Taung Child

The endocast of the Taung child was larger than a fully grown chimpanzee's.

It's the most important find in paleontology in Africa since the Taung child."

Taung Child had a cranial capacity of 340 cc, living mainly in a savanna habitat.

The left hand side of the endocast of the Taung child is covered in beautiful calcium carbonate crystals.

Taung child fossil discovered.

All of these traits convinced Dart that the Taung child was a bipedal human ancestor, a transitional form between ape and man.

In 1924 a skull (later named the Taung Child) was discovered by a quarry-worker in the nearby Buxton-limestone quarry.

The skull, commonly called the Taung child, was found embedded in rock at a mine near Taung, a village 400 miles southwest of Johannesburg.

The first hominin fossil discovered in Africa, the Taung Child was found near Taung in 1924.

After Raymond Dart's discovery of the Taung Child, an infant australopithecine, Broom's interest in paleoanthropology was heightened.

The Taung Child (or Taung Baby) is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus individual.

The forehead of the chimpanzee receded to form a heavy browridge and a jutting jaw; while the Taung child's forehead recedes, but leaves no browridge.

The lack of facial projection in comparison to apes was noted by Raymond Dart (including from Taung Child), a trait in common with more advanced hominines.

The Taung child's foramen magnum (a void in the cranium where the spinal cord is continuous with the brain) is located beneath the cranium, showing that the creature stood upright.

In 1936, the Sterkfontein caves yielded the first adult Australopithecine, substantially strengthening Raymond Dart's claim that the skull known as the Taung child (an Australopithecus africanus) was a human ancestor.

This conclusion was reached by noting similarities in the damage to the skull and eye sockets of the Taung Child with damage to the skulls of modern primates known to have been killed by eagles.

The find followed the 1924 discovery of the juvenile Australopithecus africanus skull, 'Taung Child', by Raymond Dart, at Taung in the North West Province of South Africa, where excavations still continue.

The scientists used computerized tomography, the technology on which brain and body scanners depend, to obtain new views of the teeth and some facial structure of one of the most famous fossils, the Taung child of South Africa.

The discovery of the Taung child's skull in South Africa in 1925 led to the classification of small-brain protohumans in the genus Australopithecus and set in motion this century's explorations of human origins in Africa.

In 1950, Bronowski was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes.