"Bones With Bling" in Fortean Times

Via Morbid Anatomy (which you should be reading if you like the morbid, odd, and peculiar), there's an article in the Fortean Times on "the amazing jewelled skeletons of Europe," titled Bones with Bling.

I'm not likely to link to Fortean Times very often, but this is an interesting piece about a forgotten part of Catholic Christian history, when supposedly psychic priests would "discover" the bones of saints and martyrs which would then be lavishly decorated as relics. Of course, many of the skeletons had probably belonged to ordinary people--even pagans--but more saintly relics meant greater prestige for the Church and could mean increasing attendance (and therefore wealth) at smaller churches.

Whether these bones belonged to holy people or ordinary people, they certainly make beautiful displays.

OsteoSophy on Etsy

I added intercaps in the name, mostly because it looked nicer on the banner. So, yeah. I opened (another) Etsy shop to sell my new line of copper animal skull jewellery (because I don't already have too many things to do).

Here are the first few items for sale (and after this, I probably won't mention this stuff again, unless I make something really exciting, but I will add a widget or link or something to the sidebar).

First, I made a thylacine (above, posing on a whitetail deer skull), because everyone needs a thylacine. Right?

 Then a fox, which I really made for myself. I listed it for sale, but if someone buys it, I'll have to make another for me.

 A badger, which never fails to lodge that silly song "badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom" in my head (don't know what I'm talking about? go here).

Finally, a snowshoe hare, because things other than carnivores have cool skulls, too. I've got a whole pile of drawings ready to resize so I can make more--deer, goat, dolphin, bear, various birds, some herps. Eventually I'll add some dinosaurs.

Convergent Skulls: Walrus and Elephant

I was watching on episode of Oddities a while ago (a great tv series for skelephiles and other fans of odd stuff), and someone brought in a walrus mandible (actually both mandibles fused). The expert they had look at the bone commented on how similar it was to an elephant mandible, despite the very different diets of the two animals.

That got me thinking about walrus and elephant skulls and the similarities they have evolved, largely due to the fact that both animals need skulls that can support a massive pair of tusks. Of course, there are also a lot of differences, but have a look at these simplified illustrations.

Obviously, these are not to scale. I don't have anything profound to say here, just that it's cool to think about how the bones of animals can be so similar or so different, depending on how they developed.

Bone Art: Takayuki Hori

Here's something absolutely breathtaking: "Oritsunagumono" by artist Takayuki Hori.

Each piece was printed on translucent paper and then folded using traditional origami patterns. Some of them have coloured images of trash superimposed on them, as a comment on "the animal's plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem."

The pieces are displayed on a lightbox, with an unfolded version of the image in a frame on the wall behind. See more photographs on designboom. Really, go and look, this work is just amazing.

Some of you may know that I'm also a letterpress printer, and I'm just dying to borrow this idea and letterpress print skeletons on origami paper. I don't know if I will, though, except maybe to make a few for myself.