Time to Wonder Podcast
Time to Wonder Podcast is a place where kids ask questions about museums and we find the answers.
Time to Wonder Podcast
Episode 4: Bones and skeletons
In part 1 of this episode we chat with two skeleton articulators Mike deRoos and Michi Maine. We find out that preparing bones from marine mammals like whales can be very stinky. We also discover that burying bones in horse poop is a good way to clean those bones. Mike talks about how he got into this business. And Mike and Michi tell us about some of the skeletons they've been lucky enough to articulate for museums. In Part 2 we introduce our listeners to the idea that some museums are in houses.
Meet the podcasters, read our blog and listen to our episodes at timetowonderpodcast.com
Bones and Skeletons
Welcome to Time to Wonder podcast, a behind the scenes peek into the world of museums for kids of all ages, everywhere.
Hi, I'm Ava.
Hi, I'm Leslie
And I'm Sue
And this is a podcast where kids ask questions about museums and we find the answers.
In this program, we're going to be talking about skeletons and how they are prepared for museum exhibits. While there is no graphic content, it still may be disturbing to some children.
The big question today is how do museums put skeletons together? Today's guests are Mike de Roos and Michi Main. They are skeleton articulators. They put together the skeletons of marine mammals like killer whales and dolphins in a way that makes them look like they're swimming or diving down to the bottom of the sea.
Their company, Cetacea Contracting is hired by museums who want to display the skeletons of marine mammals. What they do is not very common, so they get asked by museums around the world to articulate skeletons for them.
If you've ever been in Telegraph Coles on Vancouver Island, you can see several examples of skeletons Mike and Michi have worked with.
Something listeners should know is that Mike and Michi don't just get handed skeletons. They work with animals that have been killed or that have died a natural death. So, they still have flesh, muscles, ligaments and skin. They have to strip the bones down to the skeleton.
Interview:
Welcome, you guys. We’re excited to learn all about skeletons and what you do with your work.
Where do you find the animals?
Mike: That’s a great question. Yeah. So all of the animals that we work on have died out in the oceans for some reason, and we find them after they’re dead. Sometimes they die of natural causes like old age or some disease, but quite often and sadly, they actually die because of humans. Either they might be entangled in a fishing net, or they might get hit by a ship. And then we'll find them after they've died from that.
Michi: And so when a marine mammal is found stranded, there is a response hotline that people can call and report to. And then if it's determined that the animal can't be rescued or dies, then we’ll often work with the response team and try to figure out what happened and why the animal may have died. And then if a museum or university would like to keep the bones for research purposes or for display, then they'll hire us to do that part of the job.
How old are they?
Mike: I'm curious to know if you mean like how old are the whales when they die or how old are the bones when we find them? There's sort of two questions there.
If you’re curious about how old the animals are when they die. So, whales are just like us, and they'll die at all different times of their lives. So, it really depends on what happened to the animal. But many whales can live as long as humans or some even longer. We've had specimens that we suspect were maybe even over 100 years old.
But I’m also curious about the bone element of the question.
Mike: Yes, yes. So when we see bones in museums, we’re often curious about how old they are because some bones can be really, really old like dinosaur bones. And those would be hundreds of millions of years old. Whereas whales are actually, you know, swimming around in our oceans right now. And so the bones that we work with from these animals are really not very old. They could be just found yesterday or maybe some of them have been maybe found about 100 years ago and that's about as old as the animals that we work on have lived. So they're all really present day animals that are out there swimming around our oceans. Sometimes we find them when they've been dead for a week and sometimes we find them when they've been dead for a few months, and other times a museum collected them maybe 100 years ago, and then we go and just put them together. So less than 100 years generally.
How do you move them?
Michi: Thats a super good question. So it really depends on how big the animal is that we're talking about. So if we are working with the little sea Otter, then it just doesn't take very much effort to move it. And we can just do that by ourselves. But most of the whales we work on are actually much, much bigger than that. And so when we find them on the shore, there is no way that we would be able to actually move them ourselves. So we begin the process of taking them apart and then often we’ll call our friends to come help us or be lucky enough to be able to work with locals in the area to move the bones. And sometimes if we're talking a blue whale scale, we'll have to even hire machines to come and help us.
Wow, that's so cool.
How happy are your friends to come and help you do that?
Michi: So the thing is everybody wants to come out once, but we very rarely get people returning.
How do you clean the bones?
Mike: Well that's a really tricky job because when we find them, of course they're inside the body of a whale. And so, the very first thing we need to do is actually to take the whole whale apart and take the bones out from inside the body. And then we use bugs and microbes and things like that to clean all of the soft fleshy stuff off of the bones.
Michi: And we're really lucky because we live on Salt Spring Island and lots of people here love horses. And horse poop is actually one of the best cleaners, natural cleaners for getting flesh off the bones, we have found. So, we usually call on people we know who have horses. We collect a whole pile of manure and we make a big burial for the bones.
