I Dug Up a Skull in Our Backyard!

I found a cow skull in a compost pile and decided to clean it up for display. The flesh was already consumed, and in fact the maggots already completed their life cycle and metamorphosed into flies and were long gone. I buried it for about 9 months in our back yard to allow the worms and bugs to clean up the compost and pupae casings that were tightly packed inside, then dug it up to see the results. After pressure washing the dirt and loose material out, I soaked it in Hydrogen Peroxide diluted to roughly 3% (10x volume oxygen production). I supplimented this with a deck cleaning solution (also a hydrogen peroxide wash) when the bubbles stopped forming from the original rinse. Upon removal, it still had a stained color bad smell so I rinsed it in hot water and Dawn detergent, let it sit for a couple days, and repeated the same rinse. These hot detergent rinses helped degrease it. Finally, I washed again in a peroxide to sanitize and brighten the bone, followed by several rinses with water. "Bessie" will hang in our basement saloon as a reminder that ". . .to dust we shall return."

[@DanaGundlach]

Bessie smells like a hairdo! haha. Cool project!

[@ccootsona]

Thanks for catching my joke and being one of the few who watched it!

[@BriggsCanyon]

So cool, Craig! Now you need to name a section of your layout "Skull Hill"

[@ccootsona]

@@BriggsCanyon Glad you liked it! When I'm too old to do 1:1 scale and 2 1/2" scale maybe I'll build a layout. If I had N scale equipment could run it through the eye sockets like tunnels!

[@BriggsCanyon]

​@ccootsona Ohhhhh, you were working on the real railroad? For some reason, I thought you did 7.5 inch guage ride-on trains.

[@ccootsona]

@@BriggsCanyon You are correct, I do both 56.5" and 7.5" gauges (and I have about 55 feet of 18" gauge mining track in the yard). I thought you meant an HO scale indoor layout for the Skull Hill, which would be pretty cool if I had the time and space.

[@chrisroach9459]

This was fun!