Thursday, December 07, 2006

Leakey Fights Church Effort to Hide Hominid Fossils

From Live Science.com (via The Skeptical Inquirer and The Daily Telegraph):

Famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is giving no quarter to powerful evangelical church leaders who are pressing Kenya's national museum to relegate to a back room its world-famous collection of hominid fossils showing the evolution of humans' early ancestors.

Leakey called the churches' plans "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard."

He told The Daily Telegraph (London): "The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya's very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science."

Leakey was for years director of the museum and of Kenya's entire museum system.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

I’ve been busy and will be for a few more days, hence the slow pace of posting. I missed posting on Phil Anderson’s work on Dunkleosteous from last week. Nice work Phil, now please send me a PDF!

In a story related to the above, Slate.com interviewed me yesterday about “how artists and scientists work together to create images of extinct animals”. That piece is HERE (nope, they didn’t directly use anything I told them).