Taung child 'safe'

By Shaun Smillie

It was once forgotten in a taxi, even mistaken for a murdered baby, and for a long time had a simple wooden box as a home.

But on Thursday, the Taung child, one of South Africa's most famous fossils, was presented with a new storage box, designed and built by members of the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, France.

At an informal ceremony, the museum's Professor Francis Duranthon presented the new box to Bernhard Zipfel in the Phillip Tobias laboratory at the Wits Medical School.

Zipfel is the curator of the Wits University fossil collections at the Institute of Human Evolution.

The new storage case is lined with a special inert foam material, cut with an electrical cutter so that each of the three pieces of the skull fit exactly.

"This is in keeping with international standards of curation, and it is far better than wood," explained Duranthon. The box is also enclosed in transparent plastic.

But with the modern storage case comes a new era and the end of a piece of history.

For at least half a century, the Taung skull was kept in that wooden box, wrapped in individual pieces of plastic.

No one knows for sure the exact age of the box, and there is the possibility that it is older and might have carried the skull when it was nearly lost for good during a taxi ride across London.

This is a story that Tobias, honorary research fellow at the School of Anatomical Sciences, knows well.

It was in 1929, and the discoverer of the Taung skull, Raymond Dart, wanted to take the fossil to London to have some casts made. He had to return to South Africa before he could do so, and it was left to his wife to bring the skull home. On her final night in London, Mrs Dart caught a taxi back to her hotel and left the box containing the skull on the back seat.

"She had just started undressing, when she had a brain storm and almost fainted. Where was the box?" Tobias recalls. The police were alerted, but it was a horrified taxi driver who found it first.

"The taxi driver had two or three more customers, and any one of them might have walked off with it. It was found in the back seat of the taxi. The driver looked into the box, and there he thought was the head of a baby. My God, we have a case of infanticide," Tobias recounted.

The taxi driver reported it to the police, and by morning, Mrs Dart had the skull.

Tobias is not sure it was the same box.

Since the London adventure, the Taung child has left South Africa on only two occasions.

Tobias is happy with the fossil's "new accommodation".

"The Taung child existed 2 million years ago, and now it will be safe for another 2 million years," he laughed.

But for the short term, the skull will remain in its old wooden box. The French need to make a few adjustments to the new storage case before occupation.