Very sad news for those of us who do physical anthropology. Charles ("Charlie") Lockwood (University College London) was killed today [July 14, 2008] in a motorcycle accident in London. He is survived by his parents and sisters.

Charlie was a talented morphologist both in the sense of being a descriptive anatomist and quantitative biologist. I met him in the late 90's when he came to Arizona State University’s Institute of Origins for a post-doc after completing his PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. He, Bill Kimbel and I shared the pain of rejected NSF grant proposals before receiving NSF money to study the use of geometric morphometrics to study temporal bone variation in hominins. Three papers resulted:

-- Lockwood,C.A., Lynch,J.M., Kimbel,W.H. (2002). Quantifying temporal bone morphology of great apes and humans: An approach using geometric morphometrics. Journal of Anatomy 201(6), 447-464.
-- Lockwood,C.A., Kimbel,W.H., Lynch,J.M. (2004). Morphometrics and hominoid phylogeny: Support for a chimpanzee-human clade and differentiation among great ape subspecies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101(13), 4356-4360.
-- Lockwood,C.A., Kimbel,W.H., Lynch,J.M. (2005). Variation in early hominin temporal bone morphology and its implications for species diversity. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 60(2), 73-77.

There was other research we intended to do but, somehow, with Charlie's move to London in 2004 and all that involved, we never got round to it. He was soon to be returning to South Africa to take a position at Wits. I'm proud to have known Charlie as a colleague and a friend. He will be missed.

John M. Lynch
Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett the Honors College at Arizona State University

Photo courtesy of the University College of London