The 1985 Taung Skull Commemorative first-day cover signed by Professor Raymond Dart
Queensland-born Raymond Arthur Dart (1893-1988), anatomist and anthropologist, achieved lasting fame soon after his appointment in January 1923 as professor of anatomy, University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. 'In November 1924 Dart was handed a fossil skull that had recently been discovered at Taungs (later Taung), 100 miles ... north of Kimberley. He extracted the fossil from the hard matrix and found that the skull was that of a child possessing a mixture of apish and human features. The child had held its head on a nearly vertical spinal column; its teeth, especially its little canines, were human-like. Although the brain was small, like that of an ape, its form seemed to be hominoid. Thinking that its blend of traits might characterise the supposed missing link between humans and non-human animals on the old notion of a chain of being, Dart named the species "Australopithecus africanus" and published his findings in "Nature" in February 1925. For over twenty years most scholars rejected Dart's claims. Critics asserted that the Taung child was on the wrong continent, was too young at death to make predictions about its likely adult form, and belonged to a geological epoch too recent.... [But in] time more fossilised hominid remains were found in Africa, and Dart's theory was generally accepted. The palaeontologist Robert Broom considered that Dart had made "one of the greatest discoveries in the world's history"' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography').
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