Please help with skull sanitizing

[nestof3]

My son brought home a cranial skull of some animal -- I don't know what yet. He wants to keep it.

Is there any way I can sanitize it to make it safe?

I don't want to come in contact with any strange flesh-eating bacteria or anything.

[Jenny in Atl]

Here is a link that should help, if it still has meat and fur?
http://www.wildlifenews.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlife_news.view_article&articles_id=27&issue_id=11

If not... here are a few other methods.
http://cals.arizona.edu/pubs/natresources/az1144.pdf

I just bleach ours if all the flesh and fur is gone.

[nestof3]

Thanks -- it's just the bone.

[Doran]

Thanks -- it's just the bone.


...a simple wash with basic soap and water, then leave it somewhere outside for a couple weeks. We usually put ours up on the shed roof of our garage. Gosh, now it sounds like I've got quite the skull collection, doesn't it? ;)

I'll also add that we're aren't too skeeved by clean "nature" finds. We tend to ooh and ahh without worrying too much about the bacterial aspect. Case in point, several weeks ago, I was vacuuming under our bed and found a desicated frog, presumably dragged in by our cats in the fall. Looked like some kind of mummified thing, and it didn't smell. So, it has lived on a bookshelf in our hallway until just this morning, when I finally tossed it into the compost!


So, you may want to consider someone else's advice before mine. :D

Doran

[mcconnellboys]

Yeah, I think what Doran said would be fine. If it's a very thin skull of a smaller animal, though, you may want to go easy on the amount of bleach and just rinse it over it (not soak it) as full strength bleach might actually dissolve something very thin.

Regena

[Jenny in Atl]

We are rather bad about "cleaning" our specimens. Dd 7 has a ton of them. Skulls, teeth, spines, dead snakes, and who know what else. I did not want to share what we did..
http://www.clicksmilies.com/s1106/tiere/animal-smiley-039.gif

[PrairieAir]

Wanna hear something cool? If you put a coyote skull with fur and some rotted flesh still attached in a bucket with about 50% bleach (more than you were told) and leave it there waaaaay longer than your mother says hoping the remnants will eventually fall off, after about a month it will turn to the consistency of cantaloupe and then after two or three months it will fall apart when you try to pick it up with a stick. (Is that sentence long enough?) If you try to show it to your mother, she will lock you out of the house and refuse to let you in until you've properly disposed of the mess.:ack2:

[MichelleWI]

We've never cleaned any of our finds. If there is tissue or hair attached, we are more careful about handling it until it's been around a while. That sounds gross when I type it out, I imagine.

We have friends who bury their skeletal finds in anthills. Apparently the ants clean them very nicely and leave them sparkling white. They live in the south, though, and I'm not sure Northern ants will do the same job.

[Pencil Pusher]

I couldn't help it. The title made me think of it.

Bummer, I couldn't find a link.

Oh well, there was a theologian about a hundred years ago who came up with this idea of "mental hygiene"-- meaning that to keep his mental "palate" clean, he wouldn't read anything but the Bible. But he wrote his own stuff, & he was FAR OUT. Can't remember his name, just had a pastor who mentioned him in passing. It's become a joke around here--whenever dh or I do something dumb or refuse to listen to something the other's reading, we accuse ea other of (or claim to be practicing) mental hygiene.

Hm. Was that way too far off to be funny? Did you have to be there? :leaving: Sorry. Consider yourselves true friends if that is the case. Many of my irl friends look at me w the same blank stares when I try to tell a funny story. :D