This story, Skull, Inc., initially ran within the June/July 2014 challenge. You can discover extra tales from the final 15 years of Outdoor Life right here.
LIKE PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS, taxidermists develop their very own inventive type and signature. Capes are their canvases and Styrofoam their clay, their medium for expression. But cranium mounts are completely different. There’s no room for inventive license or interpretation. Just the irreproachable fantastic thing about bone formed solely by the hand of God, or, should you want, by the forces of evolution.
Or perhaps we, as hunters, love skulls just because they appear so darn cool.
However deep or superficial your attraction to wildlife osteology, you’re most likely among the many congregation of America’s foremost temple of cranium and bone: Skulls Unlimited International.
Though few natural-historical past buffs notice it, a lot of them have admired the handiwork of this uncommon firm, situated within the ragged outskirts of Oklahoma City, for many years. Skulls Unlimited is the world’s main provider of museum-quality skulls and skeletal specimens. Its merchandise are in all places, from native nature facilities to the Smithsonian Institution, and from junior-high science lecture rooms to the labs at Harvard Medical School. And increasingly, its craft is gracing the dens of hunters.
“We’re now cleaning and whitening more than 50,000 skulls per year, and one of our fastest-growing services is processing big-game skulls,” says Jay Villemarette, who based Skulls Unlimited in 1986. “In 2013, we did more than 2,000 whitetails alone.” That’s at $125 a pop.*
Bare Bones Beginning
In the early years, Villemarette and his spouse operated the enterprise out of their kitchen. Today, the corporate has 21 staff and a campus with two buildings in a light-industrial space southeast of downtown. The foremost constructing homes a formidable 7,000-square-foot Museum of Osteology and a present store. On show are some 300 full skeletons and 400 skulls. It’s skilled and orderly, however some guests actually turn out to be faint or nauseated. Nevertheless, the museum is a rising attraction and will be rented for weddings, birthdays, and different non-public occasions.
An adjoining transport space is a pulse of commerce. What started 28 years in the past with a one-page value checklist is now a retail and mail-order agency with a 130-page catalog and on-line gross sales worldwide. Christmas is the busiest time. Need a stocking stuffer on your child? See web page 8 to order a shrew for $29, plus transport and dealing with. A staffer will pluck one from a bin of shrew skulls and ship it specific. How a couple of bison? Page 75: $349 giant, $260 common. In between these bodily extremes are skulls, claws, eggs, and different artifacts from tons of of species, sport and non-game, frequent and endangered–even extinct–from across the planet. Some are replicas; many are actual.
Villemarette is delicate to perceptions that he’s over-commercializing wildlife. A letter on the catalog’s first web page assures prospects that Skulls Unlimited resells specimens attained solely via authorized and moral means, resembling roadkills, pure deaths, and zoo attritions, and from regulated looking and trapping.
Skulls are also acquired underneath uncommon circumstances. In early 2014, the corporate bought and started promoting an assortment of California sea lion skulls. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 usually prohibits possession of sea lions, however this was a analysis assortment courting again to the Fifties, exempt from the act’s protections. Each cranium comes with a invoice of sale and letter of authorization from the federal authorities.
Another space of sensitivity is human stays. Villemarette is cautious to respect the dignity of those that’ve donated their our bodies to science. His firm discreetly receives, cleans, whitens, and markets human skulls and skeletons on the market strictly to medical, academic, and tutorial establishments. Human skulls are graded and priced from $1,250 to $1,850, based mostly on bone high quality and variety of enamel.
Villemarette says the legal guidelines governing possession of animal elements are literally extra restrictive and complicated than these for human elements. Why salvage the mortal stays of people? They are a useful device for medical analysis.
“If you break your arm,” Villemarette says, “would you rather see a doctor who has experience with real human bone, or replicas made out of resin?”
Repository of Death
From the comparatively sterile entrance constructing, it’s a couple of steps throughout a parking space to Skulls Unlimited’s second constructing. This is the place uncooked supplies arrive for processing. Local UPS and FedEx drivers be taught to seek out the receiving door shortly, keen to dump the packing containers with the very best odds of changing into the day’s smelliest supply. Insurance laws prohibit public entry, citing “mental anguish” considerations for guests. The TV collection Dirty Jobs filmed a stint right here, with host Mike Rowe visibly aghast.
As the door opens, you catch your first whiff of putrefied meat and bleach.
Behind the door is usually what you’d anticipate: fuming stench, staff with knives, glass tanks crammed with flesh-eating beetles, plastic tubs for numerous chemical baths. But on autumn days, the quantity and number of critters is wonderful. Amid the piles of deer is all method of fauna. Wildebeest, elk, lions, pronghorns, snapping turtles, baboons, wolves, and warthogs wait, oozing, for his or her flip within the lineup.
