Dressed in a suit, this person would not look out of place in a busy street in a modern city.

The clay sculpture, however, portrays the face of the earliest known modern European - a man or woman who hunted deer and gathered fruit and herbs in ancient forests more than 35,000 years ago.

It was created by Richard Neave, one of Britain's leading forensic scientists, using fossilised fragments of skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago.

The first modern European: Forensic artist Richard Neave reconstructed the face based on skull fragments from 35,000 years ago

His recreation offers a tantalising glimpse into life before the dawn of civilisation. It also shows the close links between the first European settlers and their immediate African ancestors.

To sculpt the head, Mr Neave called on his years of experience recreating the appearance of murder victims as well as using careful measurements of bone.

It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonise the globe.

The head has taken pride of place on the desk of Alice Roberts, an anthropologist at Bristol University, who presents the programme.

'It's really quite bizarre,' she told Radio Times. 'I'm a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think "Gosh, I'm looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago" and there's something weirdly moving about that.

'Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he's used to looking at differences between populations.

'He said the skull doesn't look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them.

'That's probably what you'd expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe.'

Anthropologist Alice Roberts with the model: 'I look at that face and think "I'm actually looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago"', she says

The head is based on remains of one of the earliest known anatomically modern Europeans.

The lower jawbone was discovered by potholers in the Carpathian mountains in Romania in 2002. The rest of the fragments were found the following year.

The bones were carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by two species of human.

They were the Neanderthals, who had arrived from Africa tens of thousands of years earlier, and the more recent modern humans, also known as Cro-Magnons.

Although the skull is similar to a modern human head, it has a larger cranium, is more robust and has larger molars. Although it is impossible to work out the skin colour of the prehistoric hunter, it is likely to have been darker than modern white Europeans.

Fossil experts are also unsure if the skull was male or female.

Many scientists believe that modern humans evolved in Africa 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors left Africa around 60,000 years ago and migrated around the world, replacing other branches of the family tree which had left the continent earlier.

The earliest modern Europeans were far from primitive. Living in huts and caves, they used stone tools and spears made from antlers, painted on the walls of their caves and made jewellery from shells.

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Feel the breath of a huge brachiosaurus. Hear the terrifying roar of a 40ft T-Rex. A new £10m show really does let you walk with dinosaurs – and it promises to be a monster hit..
The noise hits you first – a bellowing, bone-shaking roar that leaves your heart pounding and your adrenaline levels soaring.

Terrifyingly real: The live animatronics show Walking With Dinosaurs features 15 life-sized models including a 40 ft T-Rex.

Then you see it, a 42ft Tyrannosaurus rex towering over you, nostrils flaring, beady eye glaring. If you've ever wondered what it would have been like to get up close to a dinosaur, then this, without a doubt, is it.

Life as they knew it: The Walking With Dinosaurs show will re-create how the creatures lived.

Ten years after the BBC's award-winning Walking With Dinosaurs series became the most expensive documentary ever made, it has been transformed into a ground-breaking, live animatronics show.

Now, 65 million years after they died out, audiences will be able to transport themselves back in time and stand side-by-side with some of the most terrifying animals ever to have existed on our planet.

The experience is not for the faint-hearted. Those who go to see Walking With Dinosaurs, The Arena Spectacular, which is due to arrive in the UK this summer, will find themselves penned in with 15 life-sized and disturbingly realistic dinosaur models.

Alarmingly lifelike: The models can even chew.

When the brachiosaurus stomps into view – 72ft from nose to tail and 32ft tall – suddenly it's possible to appreciate the colossal size of these beasts. And when the snarling T-Rex launches itself at a predatory torosaurus, you could be forgiven for wondering if you'd somehow strayed onto the set of Jurassic Park IV.

This, say the show's producers, is the closest anyone has ever got to experiencing what life would have been like when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth 200 million years ago.
Recreating the experience hasn't been cheap. Costing £10 million to produce, it has taken a team of 50 people – including engineers, puppet makers, artists and animatronics experts – a year to create. A team of paleontologists gave advice on how the dinosaurs would have moved, and even how they would have roared.

'We take the audience on a journey back in time and show them how the dinosaurs might have looked in their prime – and how they fought for survival every day of their lives,' says the show's director, Cameron Wenn.

'Our dinosaurs move as if they're real – with all the roars, snorts and excitement that goes with it.'

Without the possibility of using computer graphics, the realistic effects are achieved through animatronics and puppetry. Sonny Tilders, the man responsible for designing and building the dinosaurs, is a world authority on animatronics and honed his skills on films such as The Chronicles Of Narnia.