Mike: Horse poop is the greatest thing to clean bones.
Michi: Because it also decomposes so quickly, it generates tons of heat. And that really is helpful with whales because whale bones are full of oil. That heat helps the oil actually liquefy and drain out of the bones.
Are they smelly?
Mike: Well. Yes. That’s the short answer. Usually, when we find a whale, it's not super fresh and so you can imagine if it's been sitting there for a little while, the body starts to decompose a little bit and it doesn't smell very nice. They're pretty big and pretty oily. One of the hardest parts of our job actually is to go out and work on a whale like that because I come home and nobody wants to even get close to me. I usually can't smell it anymore.
Michi: It’s a funny thing about our sense of smell, right? It gets overwhelmed over time. So while you're working on something so smelly and disgusting, you actually stop noticing how bad it smells as you're working on it because you get used to it. And so it's actually a bit of a danger because then you leave the site and you come home and you can't smell how bad you smell, but everybody else around you can.
Mike: You go away for a little while and you clean yourself and have a good shower and scrub your hands really well. And you go away and then you come back to the clothes you were wearing when you cut the whale up and you're like, “OK, these clothes only have one purpose from now on. And that's for taking whales apart.” They go into a garbage bag and they never come out other than for whale necropsies.
Michi: We actually have a whole protocol around what you're allowed to touch and what you're allowed to wear when we're working with skeletons that are stinky so we can avoid cross contamination and bringing the smell into people’s cars and to their good clothes and such.
How do you keep the bones from breaking?
Mike: Well bones are really cool because they're designed by nature to be strong and so the bones inside an animal allow it to move because the muscles push and pull and use them as levers and stuff like that. So, once we get all the bones clean and the flesh off, we actually don't have to do that much to them to keep them from breaking. You just have to be a little bit careful about how you handle them. You don't want to drop them from a really high height. But if you're careful and you keep them clean and dry, then then they will last for a really long time without breaking.
How do you know where the bones go?
Michi: This is a good question.
Mike: That's a hard one.
Michi: So, skeletons are like - imagine the world's hugest funnest puzzle. And if you've ever done a big thousand-piece puzzle you'll notice that as you do it you start to recognise shapes more and notice colour patterns. Working on a skeleton is really similar., eh Mike?
Mike: Yeah, and so when you're looking at the clues for your puzzle, then you put two bones together, then you’ll all of a sudden notice, “Oh, those shapes match.”Nature has designed the skeleton perfectly so that it works together all the different pieces.
Michi: And so when you have any given bone in a skeleton, there's only one way that it can actually fit in the skeleton. And once you figure that out and put it in its place, it makes tons of sense.
Mike: That's the long answer. The shorter one is we did study it in university and we looked at all sorts of books and stuff.
Michi: And we’ve looked at hundreds and hundreds of bones.
Mike: But really the best way is just to really look carefully at the animal and how this skeleton works and it will tell you.
What happens if some bones are missing?
Mike: Oh, quite often the skeletons that we work on have missing bones. It's really hard to find every single bone in a 50-foot whale on the beach. And so sometimes little tiny bits and pieces go missing or some are broken off. We used to tediously sculpt missing ones or mold and cast, and now we almost always use a 3D printer to replicate the missing pieces. It works so well. We can actually take bones from a different animal and scan them and then print them out for the missing skeleton and just make them a perfect match for the part that's gone missing. It's crazy.
How do you put the skeleton together?
Mike: Oh, that's probably the funnest part of our job. I basically sort of just figured it out as I went along. And we use lots of metal bits and pieces and welding and stuff like that. The whole whale is, depending on what type of whale it is, pretty big, so we need strong structures to hold these bones up in the air, and we find that metal is usually the best type of material to work with. We use a little bit of glue from time to time, but mostly metal bits to hold the bones together.
How long does it take to put a skeleton together?
Michi: That really depends on the size of the skeleton that we're working on. So a little sea otter might take us about three or four weeks if we're being really careful, but a blue whale could take us a year or two. With a lot of planning beforehand.
(Wow, that's a long time.)
So, a job like a blue whale if little jobs come up, doing a littler animal, will you do those and then go back to the blue whale, or is it just like onec you have our project, you just work on that continuously.
Michi: It really depends. Often a whale or project like a blue whale will actually take us to a different place. So, we did a blue whale in 2020 in Australia. So we just worked on that one solidly while we were there. That's a really good question. Sometimes with our smaller projects, something will come up and we will end up working on a couple of skeletons at the same time or we’ll be cleaning a skeleton while we're putting another one together.
