Taung: A Fossil to Rival Piltdown - The Fossil Chronicles - page 19

boxes were sent as luggage on his return trip to Johannesburg. “Young
might have arranged for the heavy boxes of breccia to be delivered
from the . . . Railway Station to Dart's house by the Railways delivery
service.” 11 If so, the specimens could be accurately described as having
been “brought back” by Young . 12
In an effort to further clarify Young's role in the discovery of Taung,
I searched the announcements under “Social and Personal” in Johan-
nesburg's main newspaper, the Star, around the date of the wedding
(November 28, 1924), to see if he had perhaps been among the guests.
All that I found was a brief announcement on page 13 of the December 4
edition that stated, “Dr. C. F. Beyers of Johannesburg was married qui-
etly to Miss Mera [sic] Rivet at Johannesburg on Friday last. Dr. Beyers
is one of the examiners in the Medical Faculty of the University of
Capetown.”
In any event, Dart acknowledged the contribution of Young (and
others) in his original publication: “I desire to place on record my
indebtedness to Miss Salmons, Prof. Young, and Mr. Campbell [gen-
eral manager of the Northern Lime Company], without whose aid the
discovery would not have been made.” 13 Nor did he forget his indebted-
ness. Thirty-four years after his initial publication about Taung, Dart
corroborated his earlier reports about the role that his “friend and col-
league, Dr. R. B. Young, a veteran Scottish geologist,” had played at the
end of 1924 when he visited the limestone works at Taungs, called on
Spiers to ask that further bone-bearing rocks be sent to Dart, and met
de Bruyn and asked that, among others, the crucial endocast and stone
block be sent to Dart. 14
what endocasts ar e
and why they matter
As noted, the term endocast is short for “endocranial cast,” which refers
to a cast of the inside of an animal's braincase. On rare occasions, endo-
casts occur naturally when skulls fill up with sediments and become