Meghan Rennie

“This is the basic nightmare. That fossil is everything that should not be here…and yet it’s here.”

This is how Meghan's archaeology professor introduced his class to The Black Skull. Found in Kenya in 1985, this fossil stunned scientists because it exhibited a mixture of derived and primitive traits—in other words, two sets of traits that, according to what we knew up until that point, should not at all have existed on the same species. It brazenly defied what we thought we knew about our ancestry. If that weren’t enough, it was also coloured black from the magnesium-rick soil in which it fossilized (hence its colloquial name), adding to the uniqueness of its appearance.

Meghan wrote a short story inspired by The Black Skull's ability to elicit existential horror. She then illustrated and screen printed a design for the story's cover, creating a small edition of hand-bound copies.