Mike: Yeah, we often have a few skeletons in our closet or in our case in her attic. And so these are skeletons that have been cleaned and they’re waiting sort of in line to be put together or we’ll have a manure compost heap in the backyard with a skeleton in it that's being cleaned at the same time that we're putting a different one together in our in our workshop.
You must have a pretty big workshop.
Michi: You might be surprised
Mike: It’s smaller than you imagine.
Michi: Often when we're working on a project, we never see it together until we install it in the museum. In the end, we just see the parts that we put together and different components.
When you give museums your skeletons, say it's like a big like blue whale or something and they ask you like for three of them or something what would be your reaction?
Mike: Oh my goodness. Yeah, I mean, these, these whales there, they're huge, but they're also really rare. And like, boy, just to find one is an amazing thing. And like, I can't believe that we've actually worked on three blue whales in our career. That's over 25 years of doing skeletons like this, I never imagined that I get to do 1 blue whale, let alone 3. It's it's a lot of fun and it's a lot of hard work. So if a museum wanted three, I would just…
Michi: Yeah, I'd have to jump at the chance, but then we'd have to really think about how we would pull that off.
Mike: We’d need to hire a bunch of young biologists to help us.
Michi: Sometimes we do get to work on multiple skeletons for a single display, and that's always really fun because then we get to think about how they might interact together in nature and. We get to produce some kind of display that really speaks to that, and that's always really, really creative.
Mike: That's so true,Michi. One of my favorite displays is actually 3 dolphin skeletons. Because one dolphin is like jumping through the air and the other two are kind of swimming down beside each other and it really shows like how those dolphins would have been in nature 'cause they never swim around all by themselves. They're always swimming in big groups of lots of dolphins together. So to have three of those skeletons together, that's one of my favorite, favorite ones.
How did you end up doing this job?
Mike: That's a really good question. Basically, when I was a kid, I was really curious about animals and how they worked. And my grandfather was a doctor and I would bring home squirrels that I found dead at the side of the road and he and I would dissect them and find out how they worked inside and that kind of thing. Then when I went to university. I got a biology degree and one of my class projects was to put a skeleton together and the next thing I knew, I got a job at a little museum. And here I am 25 years later, still putting skeletons together. So, it was really just something that I never imagined that I grow, [and do.] I still feel like I'm a little kid, but now I have my own little kids. But I get to go into my workshop and play with bones all the time. It's pretty fun.
What do your kids think about what you do?
Mike:I think some when they stop to think about it, we've got three, the older ones realize that it's kind of different and neat. My eldest actually had some friends come over when she was about 8 years old. Her little girlfriend came into our living room and went, “Oh my gosh, what is that cool thing you've got hanging from your wall? Is that a bone or something?” And Mia says, “Oh, it's just a killer whale skull. My dad's got like four more in the garage. Let's go play Barbies.”
What's your favorite skeleton?
Mike: Oh gosh, that's a really hard one to answer. I have so many that I love. I think we've done what, about 25 or so whales I can think of? Eight or ten that like really stand out for me. OK often it's the one that I'm working on right now, which is a 42 foot fin whale, It’s the second biggest whale that's ever lived in the oceans and it's going to be going into the [tems swiya] Shíshálh First Nation Museum in the fall.
Thank you so much for talking to us today.
Mike: Thank you so much for having us. It was great to talk with you guys.
Michi: It was really nice to meet you all.
Part 2:
On our next episode we will be talking about museums there and houses. I'm being my house. Most of these types of museums are in houses where famous people lived. You might have heard of the Anne Frank Museum. It's a museum in Amsterdam, in a house where Anne Frank and her family had from the Nazis during the Second World War. Houses where famous musicians, artists and writers have lived are often turned into. Museums in France, one of the most famous house museums is the home of Claude Monet, who was a painter. Over half a million people visit his house and garden every year. Green Gables is another example of a historic house that is in a museum. Anna Green Gables was a character in the novel written by. Please see mod Montgomery, so she never lived in a real house. However her author did an base green Gables and where she had grown up. People from all over the world physic Green Gables heritage place every year. Different types of indigenous houses can be museums in Hazelton BC. Lucas on historic village and museum is built in long houses you can visit along house as well as a pit house at the Squamish Lil Wat museum. The Louvre museum was also a house. Well OK, maybe not an ordinary house. Before it was turned into a museum, it was a palace where kings. And Queens live under. Next episode, we're going to be talking about the historic Joy Cagua House in Vancouver. You will learn about Joy Kogawa, a famous Japanese Canadian writer, see where she lived as a little girl and learn about some Canadian history that were not. Too proud? Thanks again to today's guests. Our music was written by Kevin McLeod and is licensed under Creative Commons. For complete information, see our blog post at timetowonderpodcast.com.
More information on this episode, visit timetowonderpodcast.com.
A special thank you to our producer, Danny Reindeau. Thank you Danny.
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