I find bones utterly fascinating, and I'm very happy to say that I have a spouse that understands and appreciates this. That's why when my wife spotted a dessicated deer carcass on the side of the road, she said "Do you want to stop and see it?" rather than "Eww!" It was what was left of young adult male deer, his antlers being relatively small, and just about all the internal organs had rotted away. The head was arched back over the vertebral column, the feet had fallen off the limbs, and the skin was a tough "jerky" that ran down its back, curling in on itself like a scroll.
The skeleton as a whole was a far cry from the beautiful, polished specimens I've often seen in museums or in photographs. The bones were frayed, splinters of bone and periosteum sticking out off the surface, but fortunately for me the skull was still in good shape. I decided to collect it. This was no easy task. Even though the skeleton was dried out, I could still see the spinal cord inside the vertebra, and the dried skin reinforced the spine. Ultimately I broke the neck three vertebrae down, but the skin was another problem. I needed a cutting tool.
My wife and I ran back to the house we were at, grabbed some gloves and branch trimmers (the only things we could find) and headed back down the road. We got a few quizzical looks from people passing by, me attacking the dried hide with the trimmers and my wife holding the skull down with her foot, but ultimately I was able to get it free. I tried to breathe through my mouth and not pay attention to the few maggots still squirming on some soft parts that hadn't fully decomposed, but ultimately I was able to cut off most of the fur and hard skin, picking up a scapula that had fallen off as a "bonus."
So now I've got a deer skull, but the problem of cleaning it presents itself. I'm looking up some information on how to do this now, but if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to share them. Admittedly the cervid cranium is a bit smelly, having the pungent odor of a basement gymnaisum that has soaked up sweat for 75 years, but if the carcass was any fresher I would have left things well enough alone. Most of the work is done for me, but some of the skin and fur is still clinging to the top of the skull, and I imagine I'm going to have to face the unpleasant experience of removing the brain through the foramen magnum, too.
If nothing else, I figure this is a way to add something to my collection and to learn a new skill that could very well come in handy in the future. I wish I had a camera to document the process as I learn as I go along (it could make for some good blogging), but for now you'll just have to settle for the text. All I can say is that I'm glad that I have a supportive wife. It's a rare woman that will help you wrench the skull off a deer carcass on a Friday night.
Update: Just to allay any concerns, I was careful, used gloves, and washed my hands many times over, and will try to be as safe as possible through this processes. Deers can carry a number of diseases, and I don't intend on catching anything from my extracurricular activities.
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Bury it under a pile of manure for a few months. It will come out clean and shining.
Dermestid beetles or boiling...
Or you might email Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science, he is a zooarchaeologist and should be able to help you.
You've come to the right nutcase, Brian! I have extensive experience in self-cleaning bones. I should really put some pictures up of the skulls I've cleaned myself, 'cause I've done three skulls (including a deer), two skeletons, and a failed attempt at a third.
At any rate...here's what you'll need:
A giant boiling pot that you will NEVER use for preparing food. I mean ever. Next, you'll need surgical tools. I'm not sure where you get surgical tools--I was able to fanagle some out of my dentist. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you'll need a water pick. A high-powered water pick.
Using a combination of tools and physical force, skin the thing. Pop the eyes out, the tongue, basically anything that is not firmly attached to the bones within. This is, perhaps, the messiest part, and certainly the bloodiest. Depending on how "fresh" the head is, this could be easy or really hard.
Next, put hot water in the pot and get it to a boil (ideally outside, perhaps on a grill), and drop the skinned skull in. Let it boil for a long time. It will STINK. It will stink to high heaven, sir. When you can no longer see the head through the creamy, white water within, dump it all out onto the ground (hopefully birds will consume the sloughed-off meat as they do up here in Alaska).
Now grab those surgical tools and start snipping and tearing off meaty bits. The ligaments are very difficult to tear off completely. Crap comes out of every sinus hole in the skull, so be prepared to use tweezers to pull stuff out. This process takes a long time, and a noseclip is recommended. Leave the skull out at night, and hopefully some birds or small mammals (or bugs) will help you out while you're sleeping.
