Nov 3, 2005, 15:01 GMT
Warsaw - A Polish anthropologist claims to have found the skull of the father of modern astronomy, Nicolas Copernicus (1473- 1543).
File photo taken in August 2005 of Prof. Karol Piasecki from Szczecin's University shows the skull, which was discovered in a cathedral in Frombork, north Poland. The skull probably belonged to famous 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus - the most serious evidence is a blowmark above the left eye, visible as a scar on portraits of the astronomer. EPA/Wojciech Gajewski
The apparent discovery was made in a cathedral in the Baltic Sea port town of Frombork, once a part of Royal Prussia.
Copernicus was named canon of the cathedral in 1497 at the same time as his uncle's appointment as a local bishop.
Anthropologist Professor Konrad Piasecki told Polish Radio Thursday the skull was found inside an unmarked tomb set in the floor near the cathedral's main altar.
A facial reconstruction made by the Warsaw-based Central Criminal Laboratory using the skull and computer animation has produced the face of a man around 70 years of age which bears a resemblance to a known portrait of Copernicus.
Scientists, however, admit it is impossible to make a positive identification without DNA tests and that such testing is in turn impossible as Copernicus had no known offspring.
A Polish astronomer, mathematician and economist, Copernicus is regarded as the father of modern astronomy for developing the heliocentric theory of the universe which posits the sun, rather than the earth, at its centre.
The astronomer from Torun, now in central Poland, shocked contemporaries by asserting the earth rotated on its axis once daily and travelled around the sun once yearly in his progressive 1530 publication 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)'.
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