“How many people want to spend their entire day — their entire life, I guess, at this point — collecting heads from rotting marine mammals? Well, Ray does!”
From Shelf Life, a 25-minute documentary you can watch here, about Ray Bandar, a volunteer for the California Academy of Sciences whose personal collection of skulls fills his home. (He’s pictured above with his collection in the 1960s.) The collection is predominantly of marine mammal skulls, but there’s a sizeable number of human skulls, bird skulls, large mammal skulls, rodent skulls, and even an elephant skull.
How does his wife stand it? She only asks one thing: no skulls in the bedroom, please.
Bandar was previously the subject of a 30-minute documentary called A Life with Skulls.