Re-boil every day, which will keep the meat soft. When you've gotten all (or most) of the external meat off, you'll want to grab your water pick. There are two ways to get the brains out: Crack open the back of the skull (right above the spinal chord hole) or...and this is disgusting...water-pick it to death. I've done both, and they work fine, but...you know, ew.
No matter what process you use to grab the brain, you'll need the pick to clean off the inside of the skull. On to the sinuses! The sinuses take a long time too, but that's just because there is a TON of tissue in there. This is where the water pick will do most of the work for you. Just stick it in the nose and turn that sucker on high. Juices and tissue will go flying out the spinal chord hole.
The final step is to leave that sucker out in the sun. This works better than bleach, and it's actually less damaging to the bone. Sunbaking the skull will dry everything out, and some of that connective tissue that was tough to pry off before will be able to be cut away when dried. Flies will congregate for about a week and finalize your work. Once the specimen is dry as a toothpick, wash it off and display proudly in your trophy (or book) room.
That's how I managed to successfully tackle a pig, wolf, and deer skulls. The deer was my first try, and it doesn't look nearly as good as the wolf and pig. Skeletons are MUCH more difficult, but far more rewarding. Well, maybe mammals aren't as bad, but birds (which is what I've done) are terribly fragile...and maggot-prone. :-P
Yes, beetles are also an option. You can pay a local taxadermy shop to let the head sit in a vat of beetles for about two weeks, OR you can keep a small tank of beetles in your garage. There are pros and cons to this:
Pro: Whenever you find a dead ANYTHING, you just stick it in the tank! Awesome!
Con: If any of the beetles get out, they will eat you in your sleep.
Yes, my girlfriend says that one of the reasons that she keeps me is that I'm willing to help her with the gory butchering jobs.
I used to be the spouse who had to decapitate the deer carcass... and what did it get me??? Huh? What did it get me?
Dermestid beetles. do your dirty work for you. taxidermy websites can sell you some.
I have a deer skull that my friends' dogs found, and it was clean inside and out (presumably by fire ants), as well as sunbleached. The only pieces of tissue remaining were in the infraorbital foramina, perhaps remnants of the nerve sheath for that trigeminal nerve branch. I also have the skull of a female opossum that was hit by a car in front of my house, and that work was accomplished by black vultures and turkey vultures, followed by fire ants.
My favorite skulls, though, were given to me by a friend's rancher uncle, and they are from a pair of striped skunks. The skull of the female skunk has a small bullet hole over the right orbit. They were completely clean (again, probably fire ants) and sunbleached when I got them. The fire ants seem to do a good job or removing soft tissue, but you can't assume that just because you don't see any tissue, the ants can't find any either. I usually quarantine the skull in a plastic bag for awhile, so that any sinus-spelunking ants find their ways out.
Boil for hours then pick, pick, pick, pick.
Beatles will work. Hadn't heard of the manure trick.
Once you are done defleshing. Place the skull in a shallow pan and pour in a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Then take cotton balls, wet then in plaster the skull with the damp wads. Redampen periodically until nice and white. Do not apply to antlers.
You didn't take pictures??
Where are the pics Yankee?
Sheeesh.
Here:
http://www.minnesotabucks.com/tips%20cleaning%20skulls.htm
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. It seems like there's more than one way to clean a skull! I'm not sure what I'm going to go with yet (the manure or beetles sound best; I can wait and I don't think my upstairs neighbors would appreciate the smell of boiling deer skull), but I'll put up updates of how its going.
I would have loved to take pictures, but like I mentioned a few weeks ago, my apartment was robbed and my camera was stolen. I'll take some pictures when I eventually get a new one, but for now I just don't have anything to take pictures with. I wish I could have gotten pictures of the whole skeleton and don't a little mini-taphonomy study, but the carcass isn't anywhere near me (I'm actually petsitting for someone this weekend, and the carcass is near their house).
Sounds like a fun project. I'd go for the manure. You don't need right away, right? Now if I had a tank of beetles...I'd be a different sort of person.
