Science: Nebraska Tooth

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Authorities at the American Museum of Natural History, last week, candidly stated that in one particular they had been wrong, and the late William Jennings Bryan and his Fundamentalist disciples right. The particular was an old tooth, found five years ago by Paleontologist Harold Cook, in an ancient Nebraska river bed.

President Henry Fairfield Osborn and other specialists at the museum examined the tooth with naked eye, microscope and x-rays. It belonged, they decided, to a manlike beast and seemed the first indication that such animals had once existed in what is now the U. S. They called the specimen Hesperopithecus ("evening ape") haroldcookii. Fundamentalists scoffed at this as at all other evolutionary data.

Recent diggings in Nebraska revealed a few similar and more perfect teeth. These the museum staff had studied and were delighted to learn that they had erred in their first deduction. The teeth, they announced last week, had served no anthropoidal beast, but an ancient, bristly, snub-nosed pig, a peccary, rooting in Nebraska several millenia ago.