Friday, May 06, 2005

Natural History (Dead Stuff) continued

WARNING: You may not want to read this before/during dinner/if you're squeamish when it comes to dead things

We dug up the rabbit skull (see Archives, February). Unfortunately we had left it in the ground for too long. The fissures that hold the bones of a skull together, had begun to seperate. The thinner parts at the base of the skull had partially disintegrated. The intricate nasal cavity folds - surprisingly similar to the fox in intricacy but obviously in a shorter snout - were crumbling. While useless for my brother's skull collection, I may yet use it in a sculpture...

Fortunately the darned blackbirds had disturbed the comorant skull a couple of months ago when it was almost ready. It's sitting in a plastic container waiting to me to dab a bit of PVA glue on its skull fissues, mandible and what not. Why didn't we just dig up the rabbit skull back then? In previous anticipation (is that a tautology?), we dug up gooey possum and rancid fox, that's why.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this part of some freaky Frankenstein experiment to reanimate dead tissue?

Or better yet, a Weird Science experiment. That movie was cool.

Mel said...

More pre-dinner morbidity. Warnings like that only serve to further compel one to look....

Lady Meerkat said...

It's more about valueing the inherant beauty of a natural object. The means of getting this object is icky, but the result is a thing of artistic beauty, intricacy as well as stimulating amateur scientific thought.

[chuckles] You can't say I didn't warn you this time!