Skeleton

PARK CITY, Utah - Before a rocking crowd of 15,000 at Utah Olympic Park, Jim Shea Jr. won the gold medal yesterday in skeleton, an event that had been on the Olympic shelves for 54 years. Clearly the sentimental favorite among fans and athletes, Shea had dedicated the race to his grandfather. Jack Shea, a double-gold-medal speed skater at the 1932 Winter Games, died hours after his car was struck by a suspected drunken driver Jan. 21. Jim Shea's storybook finish threatened to overshadow the women's race.

PARK CITY, Utah - Make a fist. Now put the meat part on a table and rest your chin on your thumb. That's how close to the ice skeleton sliders are to facial surgery each time they take an 80-mph run down a mile-long icy chute. "It's not for the faint of heart," says Lincoln DeWitt, 34, who will test his strength and heart today when the men's and women's skeleton competition is held. Still, the athletes insist, their sport is not as dangerous as bobsled, where an accident can turn the 400-pound sled into a missile.

No one knows how her body came to be in the stream or how long her distraught parents might have searched the shallows for the missing 3-year-old. The child's fossilized skeleton - a tiny skull, a jaw with baby teeth still intact, a clutch of finger bones, the curled commas of ribs - are the remains of a domestic calamity 3.3 million years ago when the human family was in its infancy, so long ago that the river in which she might have drowned has turned...

In less than four minutes this weekend, Harry Jackson can become an Olympian. All the Naval Academy graduate has to do is sprint like a man on fire, belly-flop onto a 90-pound sled and go screaming down an ice-coated, nearly mile-long chute at 80 mph. Twice today. Twice on Sunday. Fastest man wins. Jackson is a skeleton athlete, and his sport is returning to the Winter Games for the first time since 1948. To snag the third and final spot on the U.S. skeleton team, he will have to beat a dozen competitors in a series of races.

Every year, dozens of youngsters and their parents hunt for fossils at Peter Kranz's Dinosaur Camp in Fort Washington. If they're lucky, they wind up with a few clamshells and sharks' teeth. But last month, a Virginia mother and her 8-year-old twins uncovered what every camper dreams of finding: the skeleton of an unknown reptile that roamed the Coastal Plain 60 million years ago. Terri Fudala, 37, of Chantilly said she was walking through the well-known fossil site along a creek in Prince George's County with her twins, when something caught their eye. "We saw a rock with an interesting thing on it," said Fudala, "So we peeked at it closer and decided it was very interesting."

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. - When you're 20 and you've already rattled your brain pan and snapped a lot of bones, sacrificing a little chin skin is a small price to pay for a chance at Olympic glory. At least that's the way Brandon Corbit looks at it. The Olney resident and Dickinson College junior has spent the past month testing his nerve and skill on the mile-long icy chute that skeleton athletes call the office. Tomorrow is final exam time for Corbit and 24 other young men and 15 women at the Junior National Skeleton Championships.

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. - On one of the coldest days of winter, things definitely are uncool for the Jamaican bobsled team. With little time left before competition, team driver Winston Watts dashes from the Olympic Training Center to Zig Zags, a Main Street bar, hoping to find a little something to give him an edge. Like, say, a bobsled. Zig Zags keeps a battered, old sled on the sidewalk as a landmark, which puts the saloon one up on the Jamaicans, who showed up for the America's Cup race without their mode of transportation.

LINCOLN, Neb. -- The death of a 66-year-old woman late Friday in a hospital here raises the likelihood that the decades-old mystery of a girl's life and death might never be resolved. An investigation begun in December after the discovery of a girl's bones buried outside a Chicago apartment building led police this month to the Lincoln hospital bedside of Joan Miller, who detectives believe was the girl's mother. Miller's lapse into a sudden, life-threatening illness shortly before police arrived to question her added a bizarre twist to a death that had apparently been undetected for three decades.

KENNEWICK, Wash. -- When James Chatters recently was asked by the sheriff in this desert community to take a look at a half-buried skeleton on the shore of the Columbia River, Chatters thought he was in for another mildly intriguing forensic mystery.The skeleton was that of a man, middle-age at death, with Caucasian features. Embedded in the pelvis was a spearhead.At that point, recounted Chatters, an anthropologist based in nearby Richland, Wash., "I've got a white guy with a stone point in him."

NEW YORK -- In a laboratory in the upper recesses of the American Museum of Natural History, away from the public galleries, Dr. Ian Tattersall, a tall Homo sapiens, stooped and came face to face with a Neanderthal man, short and robust but bearing a family resemblance -- until one looked especially closely. A paleoanthropologist who has studied and written about Neanderthals, Tattersall was getting his first look at a virtually complete skeleton from this famously extinct branch of the hominid family.