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How Do You Clean a Deer Skull?

maegann

maegann

I'm Me, Deal With It
I know, it's a weird question. But my dad found a deer skeleton on his bikeride and my mom said I can keep the skull if we clean it (of course I would clean it first, im not stupid, lmao)

so I was wondering what the best way to clean the skull to get rid of the rest of the flesh is?
 
Well, depending on how much flesh is left, I'd boil it to remove the flesh, scrub with a toothbrush, then soak in a bleach solution to remove the rest/whiten it up.
 
1) Cut as much of the flesh off as you can and cook it in water at a very low temperature. A crock pot is really the perfect thing for anything you can fit in it, because you can leave it cooking for a long time. So if you can get a crock pot that's big enough, that'd be perfect. You can use a regular pot on the stovetop, but you can't leave that on all the time. This method doesn't smell too good, so your mom might not be up for it.

2) Drop it in a bucket of water and leave it outside. Pour off the putrescent water once a week or so and refresh. Repeat until clean. This is super gross and smelly, but at least you can keep it outside. After everything has rotted off, you'll still want to try to cook the grease out of it. If you get to this stage, I can ask my wife what the best thing to use for that is. I believe it involves cooking again, but then it's not so smelly. There are a couple of different methods I think for de-greasing stuff.

3) Buy some dermestids You can keep the larvae of these carrion beetles contained in a rubbermaid/aquairum/whatever at an appropriate temperature and they are the best cleaners around. You can order them various places. When you don't have flesh for them to eat, you can give them other things, I think, like dog food.

4) You can start your own dermestid colony by picking some larvae off a carcass you find outside. Everyone has their own native species of dermestids. But really, buying them seems worth it to me.

Have fun!

p.s. I do not recommend burying. It's supposed to work, especially, if you wrap in window screen to contain all the bones in one package, but the timing is tricky. I tried it with a rabbit relatively recently and it was disintegrated when I dug it back up. Left it "in the oven" too long. I should have used the bucket method but I didn't feel like dealing with it.

Also, bleach will damage the bone, so I wouldn't use that. But I believe Kristi has been using acetone with some success for whitening, so once you get it clean and are ready, I can ask about that, too.
 
Does it even still have the brain in it? Do you have room to just set it out for a while? Seems like things revert to skeletons very quickly in Florida.
 
Nanci said:
Does it even still have the brain in it? Do you have room to just set it out for a while? Seems like things revert to skeletons very quickly in Florida.
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i dont know, i havent seen it yet. hopefully my dad can show it to me today...

very true about the florida thing lmao :rofl:
 
desertanimal said:
Also, bleach will damage the bone, so I wouldn't use that. But I believe Kristi has been using acetone with some success for whitening, so once you get it clean and are ready, I can ask about that, too.
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This is true, (have you ever felt your fingertips after touching bleach, they're melted off!) it must be very weak. That's interesting about acetone. I swear I'm having a bleach smell hallucination just thinking about this.

Why does Kristi preserve skeletons? Fun or work?

Nanci
 
Wow, I remember why I know my method- because in farrier school we had to make a horse lower leg articulated skeleton for class. All of us. I wonder what ever happened to mine...
 
It tends to be her summer job to process things around the department that have been pretty much completely dissected for classes and just need to be skeletonized. She's the one in the department with the most experience, so she gets the job every summer. Plus, we have a friend in forensics, so they share methods back and forth.

Usually she doesn't bother with whitening, but we had some people who gave the department non-human cadavers for dissection on the agreement that they'd eventually get them back skeletonized, and they wanted them white. So she worked a lot on that last summer.
 
Nanci said:
Well, depending on how much flesh is left, I'd boil it to remove the flesh, scrub with a toothbrush, then soak in a bleach solution to remove the rest/whiten it up.
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That's pretty much what we did. We set up a bonfire outside, put a pot on a tripod, and boiled it for hours. Then we soaked it in bleach water. :)
 
I think acetone is used more of a degreaser, not a whitener. I have always just thrown a head in a rubber maid tub out side, and left it on the side of the house for 2-4 months. When I came back, I rinsed it off, and left it out in the sun for a week or so, and after that it was good to go.
 
thanks a bunch everyone!! :dancer: i will have to post picks once i get it, and then again once its cleaned
 
Try fire ants if there is still meat on it. They work wonders and can get in tiny holes and other hard to reach areas. Worry about whitening it up afterwards.
 
Talk about good timing. My girlfriend and I have been wanting to do something like this for like a year now but haven't found a good way to clean up what I have. I have a red eared slider frozen, but I've heard turtles can be difficult especially if it's your first time reconstructing something.

I live in an apartment, so I think my landlord might be mad if I started boiling an animal out in the yard, and I'm sure as heck not gonna do that in my kitchen.
 
well, my dad took me to see it and there is no flesh what-so-ever!! there is a some hide left, but thats it. the bad thing is the poor doe had been hit really hard and possible run over, so the skull was in 3 pieces, legs broken, etc...

i took a piece of jaw bone, and some vertebrae, but I will go get more tomorrow. All I need to do is bleach the bones.
 
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