I know there has been talk of european mounts lately, but here is my question. With my schedule, there is no way that i can devote the better part of a day to cleaning, boiling and bleaching the skull. I was wondering, i have a 7 pt, that i would like to do, and my friend also has one that his buddy is going to do for him, but he wants to wait for after the season to do them all together. I hear that if you bury the skull it cleans it up, but i was wondering, if i threw my skull in the pond that i live in, obviously with a rope attached to it, do you think the minnows, snails and other critters would pick it clean? i would say put it on an ant hill, but its just too cold here now to find any. Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated.

I've never thought of that. It might work, but I would try it on a "test" skull first. I may try that with a hogs head one day and see if it works. I will tell you this, before you chunk the thing in the pond, wire both sides of the bottom jaw to the upper part of the skull, if you want to keep the jaw bones. Another thing is, you may lose some teeth in the pond.

Good Luck!

Just put in on the roof of your house and let the birds and insects have their way with it. theyll pickit clean. May take some time but Ive seen alot of people do that with Elk.

I would think that the pond could have bad effects on the skull... Soaking in all the water for a few weeks can't be could for the overall structure of the bones... That's just my thoughts on it though...

Check out this site for the for their mounts,they use bugs to clean the skulls.www.skulltaxidermy.com They have some cool stuff.

Dont do it all at once. Do a little at a time. I did these two over a two week
period.

Soaking in water is called maceration. It's probably the best way to clean skulls. Mush safer than boiling, and the results are better. It will take a while in a pond, and it will discolor the antlers.

Yea, soak them. I soak mine for a few days in a bucket. Boil it and pull some meat off. When Im finished for the day, I put it back in the bucket to soak. It will not hurt at all to soak them for an extended period of time. Once cleaned, the peroxide will bleach them out well and get all the small fragments off. If you do somethingg with antlers, you will most likely need to redie the bases of the antlers. You can use antler die, or brown and black shoe polish and perminate markers. The deer mount I did in the above post, was redied with shoe polish and markers.

Where I live, we had a baby blue whale wash up on the beach several years back. To preserve the skeleton for display at the whaling museum, the experts concluded the best way to clean the skeleton was to just weight down the carcass and leave it in the water to be picked clean. Okay, so it isn't a deer skull, but bones are bones.