I collect animal skulls. It's a pretty slow growing collection as I have to wait till I stumble across a carcass before I get a new one but it's gradually increasing. Here's some pictures:
This is a pig skull. I learned a lot of lessons in preparation with one. It came from a spit roast at my brother-in-laws house, I asked if i could have the head when it was done. As it was cooked all the flesh and skin came off really easily, and i'll admit it was fun pulling Miss Piggy's face to pieces and seeing all the tendons and internal stuff (pigs cheeks are incredibly fatty, really horrible). But then i went and fucked it up by putting it through the dishwasher, hence the black mould that got into the bone. It also made the bone really soft so bits keep falling off it.
And this is a ram. I cheated with this actually, i nicked it from art class when I was in school (such a long time ago!) then forgot about it and found it at the back of a cupboard! Bonus!
This one's a rabbit. What i love about this one is how fragile it looks. Check out all the delicate 'framework' round the nose, it almost looks embroidered. And such a huge eye cavity! Crazy textures.
Here, quite literally, is a 'dirty rat'. I'm ashamed to say i never cleaned this up properly. I'm disgusting. Lovely shape to it though, reminds me of a sports car.
Squirrel. Again, a huge eye cavity similar to the rabbit, and all that fine detail round the nose. I guess bigger eyes are better for seeing predators. I got given this and the rabbit skull by a friend of mine who goes hunting. Now, i don't agree with hunting and i was pretty disgusted that he'd done this (i certainly didn't request the skulls) but he just phoned me up one day and offered some rabbit and squirrel heads. In my excitement my morals went out of the window and i told him to pop them in my wheelie bin as i was on holiday and i'd get them when i got back. I put them in my garage a few days later then like a complete tit i forgot about them. It was the middle of summer. Hot weather and dead things tend to like each other, and so about a fortnight later i get a hysterical call off my wife saying there's a terrible smell coming from the garage. I rushed home, opened the garage, and.....well, you can probably imagine. I spent the next hour shovelling maggots and rotten flesh over to the bottom of the garden and burying the lot, dry heaving throughout. It would have taken me less time but the fucking maggots kept running away so i had to round them up each time like a shitty 'death shepherd'. Total farce. Anyway, 3 months later i dug them up and had lovely clean skulls!
This beautiful raccoon skull was a gift from a work colleague for 'secret santa' one year. She ordered it off ebay and it's been professionally cleaned and prepared (bleached). It's by far the cleanest one i have. I love the intersecting lines on skulls, particularly predator skulls. The way the eye socket curves round and smoothly arches back over the lower jaw while the curve of that rises up like a sharks fin behind the eye cavity.
And look how the nasal cavity on predatory animals is shaped like a love heart.
Fantastic Mr Fox. Found this guy outside where i work, he'd been there months and was totally stripped of flesh, fully decomposed. So very easy to clean up.
Such amazing teeth. They just hang together so beautifully, it's almost like they're cuddling each other.
And finally this is a badger. My brother in law (another one) found this while walking his dog. I had to leave it months out in the open to decompose properly. When i finally collected the skull and bones i found that almost all the ribs on one side were broken. As it was near a road i can only assume it was hit by a car then crawled off and died. Hey check me out, i'm like fucking MacGuyver of the animal world!!
It's easy to see the beauty in nature most of the time, but it's not often you get to see the beauty beneath nature. Just look at how well put together this is, how smoothly the bone forms and takes shape. I find it staggering that such a robust and tough substance such as bone can look so soft and elegant.
