He went to elite schools (St Paul's, Yale) and joined elite clubs (Yale's Skull and Bones, as did Mr Bush).

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Of course, his fellow Skull and Bones man, Mr Bush, can hardly claim that he was born on the wrong side of the tracks.

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John Kerry went to a boarding school in Switzerland, to a top private school in New Hampshire and then to Yale, where he studied political science and joined the secret and elite Skull and Bones club, just as George W Bush did two years later.

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To understand how the pygmy whale fit into the lineage of whales, Marx and his colleagues carefully analyzed the skull bones and other fossil fragments from pygmy right whales and several other ancient cetaceans.

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They would have been better equipped to react if Vladisa had told them that he had met the witch Baba Roga and, in that same instant, her skull-and-bones hut on its one giant chicken leg had come tearing down the hillside after him.

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It cut through his upper jaw and skull bones, killing him.

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Numerous other dodo parts were also unearthed, such as skull fragments, beak bones, vertebrae, wing bones and toe bones.

BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Dodo skeleton find in Mauritius

But, alas, according to the scientists who excavated the remains, the bones belonged to humans, and are actually evidence of tribal skull deformation being more wide-spread than first thought.

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