St. Luke's Attic

I had a real thing for bones in college. I mean a real thing. My patient wife would put up with me scouting the woods for old skeletons, making trips to taxidermy shops for leftovers, ditto for petshops (before you get all mad at me, they were already dead), even the occasional roadkill pick up. As a result I have quite a respectable skull and skeleton collection.

The question is, however, why? I think my fascination with bones goes back to my love of dinosaurs. The funny thing about dinosaurs is that we know them more by their skeletons than by what they looked like in life. I thought about what the reverse of that would be. What do living animals look like under their skin? A triceratops skeleton looks normal while a dog skeleton looks bizarre.

So I decided to look for skeletons of extant animals. While a living raccoon is familiar, its skeleton looks alien. For your enjoyment, I have here a small drawing of a skull that my kids found. It looks very strange until you realize it is probably the remains of a pug.

Ooohh, weird.