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Walking in the Footsteps of Lucy:
Here is a photo of some students in Robert Dennison's
Biology class "walking the walk." Their school is Jersey
Village High School in the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD in Houston,
Texas. The walkers are Christopher "Lucy's Friend"
Smith and Allison "Lucy" Wardwell.
They are being observed intently by waiting walkers
Holly Hamlin and Dylan Clewis.
Saron Tesfalul is getting ready in the background to step
into the first set of tracks and become the mysterious "third
person."
New "Topo" Trackway:
We can provide an enlarged portion of a photogrammetric ("topographic")
version of the southern part of site G, adapted from the Mary
Leakey source (1987). See portion below-left. There are eight
footprints in each trail (two trails side-by-side, each with
four left and four right footprints). The original 1/5th scale
trackway diagram was enlarged by 205% (2x) on Kinko's large scale
copier to about an 11" by 56" strip. You can display
this directly, or, even better, enlarge it another 244% (approximately)
to a full scale (5x) 28" by 12 feet long trackway, have
it laminated (for durability), and have your students actually
"walk in the footsteps of 3.6 million year old 'Lucy'."
Real thrill. They soon discover that they have to be rather short,
and must walk with their arms about each other's waists to fit
into those tracks. If they are very perceptive, they may also
discover that there must have been a third person walking in
the tracks of the larger first one.
Getting the "Topo" Trackway:
If you are interested in getting the 2x enlargement strip (NOT
full scale) sent to you in a mailing tube, just send your request
to the webmaster,
along with your mailing address. There's no charge; just share
your experiences after your class has "walked in the footsteps
of Lucy."
The cost in 2006 at Kinko's in San Jose, CA for enlarging
this to full scale (5x), laminating and shipping has mushroomed
to about $155. I suspect you may get a better deal in your locality,
so I would urge you to just request the 2x enlargement. CAUTION:
The enlargement scaling on Kinko's machine isn't perfect, so
you may want to try a small sample first (say a copy of the area
with the scale on it), if you want to be sure it's perfectly
to scale.
We have also prepared a set of three sheets in the original
1/5 th scale, with alignment marks to help in reassembling them
into a strip as near the originally published format as possible.
Instructions are included. To have these emailed to you, just
email the webmaster
amd ask for the "Original 1/5th Scale Trackway in 3 sheets"
to be sent to you.
The "Economy Route": since most of the big
cost in the trackway is the lamination, you may want to try just
using the full scale trackway without laminating. Just be sure
the floor is smooth and clean, and that students walk carefully,
probably in their socks. You will still have the 2x strip, and
can make a new full scale enlargement if the previous one gets
too damaged to use.
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