Word: skulls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...waiting to see a popular sports event. What they were about to witness, though, was a drastic head transplant involving some 150 million-year-old bones. More than a century after the fossilized skeleton of a 65-ft.-long Brontosaurus was discovered, the Yale museum was replacing the skull of its prize exhibit, long a model for dinosaur displays the world over. Bronto, it appears, had been topped all these years with the wrong head...
Paleontologists, of course, tend to relish arguing about bones as much as digging them up. But after much debate, most now agree that a Brontosaurus head should not be the familiar, friendly snub-nosed skull of children's books and TV's Flintstones, but rather a much more elongated, toothy and reptilian-looking skull. Yale's correction, to be sure, is a little tardy. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago have already changed their Brontosaurus heads. What makes the Peabody's fossil surgery so interesting is that the original foul...
...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...
...Skull volume and brain weight provided much of the data for intelligence determining scientists in the 1800s. Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851 having collected more than 1000 skulls, tried to prove that a ranking of races could be established objectively by head size. By measuring the volume, which he assumed was directly correlated to intelligence, he hoped to show that Caucasian naturally should be the brightest of all races. He succeeded in his era; however, as Gould clearly demonstrates, Morton used his preconceived notions about race like any high school lab student, using only the data that fitted...
...organized a traveling cram course in the new science of politics, and its first three-day stop is Des Moines, chosen for its central geographic location. To show they mean business, the Dems have rather pretentiously called their course a National Training Academy. It is mostly a mix of skull sessions and pep talks in the garish, maroon-walled ballroom of the Hotel Savery. The subsidized tuition is a modest $95, described by Party Political Director Ann Lewis as "low enough to attract, but high enough to require serious commitment. Lewis is delighted that 240 "students," a third of them...