macrocephalic

adj

1. (not-comparable)Having an abnormally large or elongated head.

   “In 1849, M. Rathke stated that artificially-formed skulls had been found near Kertch, in the Crimea, and called attention to certain passages in the works of Hippocrates and Strabo, overlooked by medical writers, in which these authors speak of the practice of modifying the shape of the head by means of bandages, as being in use among the macrocephalic (long-headed) Scythians.”

   “This intimation, breaking through his resistances, evoked first the dread of an abnormal child, prematurely wise, macrocephalic, with dreadful tentacular hands.... So his essential humanity presented the thing.”

   “[…] that I couldn’t return her gaze directly had also to do with this unharmonious relation between body and skull, and its implication, to me, of some early misfortune, of something vital lost or beaten down, and, by way of compensation, something vastly overdone. I thought of a trapped chick that could not get more than its beaked skull out of the encircling shell. I thought of those macrocephalic boulders the Easter Island heads.”

   “The males of P. portalis [bees] are strikingly dimorphic: fewer than 50% of them are “normal” winged males that mate with females at flowers, and the remainder are large, flightless, macrocephalic fighters that remain in the natal nest, where they fight to the death with competitors.”

2. (not-comparable)Characterized by a disproportionate concentration of population and activities in a single centre, to the detriment of other areas.

   “In 1947, the geographer Jean-François Gravier published a book that became an instant sensation: Paris et le désert français. Gravier argued that France was becoming a seriously deformed nation, a macrocephalic invalid: Paris, the megalopolis, was sucking all the lifeblood from the provinces, leading to a dangerous imbalance between center and periphery.”

   “Several developing countries are characterized by rapid urbanization, macrocephalic urban systems, high urban densities and various socio economic and environmental problems.”