Word: skulled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...working-class orphan, Luke McNamara (Jackson) hopes to join the secret society known as the Skulls (based on the real life secret society, Skull and Bones, at Yale) as a way to make influential connections that might allow him to attend law school. Along the way, as he investigates the mysterious death of his roommate, he uncovers the corruption and amorality of an organization concerned solely with money and power...
Back in the 1930s, my predecessor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Harry Shapiro, while sensibly warning of the "dangers of prophecy," wondered what humans might become a half-million years hence. His predictions included such features as a rounder skull, a smoothing of the area above the brows, a reduction in the size and number of teeth, and a shrinking of the face in general. Shapiro also predicted that we would get taller and even balder and that body hair would continue to diminish...
Then they start fiddling with it--turning on old pseudogenes; knocking out the genes for feathers and putting back in the genes for scaly skin; tweaking the genes for the skull so that teeth appear instead of a beak; shrinking the wings, keel and wishbone (ostrich genes would be helpful here); massively increasing size and sturdiness of the body; and so on. Pretty soon they have the recipe for a big, featherless, wingless, toothy-jawed monster that looks a little like a cross between a dodo and a tiger...
...came a sound track--history and nature observations by Emett and Barbara Burnett, Louisiana guides for Rails and Trails, a joint service of Amtrak and the National Parks Service. There was show-and-tell in the lounge car too, where Barbara invited us to examine native artifacts--a nutria skull and otter, coyote and beaver pelts...
...Eosimias is probably closer to the tarsiers, which split off earlier from the monkey-to-human branch. "So far, we don't have the smoking gun," argues anthropologist Eric Delson of the City University of New York's Lehman College. He would be convinced, he says, by a full skull showing fused eye sockets and forehead. (By contrast, lemurs have gaps in both places...