A couple of boneheads
The Author, Lee Post (Boneman)
and friend, Orca
As a kid I was a junkie, a natural history junkie. I was passionate about the natural
world and couldn't get enough of it. I collected everything related to that world I
could get my hands on -- bugs, birds, feathers, rocks, shells, butterflies, and
especially bones. These were labeled and displayed on the walls of my
room until it looked like the aftermath of a bomb going off in a natural
history museum storage room.

I spent several formative years on the East Coast where an ultimate treat was
finding a new specimen or visiting a natural history museum. Of special
interest was any exhibits having to do with bones, whether a full
dinosaur skeleton or a single human bone.

Eventually my family moved back to Alaska where I finished school and became a
bicycle mechanic and eventually moved to the small town of Homer, Alaska
where I became a bookseller. Homer had a great small natural history
museum (The Pratt Museum) run by an inspiring director and a
wonderful crew of staff and volunteers. There I articulated a
17-foot Beaked Whale the staff had collected and cleaned.
This led to fifteen years of building up the osteology
collection at the museum by salvaging, preparing,
and often articulating animal skeletons.

In the mid 90's came a three year high school/museum collaborative project in
which I worked with high school students on first articulating a 41-foot Sperm
Whale skeleton, then half a dozen other skeletons. Since that project, the
focus has been working mostly with schools and students and creating
written manuals that can help others who might want to do similar
projects. One teacher suggested that I was like the Pied Piper of
bones, leaving a trail of kids who all wanted to do
another skeleton project.

Today, I still live in Homer, Alaska, with my companion, Mary, who is my
computer-graphic whiz and web site designer (so if you have any complaints about this site
or how the manuals look you can complain to her). I still sell books in partnership with my
sister, Sue Post, and our friend Jenny Stroyek, at the Homer Bookstore.
That's my part-time day-job, but my real passion is bone building.
Below are photos of my room when I was a kid. Having all that great stuff was
a sure-fired way to keep little sisters out of there.
Click on photos to get a better look.
The Boneman.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
URL:  http://www.theboneman.com
Boneman
Last Update: March 20, 2011

copyright 2005 by Lee Post
illustrations by Lee post
site created and maintained by
Merry Web Designs
copyright 2005
Solution Graphics
THEN
NOW
Me in my kayaking uniform-cooking
wild mussels.
My Mary who keeps my world running
smoothly, my accomplice and web mistress.
Our igloo.
Life inside the igloo.
What we get to see from the front
door of our igloo.
Since I'm not fortunate enough to
survive in Homer Alaska just on
bone work --  this is the scene of my
Day Job.
It is the longest running new
books-Bookstore in Alaska.
I started working in it in 1979.
MY DAY-TIME JOB, THE HOMER BOOKSTORE
My beautiful daughter, Krissy, who
currently lives in Moab, Utah.
(It really wasn't that big --  she was
holding it close to the camera.)
The view I see from behind the
counter
Looking towards the back of the
store, as you walk in through the
front door.
SURROUNDING AREA
This is a kayaker's view of the end of
the spit.
Homer is known for it's spectacular
scenery - it's halibut fishing - it's
artists and authors and for this 4 mile
long sliver of property that sticks out
into the bay (The Homer Spit).
My summer passion is kayaking. This
is the type of scenery on the other side
of the bay.
Sometimes I kayak before it is
summer - especially on days that look
like this.
A short hike on the other side of the
bay gets you to this view.
The Homer Harbor on a nice
day in the winter.
A view of the bay from the road past town.
A Homer beach on a typical summer
day (when the sun is out). A sunny
summer day is very atypical however.
We got a couple of them last year.
FAVORITE PAST-TIME AND FAVORITE FRIENDS
It's that boneman again doing what he
most loves doing - other then working
with bones. Relaxing on a beach with
favorite friends during a kayak tri.p
The bay is very rich in marine life from
whales to sea otters to seals to sea
lions  to birds to inter-tidal life.
And it's off to another beach and
another part of the bay.
It's tough holding that beach down
-but someone has to do it. These are
super teachers and their beautiful
daughter on a kayak trip.
LOCAL WILDLIFE
An eagle with Mt Augustine - an
active volcano in the background.
The "Eagle Lady "  Jean Keene
feeds the wild eagles for a period of time
each winter - attracting sometimes several
hundred eagles to the end of the spit.
Jean Keene passed away this winter of 2009.
She shall  be missed.
As the snow in the hills gets deeper
and deeper- Many moose move into
town. Some stay and have their calves
here  in the spring.
This is in my front yard which is in a
suburban neighborhood  in town.
Eagles allow photographers to get
quite close. . . .
Harbor seals are common.
Sea Otters wrap themselves in kelp
while they sleep to keep from drifting
away. The game is to sneak right by
them in a kayak without waking them.
Sometimes it works.
. . . .combined with ever changing
winter lighting - it is a photographers
mecca for eagle photos.
Another volcano we can see from the
Homer area---Mt Illiamna with some
sea otters in front of it on an early
spring day from the kayak.
The bay has several hundred sea otters
which sometimes congregate near the
base of the spit in the winter - feeding
and resting on ice floes.
Yes I'll take your picture too.
Occasionally some of my correspondents become curious about my world and will request pictures. For any
of you who may also be similarly curious, these are snapshots of my world and I'm sticking to it.
And for the friends of Carol and Wally ~ who could scarcely believe there was such a thing as a baculum--- let
alone that there was such a thing as a "Boneman"----here is an illustration of a walrus baculum
Post readily admits to being a nerd. He presents a little differently than the average schoolhouse variety,
however. He never actually finished college, but instead worked as a bicycle mechanic and came to the
end of the road from Anchorage with his mother when they bought the Homer Bookstore 33 years ago.

