Diamond-shaped holes in bones, for example, match the distinctive shape of bronze arrowheads found on the battlefield.
In 1985 Absolut vodka began its famous magazine ad campaign featuring variations on the distinctive shape of its bottle, executed by hundreds of contemporary artists, among them Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Lisa Yuskavage.
For a long time after I came back from reporting on the war there I couldn't even look at a map of south-east Asia in case I might happen to see the distinctive shape of the island.
As the gunman rose from the shadows to fire, Sergeant Davis said he saw his head and then the distinctive shape of a Dragonov SVD Russian-made sniper rifle.
Improved methods of fishhook making were devised in the 1650s by Charles Kirby, who later invented the Kirby bend, a distinctive shape of hook with an offset point that is still in common use worldwide.
And the distinctive shape of the peak – also constant, or nearly so, for all these generations – is very deeply entangled with our sense of what it is to be us.
Gardiner goes on: His gaze is intense but far livelier than I remembered it … In the lower half of his face one's attention is drawn to the flared right nostril, the distinctive shape of his mouth creased at the corners, the fleshy lips and jowls that suggest a fondness for food and wine, as the records imply.
In each one he captures the essence of a plant, whether it is the graceful bend of a stem or a blade of grass, the ragged edge of a leaf, the tightly curled tip of a fern or the distinctive shape of a particular flower.
"Can we say the words aloud now?" one officer finally demands after a third woman is found murdered, missing a finger and adorned with a red diamond in the distinctive shape of a five-pointed star -- the "Devil's star" of satanic legend.
One telling detail is the distinctive shape of the radiator grille, introduced by BMW in 1933.
