Word: skulls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ceremony begins. Constant offers up pictures of four loas, including his own. A priest takes shavings from the bone of one skull, sprinkles rum on the crowd, then swigs. He spreads rum on the floor, drinks again. He begins to foam at the mouth, spittle flying as he shakes his head. A bottle of rum is set afire. Constant dances uncomfortably. A loa takes possession of a girl, who writhes at Constant's feet: he looks embarrassed. There is more dancing, more drinking. Then Constant too is lying on the floor, in a fetal position. A girl dances around...
Neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio and three collaborators analyzed the battered 170-year-old skull of one Phineas Gage, whose cranium had been preserved as an object of medical fascination. Gage was a reliable fellow, well regarded by his workmates on the Rutland and Burlington Railroad. But on Sept. 13, 1848, while using explosives to prepare Vermont's craggy terrain for track, he suffered a hideous accident. Briefly distracted, the 25-year-old foreman triggered a premature explosion that launched a pointed iron rod, thick as a broomstick, right through his skull. The rod rocketed through his face, excising...
...live specimen of one of the creatures -- the giant muntjac -- in a menagerie owned by a Laotian military group. If they are correct, studies of the captive animal could confirm the claim made earlier this year by Vietnamese scientists and MacKinnon concerning the giant muntjac. MacKinnon analyzed a skull brought to him by Do Tuoc and Shanthini Dawson, an Indian biologist. It resembled that $ of a muntjac, also known as a barking deer, but the head and antlers were much larger and configured differently. After measuring many varieties of muntjac skulls, MacKinnon decided the new specimen must have come from...
Evidence of a third new mammal comes from the work of Vietnamese biologist Nguyen Ngoc Chinh, who went to Pu Mat, north of Vu Quang, to look for the Vu Quang ox. He returned with the skull of an animal the local hunters call quang khem, or slow-running deer, and scientists have taken to calling Chinh's deer. It is too early to say whether this is also a new species, but Arctander has so far been unable to match its DNA with that of known varieties of deer...
...miasma of death hangs over the village of Nyarubuye, overpowering the scent of the surrounding eucalyptus trees. Their leaves, rustling in the wind, are all that moves. In the cool of the parish church, a body lies between the rough wooden pews, its skull split from crown to forehead by a machete blade. Outside, a mother and child, caught from behind by screaming Hutu militia, lie face down in the flowers, locked in a pitiful final embrace. Farther away, in a low mission building, 400 more bodies are piled on one another, the rooms thick with the stench of rotting...