• @[email protected]
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      663 months ago

      Didn’t we have a community for unethical life pro tips? This comment would be a perfect post there.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Imagine a neighbor who’s annoying dog barks in their yard sometimes.

      Now imagine a neighbor who’s fathers’s rotting corpse is slowly being eaten by beetles over the course of a year or more.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      When I read this, I was curious how possible it would be, if there’s sufficient supply in the market… I found this vendor page. So, there would probably be enough supply as there are taxidermists who need to clean big game skulls, which require thousands of larva and adults, and the vendor say you should email them if you need more than 10’000. I couldn’t learn how much time it would take, but they do say that more = faster, and to communicate with them to fit your project timeline.

  • @[email protected]
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    1033 months ago

    It’s actually the exact opposite to what he says. In the US you can do almost anything you want with human remains, while in Europe it’s much more restricted. In Denmark for example, you have to have the body/ashes buried in a licensed cemetery. You can’t keep the ashes yourself, you can’t bury them in your backyard, you can’t spread them at some random special place (except for the sea in rare circumstances).

  • @[email protected]
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    873 months ago

    Pretty sure this is legal, they just wouldn’t release an unembalmed corpse for health reasons.

    Wouldn’t OP just have to find a qualified mortician willing to do the work?

  • @[email protected]
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    673 months ago

    Apparently there’s no federal law (in the US) banning the ownership of human bones because up until the mid to late 20th century it was apparently common practice for med students to purchase real human bones for their studies. Most of them apparently came from India, until the country banned the export of human remains, which must have played a part in causing the practice to fall out of style.

    If anyone has anything to correct/add, please do so. This was just a quick google search out of morbid curiosity

    • @[email protected]
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      213 months ago

      I know the POTC ride had a bunch of real skulls (and a few are still there) because, at the time, they were cheaper and easier to get then good looking fakes.

    • @[email protected]
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      113 months ago

      The reason India stopped that is because they realized they were exporting way too many human skeletons and way too many child skeletons in that, so they eventually realized that this meant there were mass murders involved. India to this day has problems with that but it’s become better.

      Here’s an interview of a guy who went underground to familiarize himself with the problem and even talked to a bunch of people involved. It’s a great video :)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP76ekb_DxI

      • @[email protected]
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        133 months ago

        My highschool biology classroom had the skeleton of an indian tween in a closet. It had been professionally skeletonized and rigged up and everything. The bio teacher swore it was there when he started teaching and that he doesnt know anything about it…

        He also had a human fetus preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.

    • Who knew?
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      12 months ago

      It’s true. My aunt had the skeleton of a person, probably from India, for use when she was in medical school in the '80s. She took him on the bus with her in a bigass suitcase I guess. They talked about it as if it wasn’t fucked up.

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    263 months ago

    You Can’t Keep Your Parents’ Skulls [Caitlin Doughty | September 4, 2019 | theatlantic.com]

    Under U.S. law, it’s nearly impossible to get permission to decapitate and de-flesh a relative’s remains.

    Abuse-of-corpse laws exist for a reason. They protect people’s bodies from being mistreated (ahem, necrophilia). They also prevent a corpse from being snatched from the morgue and used for research or public exhibition without the dead person’s consent. History is littered with such violations. Medical professionals have stolen corpses and even dug up fresh graves to get bodies for dissection and research. Then there are cases like that of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century Mexican woman with a condition called hypertrichosis, which caused hair to grow all over her face and body. After she died, her husband saw that there was money to be made by displaying Pastrana in freak shows, so he took her embalmed and taxidermied corpse on world tour. Pastrana had ceased to be regarded as human; her corpse had become a possession.

    So where do skulls on bookcases come from? In the United States, no federal law prevents owning, buying, or selling human remains, unless the remains are Native American. Otherwise, whether you’re able to sell or own human remains is decided by each individual state. At least 38 states have laws that should prevent the sale of human remains, but in reality the laws are vague, confusing, and enforced at random. In one seven-month period in 2012–13, 454 human skulls were listed on eBay, with an average opening bid of just under $650 (eBay subsequently banned the practice).

    If there were any legal wiggle room that might allow a person to get Dad’s head liberated from its fleshy shell, Tanya Marsh would know how to find it. Marsh is a law professor and the expert on human-remains law. “I will argue with you all day long,” she told me, “that it isn’t legal in any state in the United States to reduce a human head to a skull.”[1]


    1. [1] https://archive.ph/SE19g ↩︎

  • @[email protected]
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    243 months ago

    …how would a coroner go about removing a skeleton without destroying the body? I’m pretty sure this is nowhere in a coroner job description. I’d tell him the same thing.

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      123 months ago

      Your height varies a surprising amount as your spinal column compresses - this seems to be more pronounced in tall people (not sure why - we don’t have extra vertebrae).

      As an example, measure your height in the morning and before you go to bed.

  • @[email protected]
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    63 months ago

    My little brother likes to say he’s going to have us all taxidermied and put on roller skates so we’ll be with him forever.