Good luck.
If you wind up doing birds give us the details. Bird skeletons sound difficult.
First of all: Ewwwww! Ewwww! Ewww! Ewwww! Double ewwww on Zach's description which I stupidly read. There is a reason I became a cell biologist and I only work with yeast.
Okay, now that I'm done with that I'd like to say that I'm happy for yo--both that you stumbled across this find and that your wife is so supportive. It's the little things like this that keep a marriage together.
The only thing I can add is my vote for the beetles. I know that's what museums use when they need to clean a carcass. If you know someone at a natural history museum, perhaps you can get them to drop in into their colony for you. Or perhaps there's one at Rutgers. Although, you can probably learn a lot from doing the cleaning yourself. Perhaps you could do some of the cleaning yourself and then give the skull to the beetles.
One more thing: deer in certain areas carry a prion disease. I'm not sure how wide-spread it is but it's another thing to be cautious about. Not that I think you are planning to eat any of this deer.
Ok, my girlfriend had this exact problem with one I got here. The answer is easy.
Don't bother boiling, this is a big mess.
Dermestid beadles might work, but you have to get them, and that takes time. They might also not like the older meat as much as they would fresh.
The easy way, which is used by Skulls Unlimited and that my girlfriend used was maseration.
Go get a big plastic tub with a sealing lid. Put it out back of your house, as far as you can from anywhere people will smell it. Fill it with water and put the skull in. Poor out the water every day or so with associated crap (this will smell like the worst thing ever.
This method takes time, but it will get rid of all the stuff inside and out as it runs the course.
Well, according to wiki, Thadd has your answer. "Controlled putrefaction" it is:
You can stick it inside an anthill too, you know, if you don't mind disturbing the ants. I have no idea which ant species, if any, are protected in your area. Lift the top 1/3 or 1/2 of the hill off with a spade, put the skull there, then upend the spade on the skull. Go back in June. As long as you don't cut the anthill too deep down, this method will leave the colony functional and fundamentally intact.
I have actually done just what Joel recommends, buried rabbit, porcupine, and a goose skull in a large anthill. The rabbit was fresh, the others, not so much. It took about three weeks in midsummer to clean bone, but a deer skull is larger, and your ant hill might be smaller.
I had previously tried the boiling method with a rabbit skull. It smells like - well like boiling an animal head, requires horrible picky, slimy removing of flesh and skin, and the boiling somewhat softens the bone. Worse, the person who gave me that rabbit head lied: he said it had been killed by snaring, but turned out to have been shot with a twenty-two or something, and had shattered forehead under the fur.
Hey, boiling animal heads is a time-honored method to prepare meat for tamales down here!
Fire ants (not an option for Laelaps because he's too far north) are an invasive species, and no one would complain if you disturbed one of their mounds to clean a (non-human) skull. In fact, you could let them do your dirty work, and then kill the colony by feeding them unprepared grits (which are in turn fed to the queen, causing her to burst, or simply die of disgust).
Coturnix' suggestion of the manure pile also works, at least with horse manure. I cleaned a rat skull in this manner, but there may have been some fire ant action as well. Just make sure no one hauls off your precious bones in a load of manure for their garden!
I've used Dermestid beetles before with very good results. They get into all the nooks and crannies that are easily missed.
You can buy them on E-Bay very cheaply.
We just stick our found bones and heads outside.
When they are cleaned off we boil them in the barn and let them sun dry. My daughter has quite a collection of them as the dogs find stuff all the time.
Also, a good place to look for nice clean sunbleached bones is in rocky backbeach areas. I've found various bird skulls (including a perfect heron skull), a mystery skull that might be a small big-eyed dog, beaver, porcupine, a large seal, and one young ram skull (near base of cliff, top of which was sheep farm).
Awesome story. The highlight of my Christmas Eve last year was a phone call from a friend telling me he'd found a fresh beaver by the side of the road and had stashed it in his parent's freezer so we could stuff it after the holiday break...
