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genus of living Brachiopoda; -- so called from its fancied resemblance to the cranium or skull.

The science of the form and characteristics of the skull. [R.]

ology or archæology) which deals with the shape, size, proportions, indications, etc., of skulls; the study of skulls.

An instrument for measuring the size of skulls.

The art or act of measuring skulls.

n, or who practices, cranioscopy. It was found of equal dimension in a literary man whose skull puzzied the cranioscopists. Coleridge.

A comprehensive division of the Vertebrata, including all those that have a skull.

The skull of an animal; especially, that part of the skull, either cartilaginous or bony, which immediately incloses the brain; the brain case or brainpan. See Skull.

two of the leg bones or arm bones of a skeleton, laid crosswise, often surmounted with a skull, and serving as a symbol of death. Crossbones, scythes, hourglasses, and other lugubrios emblems of mortality. Hawthorne.

To chew with force and noise; to craunch. And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull. Byron.

A stupid, blockish fellow; a numskull. [Obs.] Chaucer.

A naked human skull as the emblem of death; the head of the conventional personification of death. I had rather be married to a death's-head with a bone in his mouth. Shak. Death's-head moth (Zoöl.), a very large European moth (Acherontia atropos), so called from a figure resembling a human skull on the back of the tho…

The soft, spongy, or cancellated substance between the plates of the skull.

Having the cranium, or skull, long to its breadth; long-headed; -- opposed to brachycephalic. -- Dol`i*cho*ceph"al, a. & n.

A heavy, stupid fellow; a blockhead; a numskull; an ignoramus; a dunce; a dullard. This Puck seems but a dreaming dolt. Drayton.

A dunce; a numskull; a blockhead. Beau. & Fl.

The tough, fibrous membrane, which lines the cavity of the skull and spinal column, and surrounds the brain and spinal cord; -- frequently abbreviated to dura.

Pertaining to a small Wormian bone sometimes present in the human skull between the parietal and the great wing of the sphenoid. -- n.

An epipterygoid bone or cartilage; the columella in the skulls of many lizards.

Pertaining to the region of the vomer and the base of the ethmoid in the skull. Ethmovomerine plate (Anat.), a cartilaginous plate beneath the front of the fetal brain which the ethmoid region of the skull is developed.