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Preserving Skulls/Skeletons Anonymous
I was at a reptile zoo today, and they had some lizard skulls and a chameleon skeleton there.
So i thought this might be a cool thing to do.
Has anybody here ever tried to preserve bones, or even a skeleton?
>> 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.
>> Anonymous
>>48302
Wow, actual help on 4chan! Thanks! Do you have pictures of your work?
I've read about letting ants do the work before, and have thought about what would happen, if i leave a carcass in the woods.
i also thought about the disease issue. What could actually happen? Not that i want to touch icky stuff with bare hands anyways.
Ive got no problems with handling and cleaning the bones, once they are revealed, im not sure if i could cut open an animal, and rip it apart, so your method sounds very good for a start.
I want to do small animals, preferably reptiles. They'll be hard to get by around here, though. Frogs will be easier, since they tend to die under ice in small ponds.
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
<- just buy some clay and make one
>> Anonymous
I bury my bones and come back about a month later.
If you put it in a cage and tie it to a tree, most likely someone will find it and take it down due to health hazards.
>> Anonymous
We've got a fully grown adult Mata Mata skeleton at the shop I work at.

Whenever something notable dies, we usually put it in with the flesh-eating beetle colony, let them clean it, then bleach the bones.

I'd suggest looking into aquiring yourself some flesh munchers to house, then you can feed them on whatever you want to clean up and keep.
>> Anonymous
>>48347
Yea, i've read about those beetles. Apparently they also use these for human remains...

But keeping these beetles, (you have a scientific name for them?) seems a bit over the top for my purposes.

Another question: most sites mention boiling, with various chemicals, but they mention the issue of over boiling the bones. However i did not find out what effect this would have?
>> Anonymous
>>48456
I would not boil the bones, because it changes the structure and the bone becomes prone to splintering.
>> Anonymous
>>48456
Dermestes maculatus
>> TehJessie
I most definately have. I have a wolf skull sitting on my desk...I preserved it wrong, though so the top of the skull has gotten all flaky and such.
>> Anonymous
Back in my days working at the college, we used muric acid and straight hydrogen peroxide in the process. Though in both cases you have to time it just right before the acid finishes the flesh and starts into the periosteum.

Dermestid beetles sometimes require a license or such too. We had a hell of a time getting them at the college even with a teacher's license and full documentation. I think it is because they could be really nasty if they got loose in the wild – or more than likely good for disposing of bodies. heh.
>> Jolta
Boiling is what everyone does with deer heads around here. Boil, bleach and mount on plate. Splintering doesn't happen that easily unless you handle the skull a lot.