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| THE BONE BUILDING BOOKS by LEE POST A series of manuals (each one dedicated to a different group of animals) explaining how to clean, prepare, and articulate the skeleton of that animal in a (hopefully) simple step-by-step manner. Each manual, heavily illustrated with black and white drawings, is suitable for teachers and students desiring to do a museum quality skeleton on a low budget. |
| ABOUT THE BOOKS |
| I articulated my first skeleton during high school for an anatomy class. It was a Snowshoe Hare and was boiled on the kitchen stove and held together with Duco cement. With any sudden movement, parts of it fell off if not totally collapsing like a house of cards. It was with great frustration that I got it to school and glued back together long enough to get graded. As fascinated as I was with bones and skulls, I knew there had to be a better way to articulate skeletons. As an adult, I started working as a volunteer on skeleton preparation and articulation mostly for the local Pratt Museum of Natural History in Homer, Alaska. Over the years of experience with mostly marine mammal skeletons, we pretty much figured out many of the do's and don'ts of skeleton articulation. In 1994-1996 I participated as hands-on instructor in a museum/school collaborative project, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In the first year, students articulated a 41-foot Sperm Whale skeleton. In the second year they did a half dozen other skeletons, ranging in size from a porcupine to a moose, as displays in the school. This led to schools and teachers, from all over who had seen the student articulation projects, tracking me down and wanting to know what it would take for them to do a skeleton project in their class. There was very little information around for teachers or students wishing to work with skeletons. I started making photo copied, hand lettered sets of notes to pass on to them. As demand grew over the years, those notes have evolved into this; a set of ten manuals on bone building that are intended to take the mystery and frustration out of skeleton articulation projects for teachers and students or other bone enthusiasts. The manuals (volumes 1 through 9) are heavily illustrated with black and white ink drawings (which I also confess doing) and often have details precise enough to help in zoo archaeological identification of animal bones. The manuals are based on twenty-five years of bone-work, much of it with students and teachers. The language is simple, the illustrations numerous, and the humor can be corny, but with these manuals even you can do a museum quality skeletal articulation project with tools and materials available-even in the smallest towns-and on a budget that even a public school teacher can afford. The Bone Builder's Notebook (volume 10) is the companion reference book to any of the other bone building manuals. If you work with bones, or desire to work with bones, this is the answer book to questions you may have about preparing bones or skeletons for use in collections, or for display. The Bone Builder's Notebook details how to acquire bones, the different options for cleaning, degreasing, and bleaching bones, the tools and materials used for articulating skeletons, and includes a section for identifying and siding mammal bones, osteology vocabulary, and reference books. Whether you are a bone enthusiast or a museum professional, this manual has the rest of the information pertaining to bone-work. |
| NOTE ABOUT THIS SERIES These manuals are published by a very small press; i.e., myself. As self-published manuals, they are not exempt from having mistakes. They are also prone to have illustrations that I sometimes will look at after a manual has been printed and think, "I could do that one better." Being my own illustrator, I sometimes do. Being that these are manuals with a very limited sales appeal (I don't anticipate Random House to ever come knocking at my door), I have been having them printed in very small press runs. Consequently, it is fairly easy to revise and correct and amend the books as I feel the need or desire. That makes the manuals essentially all works in perpetual progress, constantly in flux and possibly never totally finished as long as they are in my control. Thus, check this web site for information about newer versions. |
| The Bone Building Books have been created from my, often undecipherable hand written notes by Mary, my partner and computer-graphic whiz. If you get stuck or have questions or comments, I welcome hearing from you. Please write to: leepost@theboneman.com Happy Bone Building! |
| URL: http://www.theboneman.com Boneman Last Update: January 24, 2008 copyright 2005 by Lee Post illustrations by Lee post |
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