The room appears to assault all 5 senses, but Villemarette all of the sudden raises his nostril to a relatively delicate and sudden scent.
“Salmon!” he publicizes, explaining that the beetles generally emit the odor of regardless of the animal had been consuming. Sure sufficient, one of many aquariums held a half-cleaned Alaskan brown bear cranium.
Piecing It All Together
Ironically, probably the most suave side of the enterprise happens in a room adjoining the carnage, the place newly cleaned, dry, white osteological specimens are staged. Along with custom-processed sport skulls and numerous animal skulls for basic sale, there are fishnet luggage of unfastened bones prepared for assembling into full skeletons. Articulation is one other progress space for Skulls Unlimited, and it requires staff with specialised expertise. With their studied data of anatomy, kinesiology, and composition, and commerce expertise starting from carpentry to welding, articulators are equal elements Leonardo da Vinci and Tim the Tool Man.
As a demo, one of many artisans dumps a sack of greater than 200 bones (a grey fox, by the way) right into a random jumble on a workbench. Instinctively, he begins sorting and laying out elements. Vertebrae are shortly aligned behind the cranium and prolonged via the tip of the tail. Ribs are positioned so as on both facet. Limbs are shortly assembled from shoulders and hips right down to the phalanges.
Articulators fasten bones collectively utilizing drills, wires, rods, and glues. An epoxy compound is concocted to interchange discs between vertebrae and different cartilaginous components, so the animal returns to its authentic dimensions and construction.
The store is crammed with skeletons locked in dramatic poses. A coyote runs flat-out. A leopard assaults a springbok. A whitetail buck turns to examine its backtrail.
“Most skeletons are for educational institutions, but we also do a number of dogs and cats for people who want to memorialize their pets,” says Villemarette. “And we’re hearing from more hunters who are now considering articulated skeletons instead of full-body mounts.”
Dog and cat skeletons begin at $995. A quail hunter who desires to maintain ol’ Banjo in his fashionable high-head-and-tail-pointing stance will spend nearer to $1,800. Complete whitetails run $5,400.
Despite upward tendencies, realistically, naked bones aren’t destined to interchange basic taxidermy as most well-liked trophy-room decor. Lifelike mounts will all the time be extra common for preserving particular experiences afield, as a result of an animal’s seen magnificence and character are showcased by pores and skin, not skeleton. Still, inside many hunters and anglers lives an avid naturalist who is almost as fascinated by the purposeful magnificence that lies beneath fur and feather.
We’re interested in cranium mounts not a lot as a result of they’re comparatively low-cost, however as a result of they rouse our curiosity and we marvel on the physiological diversifications that make each sport species what it’s–a masterpiece of its setting.
And as a result of they appear so darn cool.
How to Sell Your Skulls
If you already promote squirrel tails to Mepps to be used of their inline spinners, hear up: There’s a useful by-product on the different finish of the carcass, too. Skulls Unlimited buys tons of of skulls and full skeletons–of squirrels and different species–yearly. The firm is all the time looking out for each uncommon and customary specimens.
The course of is easy. Email a photograph of the merchandise alongside together with your asking value. If there’s a deal, and all is authorized, you’ll ship the merchandise to them and obtain fee
Anatomy of a Deer Skull
A) ORBIT: Eye sockets on the perimeters of the top are a basic characteristic of prey species, offering wide-view protection in opposition to predators. Deer can spot motion in a near-310-degree discipline of view.
B) ROSTRUM: This bony construction protects the massive, elongated nasal canal crammed with membranes that seize scent particles. Research suggests a deer’s nostril is 100 instances extra delicate than a human’s.
C) HARD PALATE: Like different ruminants, deer haven’t any higher entrance enamel. A tough palate supplies a broad chew floor for the decrease incisors, an adaptation that permits quicker feeding and fewer time uncovered to predators. Deer can eat by shortly tearing and pinching off vegetation, then returning to cowl to regurgitate and chew cud.
D) AUDITORY BULLAE: Sound collected by a deer’s giant, swiveling outer ears is funneled via small, conical ducts into these bulbous constructions defending the center and interior ears. Deer hear higher than people, however not almost in addition to predators like cougars, which have giant, extremely developed auditory bullae.
E) CRANIUM: A tough case for the mind, the middle of the nervous system.
F) DIASTEMA: The giant hole between the exhausting palate and cheek enamel acts as a pocket for holding meals objects whereas shopping, and for manipulating cud.
G) PRE-MOLARS AND MOLARS: These are designed for grinding robust plant materials.
A biologist in 1949 was the primary to estimate deer age by inspecting put on and eruption patterns of cheek enamel within the decrease jaw. Correlations between age and higher enamel are comparatively unstudied.
*This story was revealed in 2014. Current cranium cleansing costs are $169 for a whitetail.
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