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 law and my amazing mystery skull

I promised that I was going to write this weekend about the extra skull that came in the biscuit tin of bones, and I am still going to but I'm going to write about it tomorrow. First of all I am going to write about what I had to do to work out whether I could keep it.

I'm not going to tell you yet what it is but as soon as I saw it I knew it could have only come from one of two animals and both of them are very rare and special indeed. I was very excited when I saw it, but I was worried that I wouldn't be allowed to keep it. I had to do lots of work to find out whether I could.