Here's another Deschler I've come across. This is one of a couple that I've found on a site that has seems to be well-regarded, so I'm surprised to see what I believe is a fairly obvious fake. Here's the skull:
The first thing that strikes me about this skull is the rather uniform dull grey appearance. This could be explained as wear, but it doesn't follow the normal wear pattern that we tend to see... Next, the nose hole looks smaller than normal, and makes the skull look like a cast copy. One of the things that really caught my eyes was the suture lines. They are not well-defined at all, and look more like long flowing lines on the right side of the skull than the normal small marks that are stamped in on authentic skulls. We can also see some rather worrisome long lines on the maxilla...
On the backside we see some traditional Deschler round-base pins.
However, the backside also shows us that the "2" in the maker's mark looks notably different than the rest of the numbers. We can also see that the "5" is set lower than the rest of the numbers, which is a telltale characteristic of the well-known "mustache fake."
I'm calling this one a fake, guys. Anyone have a different opinion?
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