'Many of the technologies are borrowed from feature films,he says. 'We use "muscle bags" made from stretch mesh fabric and filled with polystyrene balls to make it appear that these creatures are flesh and blood weighing six, eight or even 20 tons. The bags contract and stretch in the same manner that muscle, fat, and skin do on real creatures, giving a really life-like appearance.'

Add to this the scaly skin on each model, the orange-flecked eyes that swivel and blink and jaws that actually chew, and you find yourself faced with something that looks alarmingly real.

Costing £10 million to produce, it has taken a team of 50 people - including engineers, puppet makers, artists and animatronics experts - a year to create.

Roaring into action: In one scene, a T Rex fights to protect her young.

Dinosaurs featured include the stegosaurus, with its distinctive double row of plates along its arched back; the giant, flying ornithocherius, which soars above the stadium,'its wings almost as wide as the stage; and the fierce, evil-looking utahraptor, with its long, sharp claws.

A driver lies between each dinosaur's legs, disguised in a low, flat box that looks like a rock, and is responsible for manoeuvring the beast around the arena.

He works in tandem with two 'voodoo puppeteers', so-called because they sit at the back of the arena, hundreds of feet from the stage, with scaled-down versions of the dinosaurs. The actions they perform with these replicas are interpreted by computer and sent by radio waves to make the giant dinosaurs reproduce the action.

And, like the stars of any show, the dinosaurs have their diva-esque moments. 'They don't like to work for too long at a time – they overheat,' says Wenn. 'And they get twitchy if we're too near a police station, or anywhere there is a clash of radio frequencies.

The show has already gone down a storm in Australia and the US. Newsweek magazine proclaimed it as 'that rare entertainment beast that parents and kids can enjoy together'.

A safari-suited palaeontologist guides the audience through the tale of the Earth's development, accompanied by rousing music.

Tectonic plates split and the landscape turns from arid desert in the Triassic period, about 220 million years ago, to the lush green prairies of the Jurassic period, 100 million years later.

With each landscape change comes a terrifying new addition to the dinosaur family – each one seemingly larger and fiercer than the last. Volcanos erupt, flowers sprout and then die, and carnivorous dinosaurs evolve to walk on two legs so they can run faster from predators and attack their prey with increased speed.

And in the end, this strange and wonderful era of the planet's history comes to an explosive end when a massive comet hits Earth and wipes all the dinosaurs out.

Walking With Dinosaurs live show coincides with the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin Of Species – although exactly what Charles Darwin would have made of its stomping, roaring, hi-tech portrayal of evolution and extinction is anyone's guess.

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Geologist Winston Seiler with some of the dinosaur tracks he identified for his thesis as a University of Utah master's degree student. The impressions once were thought to be potholes eroded by water. But Seiler and Marjorie Chan, chair of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, published a scientific paper in the October 2008 issue of the journal Palaios identifying the abundant impressions as comprising a large dinosaur "trample surface" in northern Arizona. There are so many tracks they wryly refer to the site as "a dinosaur dance floor."

University of Utah geologist Winston Seiler walks among hundreds of dinosaur footprints in a "trample surface" that likely was a watering hole amid desert sand dunes during the Jurassic Period 190 million years ago. The track site, which also includes some dinosaur tail-drag marks, is located in Coyote Buttes North area along the Arizona-Utah border.

This Eubrontes dinosaur footprint, including three toes and a heel, measures roughly 16 inches long. Dinosaur footprints are named by their shape because the species and genus of animal that made them isn't known, although Eubrontes tracks are believed to have been made by upright-walking, meat-eaters smaller than Tyrannosaurus rex. Eubrontes is one of four types of dinosaur footprints identified by University of Utah geologists at a Jurassic Period dinosaur "trample surface" in northern Arizona. The footprints previously had been thought to be modern potholes eroded by water. The inset outlines the footprint shape.

Photo on left shows eroded dinosaur footprints, and tail-drag marks highlighted in the diagram at right, at a northern Arizona site that University of Utah geologists are calling "a dinosaur dance floor."

This 4-inch long Grallator dinosaur track is among four types of dinosaur footprints identified by University of Utah geologists at a large dinosaur "trample surface" in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness near the Arizona-Utah border. They were left by a small dinosaur, perhaps only 3 feet tall, some 190 million years ago.

