Biology Reference
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were stored, the name and e-mail address of the collection's curator,
the identification number of the key microcephalic specimen, the four
absolute measurements of that specimen that were used to calculate the
six ratios, and which, if any, of Weber's published images of microce-
phalic endocasts were from that key specimen.
Two and a half months later, the editor at
Science
provided us with the
answers he had received from Germany: The endocasts were all in the
collection in Tübingen, Germany; the curator was Dr. Czarnetzki; the
identification number of the key endocast was “osut4”; and none of the
images in their comment were of this specimen. More to the point, the
four absolute measurements for the key endocast were: length = 111.75
mm; breadth = 95.02 mm; height = 76.15 mm; and frontal breadth = 71.25
mm. When we did the arithmetic, these measurements turned out to
be 93 percent, 92 percent, 94 percent, and 92 percent of the comparable
measurements that we had published for LB1. This was remarkable,
because the published volume for Weber's microcephalic was 415 cm
3
compared with LB1's 417 cm
3
. (As a thought experiment, imagine that
you have two cubes, one with sides that are each 10 cm long, the other
with sides that are 9 cm long. The volume of the first cube [length ×
breadth × height] would be 1,000 cm
3
; the volume of the second would
be 729 cm
3
.) If the volumes of the two similarly shaped cubes (or endo-
casts) were equivalent, then their basic dimensions should have been
too. Something was
very
wrong.
Nevertheless, we attempted to locate osut4 so that it could be in-
cluded in our microcephalic study. During this process, we learned
that other information that
Science
had been given was incorrect. For
one thing, I was informed that Dr. Czarnetzki had not been curator
at Tübingen for the past four years. When specimen osut4 was finally
located there, it turned out to consist of fragmentary cranial remains
but no endocast. It was not the key microcephalic specimen, after all.
Continued searches at Tübingen confirmed that the single key speci-
men was not to be found there. Further efforts to identify and locate the
key specimen resulted in the suggestion that it might be in Brno, Czech
