Have you seen La Brea Woman?

Forensic artist Melissa Cooper says she created a facial rendering based on the Page Museum's solitary human skull, but she says the museum won't show her work out of fear that the Native American features might inspire claims to the bones. The museum says pshaw on that — that Cooper made her drawings privately and they were never intended as museum exhibits. Here's more at the LAT's Culture Monster blog, and more views of La Brea woman at Cooper's website. La Brea Woman, as generations of Los Angeles elementary school students have learned, is the name given to the only human remains officially extracted from the La Brea Tar Pits in the Miracle Mile.

2-D reconstruction by Melissa Cooper