They Put Their Heads Together for Thriving Mail-Order Firm
What a way to make a living.
With a few molds and some cement, Steve Gagnon started making skulls in his Brea back yard about 10 years ago. Every 6 hours or so, he’d place another skull on the old shelf in his garage.
Obscurity was part of the business. Aside from a clientele of artists and educators, not many knew of his finely crafted replicas. Now, however, one of the skulls is a movie star.
Featured in several scenes in the new Sigourney Weaver movie, “Working Girl,” the saber-toothed tiger skull is part of a line of fossil replicas manufactured by Skullduggery in Tustin.
What was once a cottage industry run out of Gagnon’s back yard has become a growing mail-order business managed by the Koehl family, which purchased the operation from Gagnon nearly 2 years ago. With the help of museum-donated fossils, latex molds and cement, Emmy and Peter Koehl and their son Peter Koehl Jr. make and sell 400 skulls a month from their tidy Tustin warehouse.
Ranging in price from $85 to $195, Skullduggery pieces include a mountain lion, a grizzly bear, a wolf, a 100,000-year-old mammoth tooth and replicas of about a dozen other skulls. But the No. 1 favorite is the saber-toothed tiger, made from a 12,000-year-old skull dredged from the La Brea Tar Pits.
Another favorite, according to the younger Peter, is the human skull--male and female Homo sapiens. But the Homo sapiens with the hole in the head has a certain following too. Called the trephined cranium, this skull has a hole carved in the top, identical to those carved by surgeons 500 years ago.
Called trephining, the surgery was performed with no anesthesia on ailing patients in Europe, Asia, Africa and the New World. According to the Skullduggery catalogue, this practice was performed most frequently in Peru, where about 60% of the patients survived. The surgeons carved the hole for religious or medical reasons, probably to let evil spirits out or nice ones in.
“I’ve always felt the trephined skull would be great for neurologists,” Emmy Koehl says. “They could show their patients the difference between ancient brain surgery and modern surgery--to show how far we’ve come.”
Another cranial oddity is the annular deformation skull, cast from a 500-year-old skull that had been artificially elongated. Like trephining, annular deformations were practiced by ancient Peruvians for medical or religious reasons. Skulls were bound by tight circular wrappings soon after birth so the head would gradually grow elongated. There is no evidence that annular deformation had any effect on intelligence, according to Skullduggery.
Emmy Koehl was asked which skull is her favorite.
“I like the saber-tooth because it’s unique and dramatic-looking. But my favorite is the mountain lion, because it’s small and cute. It’s less foreboding.”
Skull replicas used to be found mostly in classrooms and artists’ studios, but Skullduggery’s products have been turning up in living rooms, offices, Hollywood movies and museums.
The saber-toothed tiger skull appears in “Working Girl” as an office ornament--its ferocious bite used by the director to artistically emphasize Weaver’s tough “dog-eat-dog” character in the movie. The skulls can be seen in a more benign context at Newport Beach’s Museum of Natural History and Science, which last year received Skullduggery’s entire line as a donation.
(The replicas can also be seen and purchased at the Tustin location, 621 S. B St., or through the company’s catalogue by calling (800) 3-FOSSIL.)
Made from a gypsum cement that is poured into a latex rubber mold cast from an original fossil, the skulls are carefully patched and then finished in one of three finishes: natural bone, antique or tar pit. The entire process takes about 2 hours.
The Koehl family is able to cast molds from original museum fossils by paying royalties for every fossil used. It’s a good way to help museums and keep a skull-making business going.
“The relationship we have with the museums is wonderful, because they always have a hard time with income,” Emmy Koehl said. “It’s a good, symbiotic relationship.”
The Koehl family knew little of skull-making before they became involved in Skullduggery. But ancient history held a fascination for Emmy Koehl, who is currently taking anthropology courses at Cal State Fullerton.
“One thing I’ve learned is that there is such a wide discrepancy of ideas on how we evolved,” she said. “There’s so much still to be learned and even the experts disagree on a number of things. I think Skullduggery’s job is to reproduce the physical evidence and let the knowledgeable anthropologists form their own theories.”
As for father and son, their interest was more entrepreneurial. The elder Peter Koehl, a financial consultant, knew the business could be streamlined and made profitable. Peter Koehl Jr. is in charge of production. He says the operation has been streamlined considerably since the Koehl family took over (Gagnon is still part owner, however).
“When we started it would take us 6 hours to make” a skull, said the younger Koehl. “Now it takes us 2.”
SKULLDUGGERY AT A GLANCE
Address: 621 S. B St., Tustin.
Phone: (800) 336-7745 or (714) 832-8488
What: Mail-order company that manufactures and sells a line of fossil reproductions. Most popular items are the saber-toothed tiger skull, created from a 12,000-year-old fossil dredged from the La Brea Tar Pits, and the human skull. Among the company’s other skulls are one of the mountain gorilla, the orangutan, the African lion and the grizzly bear.
