World's largest human fossil cast collection opens for public

Penn Museum in Philadelphia has developed the world's largest collection of hominid fossil casts, most of them painstakingly recreated from molds of important original fossils in what makes up the human evolutionary record, reports Popular Archaeology.

Visitors can also trace the lineage of their human ancestors by viewing more than 100 touchable casts of fossil bones on display at the Penn Museum’s Human Evolution: The First 200 Million Years exhibition [Credit: Penn Museum]

Over several decades, these molds have been made at different sites around the globe by physical anthropologists Janet Monge (Associate Curator of the Physical Anthropology Collection) and Alan Mann (Curator Emeritus of that collection).

The importance of those casts to the ongoing study of human evolution remains, even in this age of three dimensional scans and other hi tech imagery, vital.

The reproduction casts from those molds are requested by teachers and scholars around the world, as they allow students and scholars to study and compare fossils from disparate parts of the world, learning from the direct evidence.

"Human evolution is the critical piece of the story of humankind-it's a story that the Penn Museum is uniquely able to tell," noted Dr. Richard Hodges, Williams Director of the Penn Museum.

"We are also fortunate to have cutting-edge physical anthropological and early human archaeological research being carried out at this Museum and the University.

"This new long-term exhibition gives us the opportunity to share some of that research on evolution with the wider public," he added.

Human Evolution is located in the Jacqueline W. and John C. Hover II Gallery on the second floor of the Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Visit the Human Evolution interactive website

Source: ANI [October 23, 2011]