The skull of Australopithecus Sediba

The skull of Australopithecus Sediba at the UK's Natural history Museum, London.

It is currently the hottest topic in palaeoanthropology, and visitors to London's Natural History Museum can now get to see what all the fuss is about. 

This 1.9-million-year-old creature caused a sensation when the discovery of its fossil remains in South Africa was first announced in 2010.

A. sediba has a curious mix of ape and human features, suggesting it could be one of our direct ancestors.

"This is one of the most exciting and controversial fossil finds of recent years and it's fantastic to have this material at the museum," said Prof Ian Owens, the NHM's director of science.

"Researchers will get to work with it, but also the public will get to see it, and we hope that will really help bring the science alive," he told BBC News.

The replicas are a gift from the government of the Republic of South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand, which is leading the investigation into the fossils.

The real specimens were found at Malapa in the famous Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, just to the northwest of Johannesburg.

They were pulled from a pit - a depression left in the ground by a cave complex that subsequently lost its roof through erosion.

Identified as the remains of an adult female and a juvenile male, the two individuals were quite possibly mother and son.

It seems they died together in some tragic accident that saw them either fall into the cave complex or become stuck in it.

After death, their bodies were washed into a pool and cemented in time along with the skeletons of many other animals - sabre-tooth cats, hyenas, antelope, even birds and mice.

"All of this accumulation happened very, very quickly - in a few days, weeks or months," said lead researcher Prof Lee Berger of the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University.

"Once we've completed this project, we're going to be able to show a texture of a moment in time that we have never seen before except in maybe the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the burial of Pompeii."

Scientists are now engaged in an intense debate over the status of A. sediba in the story of our origins.

Prof Berger and his colleagues say the creature's mix of ancient and modern traits probably make it central to that story. They propose that A. sediba could even sit on, or very close to, the line that led directly to us - modern humans (Homo sapiens).

Other scientists remain to be convinced, and argue too little is known about the diversity of ancient human forms this far back in time to make any bold statements.

Mind-Blowing Brain Images From Then and Now | Wired Science

It is not an accident. There is a grand tradition of scientists making art out of human anatomy, from the comic grotesqueries of Vesalius to the exquisite drawings of Cajal. The twenty-first century is no exception.

Just because these images depend on expensive machines doesn't mean the scientist has become a passive observer, or no longer thinks about the aesthetics.

Keats knew that truth exists in a tangled relationship with beauty, and nothing illustrates that poetic concept better than these scientific images. Their empirical power is entwined with their visual majesty.

More pictures and their stories from Wired Science

DNA Tests Throw Doubts on Hitler's skull

Doubt has again been thrown on whether Adolf Hitler shot himself dead and whether he was in his bunker, it emerged yesterday.

A skull fragment believed for decades to be the Nazi leader’s has turned out to be that of a woman under 40 after DNA analysis.

Scientists and historians had long thought it to be conclusive proof that Hitler shot himself in the head after taking a cyanide pill on 30 April 1945 rather than face the ignominy of capture.

Revealed: The skull with a bullet hole, kept in a Russian archive, is a woman's

The piece of skull - complete with bullet hole - had been taken from outside the Fuhrer’s bunker by the Russian Army and preserved by Soviet intelligence.

Now the story of Hitler’s death will have to rewritten as a mystery - and conspiracy theorists are likely to latch on to the possibility that he may not have died in the bunker at all.

The traditional story is that Hitler committed suicide with Eva Braun as the Russians bombarded Berlin.

Although some historians doubted he shot himself and suggested it was Nazi propaganda to make him a hero, the hole in the skull fragment seemed to settle the argument when it was put on display in Moscow in 2000 but DNA analysis has now been performed on the bone by American researchers.

We know the skull corresponds to a woman between the ages of 20 and 40,' said University of Connecticut archeologist Nick Bellantoni.

'The bone seemed very thin; male bone tends to be more robust. And the sutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40.' Hitler was 56 in April 1945.

Mr Bellantoni flew to Moscow to take DNA swabs at the State Archive and was also shown the bloodstained remains of the bunker sofa on which Hitler and Braun were believed to have killed themselves.

'I had the reference photos the Soviets took of the sofa in 1945 and I was seeing the exact same stains on the fragments of wood and fabric in front of me, so I knew I was working with the real thing,' he said.

His astonishing results have been broadcast in the U.S. in a History Channel documentary titled Hitler's Escape.