My Brother and I Collected Skulls
My brother Bruce was eight years older than me. That age difference and distance were obstacles that thwarted me from having a close relationship with him as we got older. That's a bit tragic, because he died unexpectedly at the age of 42, twenty two years ago. His last two years of high school were probably our best - he was still living at home and I had perhaps become less annoying. And it was in those years that we shared something that lives with me still - we collected skulls together. This was not some morbid, proto-goth thing. It was about a love of biology.
There is a special place in hell for bad high school biology teachers. They are given some of the most compelling subject matter - reproduction, DNA, photosynthesis, predator-prey relationships, evolution, ecosystems - and asked to communicate it to kids on the brink of adulthood, primed to soak it up in all its beautiful, gross, compelling details. My brother's biology teacher at Wheaton Central was Clayton Barker, and I was fortunate to sit in his class eight years later. He was a soft spoken, gentle man, passionate about biology, teaching, and high school kids. He was also approachable and secure. In class one day he stated that humans were the only species that transform their environment to improve it for their benefit. I raised my hand and pointed out that beavers do this, something I had simply heard on a PBS nature program a couple nights before. His first reaction was to say I was wrong, but the next day, in front of the class, he thanked me for the correction. Bruce and I were blessed.
Skull collecting began with a project in Bruce's advanced biology class. I can't say what the exact origin was, but somehow parts of a sheep carcass from my Dad's family farm were transported to the high school and put through the boiling and bleaching process in one of Mr. Barker's back rooms to become bone specimens. Bruce was way into it, and the end product was mesmerizing: clean, ivory components with teeth, squiggly sutures between the plates, and processes where ligaments and tendons had attached. And yes, it had that proximity to death that injected coolness. Bruce now had forbidden knowledge, and he shared it with me.
Our source material was dead livestock out at the farm and, more commonly, road kill. With the support of Dad, (Mom not so much, but she didn't object) we started keeping a knife and plastic bag in the car for, well, those times when you need those things. Depending on the state of the deceased, we would boil the head in an old pot over a fire in the back yard, remove the softened tissues, then bleach the bones in jars of hydrogen peroxide. We did this discreetly. I suppose there were times at our home when an unexpected guest would have had an unpleasant experience, but it wasn't like we were the "skull boiling family" on the street. Scrub here and there with a toothbrush, let it dry, glue the loose teeth back in, and voila! - science, art (sort of), and something deeply real. Not to mention an opportunity for highly original gift giving.
The easy additions to the collection were animals like cow, horse, racoon, deer, opossum, and squirrel. Slightly more exotic were the skulls of a skunk and red fox. Bird skulls are fragile and hard to prepare, as are those of small rodents so we didn't pursue them much. We had a beaver skull that was quite cool because you could remove and reinsert the surprisingly long curved teeth, but it's been lost in the winds of time. We never got a pig. I have the lower jaw of a seal.
Predator skulls are prized because of their amazing teeth, combined with being relatively harder to find. I still don't have a coyote. On a summer family road trip to California, on an American highway somewhere, we saw a mountain lion on the shoulder with it's tongue hanging out. We were going fast, there was nowhere to turn around, Mom was in the car, we were on vacation for Christ's sake! What did we think we were going to do - wrap it up, toss it in the trunk, and drive around under sunny skies for a week? My Dad and I still talk about the one that got away.
I cheated once. There was a store near Chicago in the 1970's that specialized in exotic meats - zebra, bear, ostrich. With the logistic and monetary support of my Dad we arranged to purchase the skull of an African lion and gave it to Bruce for Christmas. Bruce's daughter has it now. It has a bullet hole in the middle of its forehead.
About eight years ago I saw a dead woodchuck near the intersection of Johnson Street and the Yahara River and decided that it was a good time to introduce my son to this world. Owen came with me and witnessed the gory part. At the time he was more interested in his friend Noah than the boiling process taking place on the Weber, but he really liked the final product and my collection is now shared with him. The opossum skull that went away when Bruce moved out has been recently replaced thanks to road kill right in front of our house. Manna.
