Taung’s Checkered Past - The Fossil Chronicles - page 43

Although fossils are now viewed as part of the heritage of their
countries of origin, Dart assumed Taung was his personal property,
which was normal at that time. 26 After carefully considering a proposal
from the Witwatersrand Council of Education that he donate the fos-
sil to the university in exchange for financial support for his research,
he declined the offer.27 27 Because Dart was not set up at Wits to pro-
duce museum-quality casts, he eventually made arrangements to have
the various parts of Taung cast in London by Messrs. R. F. Damon and
Company, Makers of Anthropological and Palaeontological Casts and
Models, so that copies could be sold to interested individuals, museums,
and universities. Soon after the discovery of Taung was announced,
Dart was approached about making such an arrangement. The person
who approached him was a partner of that company, F. O. Barlow, who
suggested that Dart might feel less anxiety about sending the skull to
London if he sent it to him (Barlow) at the Natural History Museum,
where it could remain under his personal charge while he did the work
on it. 28 Although it took some years of negotiating to finalize the arrange-
ments, two series of casts were produced by Damon and Company, the
first from casts of Taung, and the second from the original fossil, which
Dora Dart personally took to London during a trip to England to take a
postgraduate course. (Raymond, meanwhile, took sabbatical to travel to
Italy with the Italian Scientific Expedition.) Records in the archives at
Wits indicate that Dart received royalties on cast sales during most of
the 1930s, and it may have been even longer. It is interesting that, years
earlier F. O. Barlow had prepared plaster replicas of the Piltdown skull
under the direction of Arthur Smith Woodward and was one of the men
portrayed in John Cooke's painting The Piltdown Committee (figure 1). 29
the monograph that wasn't
The ink barely had time to dry on Dart's 1925 report in Nature when
it became clear that he was expected to write a full monograph about
his discovery . 30 As Keith put it, “No doubt when Prof. Dart publishes