This photo shows a trackway, or set of prints made by the same dinosaur, as it walked through a wet, sandy oasis some 190 million years ago in what is now the Coyote Buttes North area straddling the Utah-Arizona border. University of Utah geologists published a new study showing that numerous impressions at the site are dinosaur tracks, not erosion-caused potholes as was believed previously.
This 14-inch-long Sauropodomorph dinosaur track actually is two footprints in one and was left by a creature that walked on four legs. The imprint includes the deeper central circular portion, which was left when a dinosaur's "pes" or rear foot, stepped into the larger, shallower print left by a "manus" or front foot. The toe prints, top and upper right, were left by the front foot, obscuring prints from the rear toes. The print is one of many identified by University of Utah scientists at a large dinosaur "trample surface" in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in northern Arizona.

University of Utah geologist Winston Seiler walks in the path of dinosaurs. The dinosaur tracks were preserved in a "trample surface" where the reptiles likely gathered to drink water at an oasis among arid sand dunes some 190 million years ago. The site is in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness along the Arizona-Utah border.

The "dinosaur dance floor," formally known as a dinosaur "trample surface," is outlined by white dashes in this photo taken from a hill above the three-quarter-acre site. The site's numerous holes in Jurassic sandstone were identified as dinosaur tracks by University of Utah geologists Marjorie Chan and Winston Seiler.

A dinosaur trample surface has been identified on the Arizona side of that state's border with Utah. Geologists from the University of Utah determined the numerous impressions at the site are dinosaur tracks, not erosion features.

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A 650-million-year-old underwater reef, 10 times higher than the Great Barrier Reef, has been discovered in the middle of Australia's outback.

The ancient reef, formed nearly 100 million years before the first known animal life evolved, is the only one of its age in the world. Scientists believe it may hold evidence of the earliest examples of primitive animal life.

The reef was discovered by three Melbourne scientists in the Northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Formed hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the earth, it existed for five to 10 million years in a tropical period sandwiched between two ice ages.

The scientists, from the School of Earth Science at Melbourne University believe the reef could also explain the extent of climate change in earth's early history. 

"Some of the complex organisms we have seen in the reef have never been discovered previously," associate Professor Malcolm Wallace, told The Times Online. "There is nothing like these fossils in any modern setting but they have structures that are similar to some animals." 

The oldest known animal fossils are 570 million years old. The Flinders Ranges reef is 80 million years older than that and was, he said: "The right age to capture the precursors to animals."

"With the movement over millions of years on Australia's tectonic plates, the reef has been turned 90 degrees skywards from its once horizontal position," said Professor Wallace's colleague Jonathan Giddings. "This has exposed the whole depth of the reef. These tectonic forces have resulted in very ancient history being pushed up to the present. 

"Today's advances in satellite imagery are helping us to see the reef very easily," he said. "Geologists had seen this mass before but had not really recognised it as being once a reef."

"This reef is much too old to be made of coral, " said Professor Wallace. "It was constructed by microbial organisms and other complex, chambered structures that have not been discovered before." 

The escarpment of the reef would have been 1100 metres at its highest point, ten times higher than the 100 metre high escarpment of the Great Barrier. The section of the reef that has been preserved is 20 km wide, but there is evidence that it extended across around 100 kilometress, comparable to the Great Barrier which stretches for 2,600 kilometres.

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Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, PA. It's a museum of medical oddities. They have many exhibits of conjoined twins... It's extremely disturbing.




The Mutter Museum, part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, is interesting if nothing else. The museum contains specimens of different medical conditions. The Mutter Museum was originally intended to give medical students the chance to see the effects of rare conditions. Today it still serves that purpose, and fascinates the public with some macabre items you might expect to find at a Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum. Some readers may find exhibits mentioned in this article to be quite gross.




Thomas Dent Mutter presented his collection of unique materials to the college in 1858, and the museum grew from there. The Mutter Museum's collection now has over 20,000 artifacts. The artifacts include fluid-preserved specimens, skeletal specimens, medical instruments, models, and much more.




In 1874, the autopsy of Siamese Twins Chang and Eng Bunker (the first set of Siamese, or conjoined, twins) was performed in the museum. The twins' connected livers, as well as a plaster cast of their bodies, has been on display ever since.



Visitors to the Mutter Museum can also see the "Soap Woman". She may have died sometime in the 19th century. Certain chemicals present in the soil she was buried in turned her into soap, literally.






Other specimens include a preserved 5 foot long human colon, preserved human fetuses, and part of the brain of President Garfield's assassin, Charles Guiteau. The Mutter Museum is also widely know for it's collection of skulls, as well as a collection of 2,000 objects people have swallowed.
 
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