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Bone Building Books
Step-by-Step Guides for the Preparation and Articulation of Animal Skeletons
By Lee Post (a.k.a. Boneman)
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Skeleton Articulation Class At
Kenai Peninsula College - UAA
The local branch of the Kenai Peninsula College of the University of Alaska made a major score by hiring Professor Debbie Tobin for Marine Science classes. She also is a major player in the local marine mammal stranding network. Besides documenting and helping with necropsies, she, with her students and local volunteers, had collected bones from a gray whale and a complete Bering Sea beaked whale skeleton (I got to help). This led to various other marine mammals over the years being collected, necropsied, and the skeletons cleaned, usually by composting in horse manure.
Click on the first picture to see the slide show. There are more photos than just these nine
Skeleton Articulation Class - UAA
I teach a skeleton articulation class at the local branch of the Kenai Peninsula College of the University of Alaska. Debbie was typically too frantically busy (as were her students), to ever get very far in the articulation of any of these cleaned skeletons. So I offered to help her with an articulation class and she turned it around and instead offered to help me if I would teach one. So in the fall of 2014, I signed up to be an adjunct teacher for a one-credit class called Marine Skeleton Articulation Class - not really thinking I'd get enough students. Instead, it filled to overflowing with thirteen students. Seven of them were from out-of-state and were here for The Semester By the Bay Program that Debbie piloted for the KPC.
We had a 14-foot young female Stejnengers beaked whale we had collected and cleaned a few years prior. The big unknown was if nine, three-hour classes was enough time to get the whale built. It wasn't. But it got done anyway because many students started coming in on Saturdays and other open time slots to work on the skeleton. Time for formal teaching was limited to a couple lessons and note-taking opportunities were even more rushed. But on December 5, 2014, the whale was carried down the hall and suspended from a beam in the student services room. The whale, named Fancy, swims again. The class has been continued for the following 4 years.
Click here to see an article from the Homer News regarding this class.
* * * A special thank you to Michael Armstrong for the use of a few of his photos as indicated below. * * *
Following are photos taken from the first class.
Click on the first photo to start a slide show. There are a lot more photos than just these nine.
The following photos are of the finished skeletons from different years.
Click on the first photo to start the slide show.
Click the link below to see a timelapsed video of the sea lion articulation.
Skeletons in a Box
The beluga whale is one of the skeleton-in-a-box kits we have done. An aluminum frame that comes out of a box and
snaps together and a full skeleton that can be assembled on the frame in an hour or two. Then it all goes back in the box.
One was also made for a sea lion skeleton.
Click on the first photo to start a slideshow
2021
This year, being year 2 of Covid, we didn't really work on a full class skeleton articulation. The students did
excavate a beaked whale and worked on a photographic bone atlas of that whale skeleton.
UAA students unearthing the skeleton of a beaked whale. The skeleton had been buried in horse poop to clean the bones.
Beaked whale skeleton (minus flippers) in the classroom - roadkill fashion.
More Unearthing
Super interns Abbie Flowers and Mikayla Zylich, repaired a lynx skeleton that had been on display at the
Center for Coastal Studies and pretty much totally rebuilt a bald eagle skeleton that had done a crash landing
within the Pratt Museum some time in the past. They did fantastic on that.
2022
This year brought extra challenges. It was the largest class yet with seventeen students, all double-Xed in the chromosome department.
We split the class in half each day after the "Bone Bytes Talk," with Dr. Tobin taking half to another room to work on photographing bones for a bone atlas. This made the class more manageable.
The skeleton was that of a beluga whale. The bones came to us in three totes from the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska. The challenge was to build the fourteen-foot-long skeleton such that it would fit into the six-foot-long camper shell on my little pickup truck so we could deliver it back to Fairbanks, almost 600 miles away.