The Viking skeletons at Jorvik

I've blogged earlier about my family holiday in England (*), but one of the places we also stopped off at was the Jorvik Viking Centre in York. It's a fantastic visitor centre which shows viking artefacts and skeletons found by archaeologists in what used to be the viking settlement of Jorvik.

One of the things I was particularly looking forward to seeing  were the viking skeletons found in and near York. Both of them had a lot of interesting pathology and diseases, and it's not often that I get to study human skeletons because even though I have been offered human bones, I have strong views on how human remains should be treated, so this was a valuable experience and something I was looking forward to. Here's what I found !

Bog men and strange decomposition

BIG NEWS - I've a big announcement on Monday at 8am: check out my blog post then !

From collecting bones, I know quite a lot about decomposition. When an animal dies, the soft tissue, sinew and organs start to break down, releasing bacteria that eventually break down everything except the bones and cartilage. Often you can find the entire skeleton lying in the same position it had been inside the body.

 But what if it happened the other way around ? What if the bones decomposed and the soft tissue remained - maybe even for thousands of years ? It may sound completely strange, but dad told me  about something he saw when he visited the National Museum of Ireland while he was giving a talk in Dublin. These are the "bog people", and what happened to their bodies is stranger than fiction.

Human remains should not be raffle prizes (update)

When I visited the Horniman museum stores last year, the curator Paolo taught me that any human remains they keep, even if they are just partial, need to be treated with special respect. That makes sense. Humans might just be a bigger, cleverer kind of animal, but we are also the only species who knows that we are going to die, and that makes us very different to other animals. We are also the only species that has a sense of our own history, and that people have died before us and more will die afterwards.

So imagine how angry I was when I found out the taxidermy website The Weird and Wonderful are offering a human skull as a competition prize. [Added Sat 11am: link is now dead - see at bottom of story] This is wrong. Here is why I as a fellow bone collector think that this is wrong, and they should rethink what they are doing.

The best bone museum in the world ?

This week I've been in Paris with my mum, dad and baby brother Sam. While I was there there was a museum I  had heard about and really wanted to see. It is called the Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée and it is part of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History).

The Ulster Museum in Belfast

My mum is from Northern Ireland and we all go over in Easter time to see her family. Yesterday was my last day in Belfast and we went to see the Ulster Museum.

The McManus Museum in Dundee

At the end of the summer, I went with Mum and Dad to the McManus museum in the middle of Dundee. I actually went there twice. The first I went because when I was at Perth Museum they said the McManus museum was really good. The second time I went was because my friend Catherine who is a archeozoologist was doing a workshop there on bones.