The Raccoon Skull

Finally, an update! And what's this? Wellll...

This is what me and my dad have been working on for so long. I found a dead raccoon in the marsh near our house last winter/early spring (not sure what month it was, but it was cold and icy) stuck partially under the ice. The tail and rump were frozen, and there wasn't much we could do with it, since I don't know anything about taxidermy or even skull cleaning (well, now I know plenty about skull cleaning!), and the tail was frozen so it's not like we could try and cut it off and do something just with that which was what my dad suggested. So, having seen people with their shiny skulls all over dA, and read some skull/bone hunting/cleaning tutorials just out of curiosity, so I suggested getting the skull to clean/etc.. We watched it carefully as it decomposed, and maybe a month or two ago me and my dad went out to the marsh to draw and check on the raccoon. It was pretty much just a mat of hair and bone, so we took the skull and mandibles and went off to clean it (it's only missing three teeth, too!). We first just put on some rubber gloves and got some scrub/snake whatever things that my dad uses for machines/etc. and scrubbed what dirt we could get off the skull and mandibles off, and then we put each mandible and the skull and the teeth which had fallen out of them into their own containers and went to ask our taxidermist/bone hunter neighbor (who actually found a huge ram skull once) what to do with the skull to sterilize and whiten it. He confirmed that hydrogen peroxide was the right thing to use, so we went off to wall-mart to buy a bunch of the stuff. After probably around two weeks of soaking the bones in the peroxide, they'd whitened up considerably, and we decided they were good enough to be rinsed and dried (along the way we had to use the hose, a wire, and different positioning of the skull in the peroxide so we could get all the beetle pupae out of the brain and nasal cavity). So we rinsed it out, getting the last of the pupae out of the skull, soaked it in water for two days, and set it out to dry in my dad's office. Then we didn't do much with it until today, when we got the super glue, hot glue gun, and everything else together and finished gluing the teeth in (the hot glue was only to glue the mandibles together, and worked like a charm). Now we have a completely clean, 100% genuine, shiny, white, sharp-toothed raccoon skull that's only missing two teeth and in excellent condition otherwise (there's even a healed scar on the bone on one side of the forehead, which, if you ask me, only adds character, not imperfectness).

So, that is the story of the raccoon. And if there is a way to tell the gender of a raccoon from it's skull, I'd love to know. I'll be googling and trying to figure it out, in the mean time.

In other news, I'm gonna be rewriting To Run With Wolves for NaNoWriMo! It'll get 75% new characters, a much more detailed, long, and dramatic plot, and I will hopefully end up with a close-to-full-length-or-full-length novel by the end of November! We'll see, and my fingers are crossed. Should be fun.

-Willow