“Taung was the opposite,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood. The hole in its skull for the spinal cord was located squarely at the bottom, suggesting a creature who had walked uprigh ...

He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material ... It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery site and its young age. Dart is portrayed as prescient in most ...

The juvenile skull was dubbed the Taung Child by Raymond Dart, an anatomist at the University of the Witwatersrand, who first described it. In 1924 Dart could not say exactly how old it was ...

The study prompted Berger to go back and re-examine the Taung skull. "I picked up this little face, and I almost dropped it," he said Thursday. There was a tiny hole and jagged tears at the base ...

which became known as the Taung child skull. The paper’s author, an Australian-born anatomist called Raymond Dart, argued that the fossil was a new species of hominin called Australopithecus ...

A replica of the Laetoli footprints discovered in Laetoli, Tanzania; The original footprints were dated to 3.6 million years ago. | Momotarou2012, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 In the last ...

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says Australopithecus, and the Taung skull specifically, combined three things in a way that no scientists had predicted.

Dart was examining a set of fossils that had been unearthed by miners near the town of Taung in South Africa when he found the skull of a “missing link” between ancient apes and humans.

It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery ... They were looking outside Africa for human origins and argued that the skull more likely belonged to a non-human primate.