![]() Villemarette is careful to respect the dignity of those who’ve donated their bodies to science. Each skull comes with a bill of sale and letter of authorization from the federal government.Īnother area of sensitivity is human remains. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 generally prohibits possession of sea lions, but this was a research collection dating back to the 1950s, exempt from the act’s protections. In early 2014, the company purchased and began advertising an assortment of California sea lion skulls. Skulls also are acquired under unusual circumstances. A letter on the catalog’s first page assures customers that Skulls Unlimited resells specimens attained only through legal and ethical means, such as roadkills, natural deaths, and zoo attritions, and from regulated hunting and trapping. Villemarette is sensitive to perceptions that he is over-commercializing wildlife. In between those physical extremes are skulls, claws, eggs, and other artifacts from hundreds of species, game and non-game, common and endangered–even extinct–from around the planet. How about a bison? : $349 large, $260 average. A staffer will pluck one from a bin of shrew skulls and send it express. ![]() ![]() Need a stocking stuffer for your kid? See page 8 to order a shrew for $29, plus shipping and handling. What began 28 years ago with a one-page price list is now a retail and mail-order firm with a 130-page catalog and online sales worldwide. Nevertheless, the museum is a growing attraction and can be rented for weddings, birthdays, and other private events.Īn adjoining shipping area is a pulse of commerce. It’s professional and orderly, but some visitors literally become faint or nauseated. On display are some 300 full skeletons and 400 skulls. The main building houses an impressive 7,000-square-foot Museum of Osteology and a gift shop. Today, the company has 21 employees and a campus with two buildings in a light-industrial area southeast of downtown. In the early years, Villemarette and his wife operated the business out of their kitchen. Flensing is the act of stripping and slicing skin or fat from a carcass. Jeff Wilson Jaron Villemarette works on a tapir. “In 2013, we did more than 2,000 whitetails alone.” That’s at $125 a pop.* Founder Jay Villemarette. “We’re now cleaning and whitening more than 50,000 skulls per year, and one of our fastest-growing services is processing big-game skulls,” says Jay Villemarette, who founded Skulls Unlimited in 1986. And more and more, its craft is gracing the dens of hunters. Its products are everywhere, from local nature centers to the Smithsonian Institution, and from junior-high science classrooms to the labs at Harvard Medical School. Skulls Unlimited is the world’s leading supplier of museum-quality skulls and skeletal specimens. Though few natural-history buffs realize it, many of them have admired the handiwork of this unusual company, located in the ragged outskirts of Oklahoma City, for decades. ![]() However deep or superficial your attraction to wildlife osteology, you’re probably among the congregation of America’s foremost temple of skull and bone: Skulls Unlimited International. Or maybe we, as hunters, love skulls simply because they look so darn cool. Just the irreproachable beauty of bone shaped solely by the hand of God, or, if you prefer, by the forces of evolution. There’s no room for creative license or interpretation. Capes are their canvases and Styrofoam their clay, their medium for expression. LIKE PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS, taxidermists develop their own artistic style and signature. You can find more stories from the last 15 years of Outdoor Life here. This story, Skull, Inc., originally ran in the June/July 2014 issue.
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