Skeletons

The Grateful Dead bought eight, Knotts Berry Farm ordered several. Doctors, medical schools, nursing schools, universities, research labs, high schools, anatomists, attorneys, physical therapists, athletic trainers and the entertainment industry buy them. All have purchased authentic plastic reproductions of life-sized human skeletons from Medical Plastics Laboratory, a life-sized plastic human skeleton factory, in existence 39 years in this Texas town 110 miles south of Ft. Worth.

She is 96 years old, all bones and little skin. Her ribs are split and rotted in places and stained by rust. Nonetheless, she is a slightly fearsome presence, commanding her surroundings like a T. rex in a natural history museum. When the Shawnee first hit the water in 1916, she was a striking beauty - a 72-foot sailboat made of old-growth oak and Douglas fir, African mahogany, naturally curved hackmatack and gleaming teak. Her hull had the seductive curve of a wineglass.

The middle-aged woman and the young boy, perhaps her son or simply another member of her tribe, were out hunting on the African plains or maybe looking for water in the midst of a drought when they fell into a sinkhole, dying almost instantly. Shortly thereafter, a monsoon or a flood washed them into a deeper basin, where they were covered with mud and rapidly fossilized. In 2008, nearly 2 million years later, another boy, 9-year-old Matthew Berger, discovered part of their skeletons outside the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa, a find that experts have dubbed one of the most important of recent times.

The curator of the Catalina Island Museum opened the door to a musty backroom a few weeks ago hoping to find material for an upcoming exhibit on the World War II era. Closing the door behind him, he trudged down a narrow aisle lined with storage boxes and bins filled with gray photocopies of old letters, civic records, celebrity kitsch -- and dust. "No luck," curator John Boraggina muttered. But as he made his way to a back corner, he noticed another row of boxes. He carried the largest to a table, blew off the dust and lifted the lid. Inside were leather-bound journals and yellowing photographs showing freshly unearthed skeletons lying on their backs or sides, or curled as if in sleep.

The skeletal remains of a person who may have been shot in the head were found Tuesday in an open field in the Saugus area, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The bones were found about 1:45 p.m. in a field near Redview Drive and Golden Triangle Road, Deputy Hal Grant said. Deputies said they did not know yet if the skeleton was that of a man or woman and had no idea how long the body had been there.

A landscaper working in the courtyard of an abandoned mid-city hotel unearthed the skeletal remains of a person wrapped in a blanket, authorities said Sunday. The worker was turning over soil with a pick at 11:30 a.m. Saturday when he struck an orange blanket buried in a planter box of the building at 1250 S. Western Ave., said Officer Frank Ramirez of the Los Angeles Police Department's Wilshire Division. "He tugged hard on the blanket and a skull popped out," Ramirez said.

It's not unusual in Los Angeles for construction crews to find buried remains, but it is surprising to find a cemetery. Under a half-acre lot of dirt and mud being transformed into a garden and public space for a cultural center celebrating the Mexican American heritage of Los Angeles, construction workers and scientists have found bodies buried in the first cemetery of Los Angeles ? bodies believed to have been removed and reinterred elsewhere in the 1800s. Since late October, the fragile bones of dozens of Los Angeles settlers have been discovered under what will be the outdoor space of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes downtown near Olvera Street.

The skeletons of 30 medieval monks have been uncovered during building work to extend London's underground rail system, archeologists said Friday. The graves were found on the site of an ancient monastery, St Mary's Abbey. All contained male adults, except for one 18-month-old baby. "The baby was quite a surprise, but we will never know why it was buried with the monks," said Pat Wilkinson, an archeologist. It has not yet been decided if the bones will be reburied or put in a museum.

The auctioneer gazed out at the audience, knowing this was the moment they'd waited for. Next up, he said, was lot No. 23 -- a "wonderful, exceptional, 66-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Samson." He gestured to the ferocious-looking skull sitting on a stand to his left. "There she is," he said. The people who had gathered in the elegant gallery at the Venetian hotel gasped. Samson is one of the three most complete T. rex specimens ever discovered, possessing the most intact skull in existence.

Scientists have determined that two skeletons unearthed in a Siberian city are those of murdered Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, solving a 74-year-old mystery, a researcher said Monday. The remains of the czar and czarina were among nine skeletons dug up last summer from a pit in Yekaterinburg, said researcher Alexander Blokhin. A third skeleton was identified as that of the Romanov family doctor, Sergei Botkin, he said.

