Word: skeletonic
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...nightfall on Macumba Landing. Wild cries of birds and the trumpeting of elephants come from the nearby bush. A sign warns of a deadly piranha and frequent native attacks. From a downed Cessna lying wrecked in the tropical greenery come eerie blinks of emergency lights, revealing the mock skeleton of a pilot. Adventurers gather, some wearing the suits of corporate strivers, others in guerrilla battle dress or the Panama hats of dissolute plantation owners. But as waiters serve frosty pastel drinks, yam chips and shrimp fritters, it is obvious this is no jungle clearing, no stage set for The Emperor...
...blanket of smog. Near the airport, concrete walls are covered with political cartoons, some depicting America as the "Great Satan" and others attacking Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. One drawing shows Saddam's face peering out of a pot surrounded by hand grenades, and another depicts the U.S. as a skeleton clutching bombs in its hands...
Today the Court cuts the heart out of two of the most important and inseparable safeguards the Bill of Rights offers a criminal defendant: the right to submit his case to a jury, and the right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt . . . The skeleton of these safeguards remains, but the Court strips them of life and of meaning . . . The Court asserts that when a jury votes nine to three for conviction, the doubts of the three do not impeach the verdict of the nine. ((But)) we know what has happened: the prosecutor has tried and failed to persuade those jurors...
...that lived in eastern and southern Africa between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago, stood about the same height and had the same body build as Homo erectus, its successor. Homo habilis (literally, handy man) was the first human ancestor to make stone tools. The new Olduvai Gorge skeleton, however, suggests that Homo habilis was much smaller and more apelike than previously thought. If that is the case, says Johanson, the modern body type probably did not evolve until Homo erectus emerged some 1.6 million years ago. Moreover, the evolutionary changes leading to Homo erectus, which preceded modern...
...proportions of the skeleton were also a surprise to the scientists. The upper arm bone is about 95% as long as the thigh bone, indicating that the arms dangled to the knees, much as they do in apes. Thus Homo habilis closely resembled Australopithecus afarensis, of which the best-known example is the famed "Lucy" skeleton, which was discovered by Johanson in 1974. Lucy's ratio is 85%; in modern humans, the figure is about...