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Anonymous
Skeletons require a lot of patience becasue you have to re-assemble all those tiny little bones. Unless you have a lot of expertise with animal anatomy and you have some model-building experience, I wouldn't attempt a whole skeleton.
Skulls are easy though, you don't have to do any difficult work.
This has worked well for me: First, find your dead animal. I'll leave that part up to you. Try and find it as fresh as you can, that way you don't have to deal with the smell, mess, and disease potential of fooling with a decaying body. Take the body (or just the head), and put it in a "cage" made of metal mesh. you want the metal to be sturdy and with fine openings. Chicken wire won't cut it. You need something like hardware cloth with 1/4" openings. Make sure your "cage" is secure and then put it in an outside area away from people. I suggest tying it to a tree. Now, you wait. Mother nature will do all the nasty work for you: ants, flies, and all kinds of other creepy crawlies will eat all the flesh off of your animal. The metal "cage" keeps larger animals from carrying off the bones and from damaging them while feeding.
Come back after about a month, and your bones will be clean and stink-free. I would still wear gloves just to be safe, however. Remove the bones you want. You may have to pick off some large bits of skin residue or cartilage, but they will be quite clean. If you want to clean them further, you can boil them in clean water. Do this outside, it smells. Once you are satisfied with the cleanliness of the bones, soak them in a solution of 15% chlorine bleach for a couple of hours. This will make the bones nice and white, and it also gets rid of any bad smells and bacteria that might be there.
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