The Dead Do Tell Tales

The next time someone watches my apartment I will have to post a warning about the skulls. A few are in plain sight, like a badger skull on the bookshelf and a comparative set of small animal crania on the desk, but there are a few more hidden away in drawers and closets. The present disorganization of my osteological collection was very unsettling to the young woman who was taking care of the place while my wife and I were out west. She opened a drawer looking for a pen or some such thing and instead found a raccoon skull. Fortunately for her nerves she did not open the outdoor storage closet; I had a deer skull drying in there.

My interest in bones is not always easy to explain to those who do not share my osteological fascination. While some write it off as eccentric others think it a rather macabre hobby, and I have sometimes fretted about having to explain to a traffic cop why there is a box of moose and deer bones in the back of the station wagon. (I really have to curate those things.) Indeed, for many folks bones are grisly reminders of death, but to me they have more to say about life.

Every bone tells a story. This is a simple fact that is easy to overlook. Think of the bones in your own skeleton right now. They have been reshaped constantly since the time you were born and will continue to be reshaped until the day you die. In this way a bone is like a snapshot of a moment (albeit the last moment) of a creature's life.

[If a bone contains a pathology indicative of an illness or injury that occurred sometime before death, the more interesting it becomes.]

Now, in many cases bones are destroyed. The bodies of the dead are consumed by predators, picked apart by scavengers, trampled by herbivores, and broken down by insects, fungi, and microorganisms. The skeleton of an animal as immense as an elephant can be reduced to splinters in a relatively short amount of time. (See Peter Beard's The End of the Game for stunning photographs of this breakdown in action.) Under more fortunate circumstances, however, bones might become buried and go through the process of fossilization. The original organic material is replaced, yet the cellular structure of the bones is preserved. Just like fresh bone, even the tiniest shard of fossil bone can tell us about the life of the past.

I also find skeletons to be aesthetically pleasing, especially since they make evolution so apparent. (Their beauty is exquisitely captured in Jean Baptise de Panafieu's Evolution.) Skeletons reveal evolution's architectural experiments; it is difficult to look at the bones of a lion or an Apatosaurus or a human and not think about what paleontologist W.D. Matthew once called "life's splendid drama." Differences between the skeletons of different species can easily be picked out, but it is even more moving to recognize the similarities. It is startling to witness the way in which the vertebrate skeleton has been modified into a wide array of different forms, something I had known for some time but I still found deeply moving when I strolled through the "Hall of Bones" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History last spring.

Contrary to the popular pirate aphorism, the dead do tell tales. This goes far beyond the efforts of forensic specialists to analyze crime scenes; every bone says something about the animal it once belonged to and how that creature lived. It can be easy to take this fact for granted, but I find it so wonderful that I have little doubt that my workspace will continue to become cluttered with fossils and bones for some time to come. I had better get to work on those "Warning" signs.