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Craniodental Variation Among the Great Apes
Akiko Uchida
Harvard University Press, 1996
Akiko Uchida’s detailed data descriptions and comprehensive analysis of living ape specimens from true biological populations make a significant contribution to understanding the systematics of living hominoids and interpreting the hominoid fossil record.
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The Embryogenesis of the Human Skull
An Anatomic and Radiographic Atlas
Robert Shapiro and Franklin Robinson
Harvard University Press, 1980

Rapidly developing diagnostic and therapeutic methods involving direct contact with the human fetus—fetoscopy, fetal surgery, ultrasonic scanning— demand a precise knowledge of normal structural development during gestation. Toward achieving that goal of precision, Drs. Robert Shapiro and Franklin Robinson have created an atlas described by Richard L. Sidman as “a solid piece of research, executed with considerable esthetic as well as scholarly finesse, and [which] will serve as the definitive study on an important aspect of human fetal development.”

The authors have documented the early development of the human skull in terms of gross size, shape, and the behavior of the individual bones com posing the skull with reference to their ossification centers, ossification rates, and relationships. The data are presented in very high quality photographs and radiographs of the dried skull in several relevant orientations, low magnification color photomicrographs of well sectioned and stained specimens, and color photographs of an unusually fine series of transilluminated skulls prepared by the Spalteholz method. Line drawings are also presented to assist in interpretation.

The atlas is organized according to gestational age, and a tabular summary is given of the 63 specimens ranging in age from ten to forty fetal weeks.

This will be the basic normative standard reference for studies on develop mental skeletal disorders of the head and neck; it will be useful as well in the study of developmental brain diseases. Radiologists engaged in visualizing the fetus and diagnosing fetal diseases in situ by ultrasound, computerized tomography, and other methods will find this an invaluable tool.

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The Skull Collectors
Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead
Ann Fabian
University of Chicago Press, 2010

When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.

With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.


Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.

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Skull in the Ashes
Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America
Peter Kaufman
University of Iowa Press, 2013
On a February night in 1897, the general store in Walford, Iowa, burned down. The next morning, townspeople discovered a charred corpse in the ashes. Everyone knew that the store’s owner, Frank Novak, had been sleeping in the store as a safeguard against burglars. Now all that remained were a few of his personal items scattered under the body.
At first, it seemed to be a tragic accident mitigated just a bit by Novak’s foresight in buying generous life insurance policies to provide for his family. But soon an investigation by the ambitious new county attorney, M. J. Tobin, turned up evidence suggesting that the dead man might actually be Edward Murray, a hard-drinking local laborer. Relying upon newly developed forensic techniques, Tobin gradually built a case implicating Novak in Murray’s murder. But all he had was circumstantial evidence, and up to that time few murder convictions had been won on that basis in the United States.
Others besides Tobin were interested in the case, including several companies that had sold Novak life insurance policies. One agency hired detectives to track down every clue regarding the suspect’s whereabouts. Newspapers across the country ran sensational headlines with melodramatic coverage of the manhunt. Veteran detective Red Perrin’s determined trek over icy mountain paths and dangerous river rapids to the raw Yukon Territory town of Dawson City, which was booming with prospectors as the Klondike gold rush began, made for especially good copy.
Skull in the Ashes traces the actions of Novak, Tobin, and Perrin, showing how the Walford fire played a pivotal role in each man’s life. Along the way, author Peter Kaufman gives readers a fascinating glimpse into forensics, detective work, trial strategies, and prison life at the close of the nineteenth century. As much as it is a chilling tale of a cold-blooded murder and its aftermath, this is also the story of three ambitious young men and their struggle to succeed in a rapidly modernizing world.
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The Skull, Volume 1
Development
Edited by James Hanken and Brian K. Hall
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this authoritative three-volume reference work, leading researchers bring together current work to provide a comprehensive analysis of the comparative morphology, development, evolution, and functional biology of the skull.
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The Skull, Volume 2
Patterns of Structural and Systematic Diversity
Edited by James Hanken and Brian K. Hall
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this authoritative three-volume reference work, leading researchers bring together current work to provide a comprehensive analysis of the comparative morphology, development, evolution, and functional biology of the skull.
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The Skull, Volume 3
Functional and Evolutionary Mechanisms
Edited by James Hanken and Brian K. Hall
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this authoritative three-volume reference work, leading researchers bring together current work to provide a comprehensive analysis of the comparative morphology, development, evolution, and functional biology of the skull.
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