Fullerton Man uses His Skulls to Forge Sucess

Steve Gagnon’s interest in skulls isn’t a ghoulish Halloween pastime: it’s a business. No, he’s not a gravedigger. And his clients are not folks with an interest in the macabre but are scientists and anthropologists.

Gagnon owns Skullduggery, a company specializing in the creation of skull casts.

Make no bones about it, Edgar Allan Poe and horror film maker George Romero would feel right at home in Gagnon’s workshop. Skulls are everywhere--in a dumpster alongside the barn, on a shelf in Gagnon’s living room, lined up in a converted shed.

Gagnon, 38, started Skullduggery eight years ago with wood planks from the dump for flooring and $400. He created his first frightening replicas in a spare room in his house in Fullerton. Now, the skulls have literally taken over his farm. Gagnon’s work area incorporates three rooms of his house, the garage, a barn, a shed and a sheep pen, with skulls in various stages of production occupying every inch of available space. “It’s really like a Little Rascals factory,” Gagnon said.

Anthropology and archeology haven’t been lifelong pursuits of the soft-spoken Gagnon. He was a business administration major at Cal State Fullerton eight years ago when his brother introduced him to contemporary and fossil skull replication.

“My brother used to do facial reconstruction for the sheriff’s office in L.A.,” Gagnon said. “He learned how to make molds of skulls. I had been wanting to make casts of skulls and sell them, but I didn’t know how to make the molds until he taught me.”

Gagnon began by replicating a human male skull. “Then people started coming to me with different ideas of other skulls they would like to have. The second skull we did was an African lion. We received the skull in exchange for a human male cast.”

Today, Gagnon has 13 different skulls in his ghoulish repertory, including a saber-toothed tiger, a mountain gorilla, an African lion, a Sumatran orangutan and a grizzly bear. This range of skull reproductions is unusual, he added. “I’m the only one I know who offers so many different animal skulls. There are some companies that sell saber-toothed tiger casts and some that sell just human skull casts.”

Despite the breadth of his offerings, financially this is the first year Skullduggery has made a profit. One of his goals has always been to sell inexpensive but high-quality skull casts, Gagnon said. He noted that his human skull replicas sell in the $20 range in comparison to the $100-plus figure some other companies charge. The saber-toothed tiger costs $70.

Gagnon offers three types of skull finishes: his “clean bone” is the color of bone when “it’s received fresh from a biological supply company” while “antique” has a “just dugged up” effect and “tar pit” is the “straight-from-the-La-Brea-tar-pits look.”

Antique is the most popular finish, but tar pit, a finish Gagnon developed a year ago, is quickly gaining popularity, he said. “I had to have tar pit because the original saber-tooth came from the tar pit. Since I had to make it for the saber-tooth anyhow, I made it an option for the other skulls. People have been buying it. I don’t know why, though. Gorillas never did end up in the tar pits.”

The saber-toothed tiger skull also is the most popular skull in his collection, Gagnon added. “After the saber-toothed tiger, the human skull is the second most popular.”

Public, Private Collections

Gagnon’s realistic skulls can be found in public and private collections across the country, gracing such museums as San Diego Museum of Man, San Diego Natural History Museum and Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa. The biology department at Cal State Fullerton, and the University of Idaho’s anthropology department are among the academic collectors of Gagnon’s work.

Obtaining a skull that fits his criteria for reproduction is no easy task, Gagnon said. “It needs to be a large, full-grown adult with good teeth. The teeth are very important. A lot of people are really into teeth. They like to be able to study the worn patterns of the teeth to determine dietary habits.”

Originally, Gagnon purchased his human skulls from biological supply houses, but that source has dried up, he said. “They used to get the skulls from India, but India has now outlawed selling human body parts, and they were the last country in the world where it was legal. Fortunately, I have a male skull and a female skull. I can always get other specimens from schools and universities.”

Museums and private collections provide the main source for Gagnon’s animal skull casts. Whenever Gagnon borrows a skull for replication, he then gives a percentage of the royalties from the skull sales to the contributor.

Many of his skulls are replicas of those at San Diego Museum of Man, including his mountain gorilla skull. “The skull is of Mbongo, one of the largest gorillas ever in captivity,” Gagnon explained. “He used to be housed at the San Diego Zoo. After his death, his skeleton and hide were placed on exhibit at the Museum of Man.”

Mbongo was left on exhibit without a head for a month in 1983 while Gagnon borrowed the skull to make a mold. “The San Diego Natural History Museum did the same thing with their saber-toothed tiger when they loaned it to me,” Gagnon said. “I had that head for about three weeks.”

The process begins in an old shed. There, the original skulls are plugged with clay, sealing all holes, so a mold can be made. Coats of latex are then layered on the skull in a process that takes eight hours. Hydrostone, a highly durable gypsum cement, is then poured into the mold.

From each mold, Gagnon can make 150 casts. He reserves the best casts to make other molds. A backup mold, also made of Hydrostone, is pieced together in sections to provide the support for the mold. The backup mold can be used over and over again, Gagnon said.

The process then moves on to the barn where casts are made. The molds, with the backup molds encasing them, are rotated on a machine especially designed by Gagnon for that purpose. The machine holds the skulls, rotating them for uniformity. Hydrostone is poured into the latex mold, with each cast taking an hour to complete.

Done by Hand

“I used to have to do each skull by hand, rotating it for two hours,” Gagnon said. “When you have to do each one individually like that you start thinking of ways to speed up the process so you don’t have to do it by hand. That’s how I came up with the machine.”

Gagnon is now designing another machine that should completely automate the skull-casting stage.

Mandible molds are also formed in the barn. Once again, layers of latex are applied and a backup mold is created. “They’re solid, so they’re easier to make than the hollow skulls,” Gagnon said. “I could do them all day.”

In a converted sheep pen, finishing touches are applied to the skulls. “Some are too thin and we have to recoat the inside,” Gagnon said. “Others need to be smoothed and have the air bubbles removed.”

At this point the skull receives its finishing coat. “We try to make them all look natural,” Gagnon said.”They’re all as close to natural as I can get them. Of course, all bones differ. In nature, you never find two bones that are exactly the same color. It depends on where they were and how long they were there.”

For the clean bone finish, a sealer is painted on the teeth to provide a glossy off-white look and a dull varnish is then applied to the whole skull. “Personally, I don’t like the white bone look,” Gagnon commented. “But a lot of universities insist on having it. They want their students to be able to see the worn patterns in the dentition, muscle origins and insertion marks. Those things show up clearly on the white skulls.”

Although Gagnon thought that skulls would prove to be an interesting business, he never anticipated the time-consuming, painstaking work involved, he said. “I really didn’t realize how much work it would be at first. If I’d known, I don’t know if I ever would have started. But now most of the work’s behind me.”

Four Part-Time Workers

For the past several years, Gagnon has employed four workers part time and one full time to help in production. However, for the first five years of business he worked solo. “I hate getting bogged down in production. At one time, I had to make all the skulls myself. I’m happier now because I’m able to get out from underneath the pile.”

Now that Gagnon has freed himself from day-to-day production, he is exploring acquisition of new specimens for his “rogues’ gallery. It’s starting to be fun,” he said. “Now I can go out and do what I like to do. I want to get out and expand my line. I’d like to get a large specimen of each species, ideally male and female of each, especially the primates, but that’s thinking pretty far ahead.

Gagnon’s next step may be even farther back in time, he added. “I’m really looking forward to getting involved with dinosaurs. I want to start off with some of the smaller dinosaurs and then work my way up.

“But I only want to do skulls,” he said, and grinned.