I've done a lot of prepping as an assistant in the mammalogy lab, but really all the good advice about cleaning bones has already been given. Good luck with your project!
Seeing the word "maseration" [sic] instills in me the image of firing a beam of microwaves at a deer head until it asplodes.
My dad is a deer hunter, so I grabbed one of his remaining bones after he got the meat he wanted and tried the boiling method to no success. The problem: it was a young male deer so it still had epiphyseal growth plates. My solution: bury the thing for six months. It is currently buried, so I do not know the results yet, but I will find out in June! It was just so fresh and I am in a populous area with no land to let it just sit out for a while.
Boiling or burying are common methods. I've heard of the manure trick too, although I've not tried it myself. Others swear by it though and for something as potentially fragile as a skull, the longer but gentler methods can often be better.
Another place you could try for advice is the archives of the zooarch mailing list (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ZOOARCH.html). I'm sure I can remember this topic coming up before.
I've used the various enzyme-based laundry products to macerate fish skeletons. Just put the head in water with some product (can't think of a brand name at the moment)and seal it up. Check it fairly regularly and change the water and add more product. The smell isn't as bad as just letting the skeleton macerate in water and the process can go fairly fast. One wonders how a meat tenderizer would work.
Make sure you clean it fully and properly! Or else it will stay greasy and smell. I used to work in a zooarch lab, so trust me on this.
You can email my old boss, Shirley Harpham (shirley.harpham@ualberta.ca) for advice; she'll be able to tell you everything you need to do. She's a zooarchaeologist and routinely defleshes and cleans bones for the university's collections.
Have fun.
Let dermestid beetles do the hard work for you. Or ants.
Why not cook it first and then take the meat off? That should soften the connective tissue and you can always cook it again (and again).
Throw in a little onion and it might not smell so bad! :-)
Wot no household insurance? Should cover theft.
I agree with the maceration method. I have done this with four animal heads so far.
Let the head rot in a tub of water for a few weeks.
Then allow running water into the tub or bucket to clean the rotted flesh off the bone. The flesh and fur that has fallen off will usually float to the top and overflow right out. But if it does not, just dump it a out carefully, being careful not to lose any teeth.
Add a de-greasing agent (Rid X) after most of the meat is off the skull. Let this go for another few weeks.
Then replace all the water, add 10%ish hydrogen peroxide to bleach/sterilize for 2-3 days.
Let the skull dry, and glue in any teeth or cracked pieces with Elmer's glue.
This method seems to work very well. Helps if you have a fume hood while you are defleshing because the stench is as bad as you can imagine.
I see a few good comments on here. But beetles are the only way to go. You can buy your beetles from ward's supply for more money than they are worth. Ebay has dermistd beetles for a reasonable price from time to time. I would head to wal-mart and buy a 45 gal tote with a lid Buy some beetles off ebay, there is a man there that I buy my beetles from his name is Randy. Normally you get a 1000+ from him when you buy, now the prices are from $50-$100 per thou. after you get your beetles you want to only feed them rung out hot dog's for the first week or so. The reason for that you want them to have a stable eating habit before you put a skull in. when they get shiped they may not eat for a few days or longer thats why we introduce the hot dogs to them. It will take 1000 bugs some time to clean a skull, I have well over 10,000 and Im getting to the point were it only takes a day or two to clesn a skull. After the skull has been cleaned by the beetles shake it off then mix a 50/50 solution of water and rubbing alcohol, place the skull in there for a few hours(it will just get rid of the left over beetles). Then what I like to do is fill a tub (about the size of your sink) with hot water and dawn dish soap and let it soak for about two hours. Once that is done take it out and let it set in the shade out side for a day to dry. Now its time to make it white, get some volume 40 from the wifes hair dresser take it home and use a brush to apply the volume 40 to the skull. now I put it on for a one hour soak then rinse, if you want it whiter do it again just be real careful not to get the volume 40 on the horns because it will take the color out of them. then place it out to air dry, and your done.
tie it in a lake full of fish and let it sit for awhile (6 months or so). Make sure no goes and steals your skull if its a nice one