A Head for Bones

If this were a movie, Ray Bandar would be the villain.

In one scene he might be on a rocky Northern California beach, happily severing the head of a dead sea lion while tourists recoil, then packing his gruesome harvest into the back of his car. Next scene he’d be feeding the head to a pack of flesh-eating beetles, which would help scour it clean for the vast collection of skulls that covers nearly every spare inch of his Bay Area home.

But it’s not a movie, and Bandar isn’t really all that creepy. Just a gentleman scientist with weathered hands, a great tan and a shock of white hair who is in love with the artistic forms of animal skulls and bones. He has collected thousands as a volunteer field associate for the California Academy of Sciences and now more than a thousand of them are on display as part of the academy’s new “Skulls” exhibit at its Museum of Natural History in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. “Skulls tell you the most information about the animal,” said Bandar, wearing a hyena vertebra on a necklace. “You can find out the species, the sex and sometimes you can tell why it died. You can even get the age of the animal by examining the teeth.”

A trained artist and retired high school science teacher, Bandar, 74, cut off his first head in the spring of 1953 while body surfing at the famed Kelly’s Cove in San Francisco. To this day, he’s not sure what compelled him to do it.

“Here’s this dead, stinking bloated harbor seal that just washed up on the beach, so I went to my convertible and got a knife and cut off its head,” Bandar recalls. “I brought it home, and my parents were away at work. So I boiled it. The flesh came off pretty easy, but boy did it stink. My parents were not that pleased with me.”

This was in the days before a 1972 federal law made it illegal to tamper with marine mammals, even dead ones. Today Bandar’s work is legal because he does it in conjunction with the academy, which is part of a program run by the National Marine Fisheries Service to monitor and collect stranded marine mammals.

From that first harbor seal, his macabre menagerie has grown to nearly 6,000 skulls. Inspired by the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe and the African tribal art he was exposed to as an art student, Bandar developed a passion for the sometimes surprisingly beautiful contours of the skeletal form.

In addition to the thousands of native California sea mammals, his collection of 50 years includes cows and sheep he gathered on trips through the American Southwest, rare bird species and exotic mammal specimens he has culled from zookeepers and veterinarians around the country.

Nowadays, his methods for cleaning the skulls he collects are a bit more sophisticated than boiling them in his parents’ kitchen, although no less gruesome to the uninitiated.

Once the excess flesh has been carved away, fresh bones are frozen for several days to kill bacteria. Then, depending on the size of the skull, it is either fed to the carrion beetles or soaked in water so that bacteria can eat away at what remains, a method called bacterial maceration.

“The aroma is horrendous when you’re changing the water,” said Bandar, though he is unfazed by the smells and sights of his work. “Occasionally, if I’ve been working in the beetle cage, I’ll come home and one will crawl out of my hair while I’m eating dinner,” he said matter-of-factly.

On occasion, a bone is so large that neither of the usual cleaning methods is feasible. Such was the case with the elephant femur, and the 110-pound whale pelvis Bandar has in his home.

“If it’s big stuff I can’t handle any other way, I bury the bones in my backyard. I do it under cover of darkness because I don’t want the neighbors to see what’s going on,” he confessed.

Bandar leaves the bones underground for weeks, or months, until bacteria and insects eat away at the meat. Then he unearths the bones and gives them a good cleaning.

He shares a three-story home with his wife of nearly 50 years, Alkmene. The two met in art school and were married in 1954. She got a quick introduction to her new husband’s offbeat passion on their honeymoon, an 11-week, 11,000-mile driving and camping trip. By the time they returned, the back of his convertible was heaped with bones they had collected. “I enjoy it as much as he does,” said Alkmene, an artist. “It’s made for a very happy, stimulating household.”

At first, her only rule was no bones in the bedroom. But rules were meant to be broken, and the couple’s bedroom now includes several smaller pieces from his collection. The bones become increasingly dense each level down in the house. The dimly lighted basement seems something out of an Indiana Jones movie: rows and rows of heads stare out from shelves and glass cases.

In one case is the fully intact skull of a snake, which was Bandar’s pet until it bit him. A shelf nearby holds the smiling skull of a bottle-nosed dolphin. Chimpanzee and orangutan and monkey skulls stare blankly ahead, eerie in their similarities to humans.

Most of the skulls don’t technically belong to him though; he collects them under the auspices of the academy, a private, nonprofit research institution that is the oldest scientific institution in the West. His home is actually a semi-official storage facility for the academy, which otherwise doesn’t have nearly enough space to house Bandar’s entire collection.

Indeed, the idea for the museum exhibit came about when a team of the academy’s architects and designers came to Bandar’s home to measure his collection so they could plan for the academy’s eventual storage needs. Like most first-time visitors, they were overwhelmed by what they found. The museum’s scientists joke about Bandar’s relentless compulsion to add to his collection. “Somebody’s just got to change the locks on him,” joked Douglas Long, the collections manager of the academy’s Ornithology and Mammalogy department.

But they know that without him, the museum’s valuable research collection would be measurably smaller. Bandar is responsible for more than one-sixth of the academy’s vertebrate skull collection. And the larger the collection, Long explained, the better scientists are able to understand the variety within a species or an ecosystem, and how it may evolve over time.

After months of preparation, the museum exhibit includes a dizzying 93-foot display of 860 sea lion heads, a wall full of the beautiful skulls of antlered animals, and a sweeping array of examples from snakes to birds to wild boars. Even that first harbor seal he found in 1953 is on display.

A toucan skull is so small it’s almost invisible next to the bird’s long and colorful beak. A squirrel monkey skull, smaller than a chicken egg, looks hauntingly like a tiny human head.

In one glass case, carrion beetles chew the flesh off a dead reptile. Surrounded by the relics of so many lives gone by, Bandar is nevertheless impatient with questions about death. He insisted he never thinks about it. “I’ve got too many things to live for. I don’t have time,” he said.

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For more information about the “Skulls” exhibit in San Francisco, contact the California Academy of Sciences at (415) 750-7145 or go online to www.calacademy.org. The exhibit will run through late 2003.