About the Author: Lee Post - Bone Building Books
Lee Post
Photo by Durrell Kapan, CA. Academy of Science
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, Betsy Pitzman (who also was a bone enthusiast), 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 we had collected and cleaned, then half a dozen other skeletons. Since that project, my 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, leading a trail of kids whom all wanted to do another skeleton project.
Today, I still live in Homer, Alaska, with my wife, 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.