The Evolution Store

Believe it or not, I once had a cow-orker say to me, "You know this kind of stuff, where can I rent or buy a human skeleton?" She was right, upon reflection I did know. When we called, the shop asked, "Does it have to be real or will a teaching replica suffice? They're a lot cheaper."

Boing-Boing's Cory Doctorow links today to a Spring St. store that goes one further, it sells reproductions of the fossil remains of early hominids in both teaching quality and museum quality. Want to contemplate Lucy in your own home? How about gazing deep into the eye-sockets of that old fraud, the Piltdown man? Now you can.

COMMENTS
Jeff Wong's picture

What I find rather shocking is how little of the Lucy skull is extant and that so much interpolation or guessing had to be made to do the reconstruction. This rivals the miracles of the weekly handiwork of the CSI team.

wes Phillips's picture

True, but some of the work of forensic sculptors is amazing. I've read about/seen illustrations of cases where those sculptors can take a skull fragment and reconstruct faces that allow for positive identification of remains. I find that more amazing than cases where psychics were used, because I pretend I understand the mechanism of one, whereas I have a hard time even pretending with the other.

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