London: Weeks 2 & 3

The second and third weeks in London just seemed to fly by. Most of my time at the museum was spent studying modern skulls from Africa and Australia, which, while incredibly important to my project, just aren't as interesting as fossils. On my last two days I raided the Museum's cast room and found a some gems: a Mario Chech reconstruction of Skhul 4, two really high quality casts of Kow Swamp 5 and 15, and a plaster reconstruction of the full Shanidar 4 face, to name a few. During the second week, Joel Irish, A professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was in town looking at the same West African skulls as me. As he was going through some of the inventory books looking for information on some Nigerian skulls, he found the original entry logs for the Piltdown remains, entered in, fragment by fragment, as the type fossils for Eoanthropus dawsoni. If you don't know about the Piltdown man scandal, do yourself a favor and google it.

Definitely the highlight of the non-research experiences during the last two weeks in London was touring Westminster Abbey, which turned out to be well worth the exorbitant (student price) entry fee, if for no other reason, because my boy Chuck D is buried there (along with a LOT of other people). There was a really good audio guide presented by Jeremy Irons, who seems to have a global monopoly on the English language audio guide market (with the exception of ancient Egyptian exhibits, Omar Sharif locked down that gig years ago). Other great experiences during the last two weeks in London included watching the sunset on Waterloo Bridge, having a pint at the Lyceum Tavern, and eating fish and chips at St. Pancras Station.