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My Experience Cleaning a Red Fox Skull

Recently, my great aunt was in town from Wyoming, and at some point during our conversation, the topic of oddities came up. We were talking about Raven’s – and, subsequently, my own – journey with insect taxidermy before the subject shifted to my collection of animal bones. This sparked a memory in Sallie, and she told us about how, over ten years ago, she had found what looked like an unidentified animal’s skull during her walk through the forests by her home. She had collected all the teeth and bone shards she could find, packed them into a shoebox, and gave them to my parents for our family to try and identify. My parents are both biologists and they went to great lengths to encourage my brother and I to be curious about the natural world, so we were perfect for the job. But sometime shortly afterwards, probably after the family had had our fun and given up with the box of fragments, the bones were sealed in their box and stored away out of sight, to be forgotten. At the end of my great aunt’s story, my dad remembered the shoebox, and left to his workshop in the garage to try and find it. Lo and behold, those same skull pieces were on the top shelf in the garage, right where he had left them so many years ago. And so, after roughly a decade, my mother and I got back to work trying to identify my great aunt’s mystery skull.

Identifying the animal the skull pieces belonged to was surprisingly simple. Though the skull was in fragments, it was easy enough to put them together into a shape that resembled an animal, and combined with the loose teeth in the box, we quickly determined that it had to be some kind of canine. My first thought was a coyote, but a closer look at its sagittal crest revealed that it was more likely a red fox. At the end of our game, the family decided that I should get to take the skull with me to practice cleaning up – otherwise it would end up spending another decade on the same shelf collecting dust. I had never cleaned my own bones before, but it is something I have been really interested in pursuing, so I was honored to be given the opportunity.

The first thing I did was research how to properly clean animal bones. Although the fox’s shards were over ten years old and free of flesh and grease, they were caked in a layer of dirt that I wanted to remove before attempting to assemble the pieces. In my research, I learned that when cleaning animal bones, it is best to start by soaking them for a few days in over-the-counter hydrogen peroxide. This disinfects the bone, loosens any dirt or grime, and even helps to lighten the bones themself. Not necessarily bleach them – the skull shards weren’t platinum white after soaking – but they were definitely lighter and cleaner looking. On the note of bleaching, I also learned that it is an absolute no-go to use bleach to whiten animal bones. Supposedly the bleach will soak into the bones and continue to eat at them over years and years, making them progressively more brittle until they one day dissolve out of your collection. No, hydrogen peroxide is the way to go.

I soaked the shards for a few – I want to say three or four – days in hydrogen peroxide, and once a gentle shake revealed that the grime on the bone shards had been adequately loosened, I got to work scrubbing each shard clean with a toothbrush, warm water, and dish soap. I think that was the moment that this turned from an educational process into more of a religious experience. I held each shard of this fox’s skull in my hand, and as I gently worked through every crevice to draw out the dirt with my brush, I felt like I was giving this animal a new life. I thought about the life it had lived up in the forests of Wyoming, what kind of things it had experienced up until the moment it died. I pulled its teeth from the water and started to try and piece the fox together, gradually revealing the skull that once was. How lucky I was to be able to do this work, to take these discarded shards and help them represent their old form again? I think this was my favorite part of the whole cleaning process; being able to hold each individual piece in my hand, baptizing each one under warm water and dish soap as I worked away the layers of decay to reveal the subject left behind.

And finally, after over half a week of soaking the bones in hydrogen peroxide, followed by an afternoon of brushing them clean and allowing them to dry under the sun, it was time to put them all together. While cleaning the bones gave me a feeling of spiritual calm, putting the bones back together tickled the hobbyist part of my brain that craves a challenging puzzle. It was fun to hold the shards of skull in my hand and intuitively attempt to fit them back together, watching as jagged edges slotted into each other perfectly to reveal a recognizable animal face. Putting the teeth back into the skull was the best and worst part, as I went through each socket over and over with each tooth in my pile, trying to find the one that slotted in just right before finally committing to glue it in place.

Again, I had an opportunity to reflect on the life I was holding in my hands. Putting the shards together, I got to try and observe the process of decomposition as it had taken place over a decade prior. Many of the pieces were split along the cranial sutures of the skull, suggesting to me that these were the weaker points of the skull that were first to split as the bones had grown brittle in the forest sun. The bridge of the fox’s nose was also missing, something that I wasn’t seeing in the more immaculately-preserved reference skulls I had found online. I wonder if this part of the skull is more fragile than the rest? Maybe it is the first part to break off when a skull decomposes in nature and not under the watchful eye of a taxidermist.

Looking at the finished skull, he – as I had taken to referring to the fox as “he” – is missing a good amount of teeth from the left side of his mouth. I wonder if this was the cheek pressed against the earth as his body decomposed, if these teeth were the first to fall from his body? Or maybe it is the opposite, that his left cheek faced the sun in death, that the birds carried his teeth away? There is a storytelling to this skull that I cannot parse, and it makes it all the more interesting to look at now that my work is (mostly) complete.

Now the skull is living on top of the bookshelf in my living room, presented on its own miniature stand to greet guests as they walk in. Eventually I want to try my hand at making a dome or diorama to display it in, but for now I am content just to see the skull complete. Having been able to take the skull from a box of dusty shards in my parent’s garage to something that can be immediately recognized as the fox it once was has been incredibly rewarding. There was something about being able to sit with the skull – holding its pieces in my hand and turning them over as I observed in the greatest detail all the intimate forms and cracks of those shards – that really sang to me. I felt like I was able to give new life to something that would have otherwise continued to remain lost and forgotten. And all the while, I had a unique opportunity to observe what was once a wild animal in a way that said animal would never have allowed me to do. I got to feel the fox’s teeth and hold its tiny head in my palm as I glued them back into place. It was all very spiritually enriching to me in a way that I honestly wasn’t expecting.

I would love to do something like this – cleaning up and reassembling old bones – again in the future. I will need to find a renter-friendly way to process bones, or I’ll have to resign myself to waiting until I have my own yard where I can do it, but I definitely want to do it again. I really loved doing this, and I know I have a lot more to learn from the dead as I work to bring them back to life in some small way. It makes me really excited for the future.