We don't have a primate skull, although I was holding a monkey head in my hand about a year ago. That is another story; one Bruce would have enjoyed.
There is a special place in hell for bad high school biology teachers. They are given some of the most compelling subject matter - reproduction, DNA, photosynthesis, predator-prey relationships, evolution, ecosystems - and asked to communicate it to kids on the brink of adulthood, primed to soak it up in all its beautiful, gross, compelling details. My brother's biology teacher at Wheaton Central was Clayton Barker, and I was fortunate to sit in his class eight years later. He was a soft spoken, gentle man, passionate about biology, teaching, and high school kids. He was also approachable and secure. In class one day he stated that humans were the only species that transform their environment to improve it for their benefit. I raised my hand and pointed out that beavers do this, something I had simply heard on a PBS nature program a couple nights before. His first reaction was to say I was wrong, but the next day, in front of the class, he thanked me for the correction. Bruce and I were blessed.
Skull collecting began with a project in Bruce's advanced biology class. I can't say what the exact origin was, but somehow parts of a sheep carcass from my Dad's family farm were transported to the high school and put through the boiling and bleaching process in one of Mr. Barker's back rooms to become bone specimens. Bruce was way into it, and the end product was mesmerizing: clean, ivory components with teeth, squiggly sutures between the plates, and processes where ligaments and tendons had attached. And yes, it had that proximity to death that injected coolness. Bruce now had forbidden knowledge, and he shared it with me.
Our source material was dead livestock out at the farm and, more commonly, road kill. With the support of Dad, (Mom not so much, but she didn't object) we started keeping a knife and plastic bag in the car for, well, those times when you need those things. Depending on the state of the deceased, we would boil the head in an old pot over a fire in the back yard, remove the softened tissues, then bleach the bones in jars of hydrogen peroxide. We did this discreetly. I suppose there were times at our home when an unexpected guest would have had an unpleasant experience, but it wasn't like we were the "skull boiling family" on the street. Scrub here and there with a toothbrush, let it dry, glue the loose teeth back in, and voila! - science, art (sort of), and something deeply real. Not to mention an opportunity for highly original gift giving.
The easy additions to the collection were animals like cow, horse, racoon, deer, opossum, and squirrel. Slightly more exotic were the skulls of a skunk and red fox. Bird skulls are fragile and hard to prepare, as are those of small rodents so we didn't pursue them much. We had a beaver skull that was quite cool because you could remove and reinsert the surprisingly long curved teeth, but it's been lost in the winds of time. We never got a pig. I have the lower jaw of a seal.
Predator skulls are prized because of their amazing teeth, combined with being relatively harder to find. I still don't have a coyote. On a summer family road trip to California, on an American highway somewhere, we saw a mountain lion on the shoulder with it's tongue hanging out. We were going fast, there was nowhere to turn around, Mom was in the car, we were on vacation for Christ's sake! What did we think we were going to do - wrap it up, toss it in the trunk, and drive around under sunny skies for a week? My Dad and I still talk about the one that got away.
I cheated once. There was a store near Chicago in the 1970's that specialized in exotic meats - zebra, bear, ostrich. With the logistic and monetary support of my Dad we arranged to purchase the skull of an African lion and gave it to Bruce for Christmas. Bruce's daughter has it now. It has a bullet hole in the middle of its forehead.
About eight years ago I saw a dead woodchuck near the intersection of Johnson Street and the Yahara River and decided that it was a good time to introduce my son to this world. Owen came with me and witnessed the gory part. At the time he was more interested in his friend Noah than the boiling process taking place on the Weber, but he really liked the final product and my collection is now shared with him. The opossum skull that went away when Bruce moved out has been recently replaced thanks to road kill right in front of our house. Manna.
We don't have a primate skull, although I was holding a monkey head in my hand about a year ago. That is another story; one Bruce would have enjoyed.
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