utah. They set about disinterring the second skeleton, found that the neck was missing. Investigation revealed that the Smithsonian Institution had the neck. The harassed Utah diggers then discovered that their skeleton also lacked a tail. Investigation revealed that the tail had been encountered some yards away from the body by the original Carnegie party, had been sent back to Pittsburgh...
While all concerned pondered the fact that the skeleton was scattered like the pages of a Gutenberg Bible-the neck in Washington, the tail in Pittsburgh, the head and body in Utah-the Smithsonian made the cataclysmic discovery that its neck and the rest of its specimen were of two different species...
...Great American Novel has not yet been written. Herman Melville did several chapters of it, Walt Whitman some chapter headings, Henry James an appendectiform footnote. Mark Twain roughed out the comic bits, Theodore Dreiser made a prehistoric-skeleton outline, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway all contributed suggestions. Last week it began to look as if Thomas Wolfe might also be at work on this hypothetical volume. His first installment (Look Homeward, Angel) appeared five years ago, his second (Of Time and the River) last week. In the interval Author Wolfe had written some 2,000,000 words...