Bone Building Books

Written by a thirty-year veteran of professional skeleton building, the Bone Building Books is 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 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 limited budget.

The manuals (volumes 1 through 9) are heavily illustrated with black-and-white ink drawings and often have details precise enough to help in zooarchaeological identification of animal bones. The manuals are based on forty years of bone-work, much of it with students and teachers. The language is simple, the illustrations numerous, and the humour 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 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 whitening 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.

The Bone Guide To Selected Land Mammals of the Northwestern States is more a reference manual for zooarchaeologists and does not contains instructions on how prepare and articulate skeletons.