Reporting from Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia Griddle-hot deserts, time-forsaken ghost towns, prismatic canyons and endless ribbons of lonely highway: There's nothing quite like a road trip across the Southwest to get the gasoline pumping in an American's wanderlust-ful heart. But what's perfect for America's bottom-left corner works even better here in Africa's. Welcome to Namibia, on Africa's western coast between South Africa and Angola, where the deserts are hotter, the roads are emptier and America - at least when Brangelina aren't visiting - couldn't be farther away.

Without Nikita Patel and the other creature technical directors, or TDs, at Industrial Light & Magic, Rango the chameleon, who stars in the title role of Paramount's new film from director Gore Verbinski, would lack one of the key traits of any good animated character: the ability to move. "Our department basically works on the simulations and the rigging of the characters," she said. "Rigging is putting a skeleton inside the model so that the animators can move it around. And if we want to see more realism out of it, the creature TDs will go in and add some simulation to the muscles and the flesh to make it jiggle or look more real.

It's 4 a.m., and an IT geek with scruffy blond hair called Bunny is sipping beer and swallowing chunks of bread dipped in cheese fondue. Other people are passing around joints, or just chilling ? literally. The dank room is not that cold, but wading through stone corridors flooded with gray water has left their clothes soaked. That's what happens when you have a middle-of-the-night picnic 65 feet under the streets of Paris. This night, about a dozen people have found their way here through a maze of tunnels, caverns and half-flooded passageways, stepping over a few skeletons and piles of ruins, some dating to the time when the Romans called the city Lutetia.

It's not unusual in Los Angeles for construction crews to find buried remains, but it is surprising to find a cemetery. Under a half-acre lot of dirt and mud being transformed into a garden and public space for a cultural center celebrating the Mexican American heritage of Los Angeles, construction workers and scientists have found bodies buried in the first cemetery of Los Angeles ? bodies believed to have been removed and reinterred elsewhere in the 1800s. Since late October, the fragile bones of dozens of Los Angeles settlers have been discovered under what will be the outdoor space of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes downtown near Olvera Street.

Los Angeles County sheriff's and coroner's officials have agreed to launch an inquiry into the handling of Mitrice Richardson's remains, which a coroner's official said were removed from a ravine without his department's permission. Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said in an interview that he was "very clear" in telling sheriff's officials that they should not to move Richardson's remains until coroner's investigators had arrived on the scene or until clearance had been granted.

A Los Angeles County coroner's official criticized sheriff's deputies for removing the remains of Mitrice Richardson from a rugged ravine without permission, saying the deputies' actions may have violated the law and undermined the thoroughness of the coroner's investigation. Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said he was "very clear" with sheriff's officials and could not think of another case in which a police agency had moved entire skeletal remains without coroner's approval.

The skeletal remains of at least 100 people were found at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The corpses were between 2 and 3 years old and may have come from a local cemetery, local health authorities said. Police said they received a tip-off that a dump truck of a private company contracted by the municipality had dropped the bodies there. Bones were left in labeled black plastic bags discovered by people sifting through garbage at a dumpsite about 19 miles from Rio de Janeiro.

Divers investigating underwater caves near the Caribbean coast of Mexico have discovered what appears to be one of the oldest human skeletons in the Americas, archeologists said this week. A team from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History discovered at least three skeletons in caves off the Yucatan Peninsula in 2001 and 2002.

The San Diego Zoo has about 4,000 animals — all carefully catalogued. For at least a few more days, it will have one more that officials didn't even know existed until Thursday, when an excavating machine digging a hole for a storm-water runoff tank made a distinctive scraping sound. Gino Calvano, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, acting as a fossil monitor on the project, heard the sound and came running. He looked at the machine operator.

The middle-aged woman and the young boy, perhaps her son or simply another member of her tribe, were out hunting on the African plains or maybe looking for water in the midst of a drought when they fell into a sinkhole, dying almost instantly. Shortly thereafter, a monsoon or a flood washed them into a deeper basin, where they were covered with mud and rapidly fossilized. In 2008, nearly 2 million years later, another boy, 9-year-old Matthew Berger, discovered part of their skeletons outside the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa, a find that experts have dubbed one of the most important of recent times.