As a bicycle repairman and a bookseller, Post used his free time to volunteer at the Pratt Museum,
which had recently acquired a dead Bering Sea beaked whale.

And that's when Lee Post became the Boneman.

"For me in this town it was like the perfect place at the perfect time. I always wanted to work
at a museum, but I didn't have a degree," Post said.

"The reality was that they didn't have time to put it together, so it became my project."

Projects like this propelled Post into a career he could only dream of as a child.

"To me his curiosity, creative entrepreneurship and enthusiasm are quintessential Homer,"
said his longtime friend and kayaking buddy, Anne Marie Holen.

Post thought he'd just order a book on how to put a whale skeleton together, but found out there
weren't any. So he called around the country and found that most display skeletons had been
assembled a hundred years ago by folks who didn't take notes and were long dead.

It took him 300 hours of work in a makeshift room in the museum basement, consulting whatever
fisherman or carpenter was handy when he got stuck, for Post to assemble the whale skeleton
that now hangs upstairs at the Pratt.

"That got me going, so I started doing a skeleton or two a year for the next 10 years or so.
A dozen, 15 whales later I pretty much have it down to how to do this now," Post said.

He has literally written the book on skeleton building, or, as he calls it, "articulation." To be precise,
he's written and illustrated 10 which describe the method for articulating everything from
little birds to massive marine mammals.

The manuals are based on Post's research and drawings, which are detailed and accurate
enough to use as identification keys.

Post realized a need for such reference materials in 1987, while on an archaeological dig in Halibut Cove.

With high school-level art training, he has now drawn complete skeletons of more than 30 birds
and 30 mammals. There still are no complete atlases to find out "what bone is this," but Post's
drawings are a good place for a person to begin.

A lot of people start with his drawings.

Post has sent the bone articulation manuals to individuals and organizations around the world,
and all but three states in the U.S.

The sperm whale skeleton, which hangs in the high school, helped kick off many more skeleton
constructions, as students and teachers found out they, too, could be bone builders.

"We cleaned out the freezers and ended up putting together six or eight," Post said of
student projects that followed.

There isn't much for local bone projects these days, so the majority of Post's work in Homer is at
his "day job" at the Bookstore. In his free time, he replies to e-mails about bones, draws
pictures of bones and edits the manuals, which he self publishes.

The side job takes him elsewhere in the state or Outside.

Post recently returned from Port Townsend, Wash., where he and a group of volunteers constructed
an orca whale skeleton in 30 days. "He is absolutely passionate about his work, but is still able to
make it relaxed, fun and engaging for everyone involved, allowing everyone in our community
to have ownership of the project," said Port Townsend Marine Science Center Marine
Program Coordinator Chrissy McLean.

One of the dedicated volunteers, 63-year-old Linda Dacon, said Post made it seem like
anyone could build a whale.

"He brought work that is usually done in the workrooms and basements of museums, by curators,
professional preparers and grad students, out into the open and honchoed a team of rank
amateurs through the completion of a complex task," she said.

Post loves sharing the excitement of the natural world with others, be they children or adults,
through books or bones.

"He really wants to foster that enthusiasm," Sue Post said.

"It's just cool to see that someone has kept that fascination and found a way to work
with it. He's definitely been a role model in that sense."

For more about Lee Post, bone work or the orca project, visit: www.theboneman.com/

http://ptmsc.org/orca_project.html

http://ptmarinesciencecenter.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html

Lindsay Johnson may be reached at lindsay.johnson@homernews.com.

Click here for direct link to this article http://homernews.com/stories/030911/news_lpstsr.shtml
Newspaper article as it appeared in the Homer News, Homer, Alaska.
Permission for this reprint granted by the Homer News.
Homer Alaska - News
Story last updated at 9:30 PM on Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Lee Post: self-taught skeleton
reconstruction expert

Kachemak Color

By Lindsay Johnson
Staff writer
Lee Post stands next to one of his
cases of skulls at his home in
Homer. On the wall behind him is an
emu skeleton.

Photographer: Lindsay Johnson,
Homer News
Lee Post was consistently late to elementary school.

"You need to send him off earlier," said the phone calls his mother
would receive from school, but it didn't matter how much time
he had to walk there.

"He would get distracted by animal tracks and things in the pond,"
said his younger sister, Sue Post.

She remembers her brother's childhood room as a museum full of
rocks and bones and dead things in jars.

"He's just always been fascinated with this stuff," she said.