British artist Damien Hirst sold his sculpture of a diamond-encrusted skull worth $100 million, an all time high price for a piece of work sold by a single living artist, the London gallery said Thursday. Hirst named the unique piece of art, "For the Love of God. " The masterpiece is a skull cast in platinum with 8,601 diamonds. When the original skull was subjected to carbon dating for authenticity, it was found that his model dated back to the 18th century.

A woman who participated in a blind auction got a real surprise when she bid on a mystery box and found a human skull inside. The Phoenix, Ariz. woman, whose name has not been released, bid on the box Tuesday at an Apache Junction woman's treasure hunt when she accidentally discovered the human skull and then turned it over to police.

A man with a brain significantly smaller than average managed to live an entirely normal life working as a civil servant. When the 44-year-old man's brain was scanned, it showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber took up most of his skull. French researchers say it left room for only a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. "He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr Lionel Feuillet of the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille said in the Lancet medical journal. When Dr Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they discovered he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away water on the brain as a child. The researchers were shocked when scans showed a "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles - chambers, usually small in size, that hold the fluid that acts as a cushion for the brain. Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not enough to classify him as mentally retarded or disabled. "What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life," said Dr Max Muenke, a brain specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute. "If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side. "

A Carbondale, Colo. man who could hear crazy noises in his head was shocked to discover that his skull was infested with fly larvae. Aaron Dallas suffered from bleeding bumps on his head, which moved and caused terrible irritation to him.

Archaeologists in Lima, Peru have made a rare discovery of a 500-year-old skull of a man they believe to be the earliest confirmed victim of a gunshot wound in the Americas. Found in an Incan cemetery outside the Peruvian capital, the centuries-old skull has two holes that are less than an inch in diameter in the back and front. The position of the round holes and some minuscule iron particles indicate that the person most likely was shot and killed by a Spanish musket ball.