I see a made-for-tv movie in the works...

Yoko would be more eager and better equipped for that job.

Not that unusual, I would think. Back home in NS, one of the local museums left a whale carcass outside to be eaten by bugs (don't ask me which kind of bugs, or whale for that matter). It was kind of cool, once you got over the initial odour of death and decay.

Norwegian Puffin Hounds aren't that rare.

OK, let's just get this out of the way right now....

I, for one, welcome our new flesh eating beetle overlords.

/feels better now

yeah i keep some at home to... do.... stuff

"Never trust a man with a pig bug farm"

What SpinStopper said: this has been a standard practice, if not THE standard practice, for ages. Seen it mentioned in countless documentaries and articles.

In other news: the face on Mars isn't really a face AND it turns out the moon is not made of cheese.

Yeah, everyone does it this way. Dermestid beetles are the way to go. What's so strange? I have three aquaria full downstairs right now.

Forget a home theatre. I want to install a dermestarium.

Not strange at all. Makes complete sense.

If you want strange consider the fact that medicine has come full circle and leeches are now used as a cure again.

Of course, I would rather have leeches on me than have a reattached limb pool blood and fall off. As far as choosing between maggots and gangrene/infection from decayed flesh...umm, I'll just ask for Dr. Kevorkian.

/Slowly backs away from office_despot....

I've got a friend who sells animal skeletons at exotic pet shows. He uses beetles daily to do his cleaning work. He's also a whiz with a glue gun.

/the more you know...

Hey, any story with the word 'de-fleshing' in it just has to be good.

Dermestid beetle colony starter kit

Yummy. (Warning, Not safe for appetite)

I don't see why they would use beetles when they could just blow the flesh up:
http://perp.com/whale/

I have alot of friends who are in the physical anthropology program here at UT Knoxville. Dermestid beetles have been used to deflesh specimans for both human and faunal collections for quite some time.

This is news? We did this in my high school biology class. Museums do this every farking day. Who cares?

"Norwegian Puffin Hounds aren't that rare."

Yeah, these beetles usually take them medium well.

What could possibly go wrong?

I got dibs on the night watchman getting eaten first.

Common knowledge, common practise.
It was even mentioned on the first season of fear factor.

I was walking along the road and found a dead rabbit crawling with bugs. You could see the bugs moving underneath the skin. You could hear them moving through the leaves under the dead animal. I poked it with a long stick and an assortment of bugs including some beetles ran out through its eyes and mouth. I guess they were related to these beetles.

I think they should use radioactive slugs.

What could possibly go wrong?

I got dibs on the night watchman getting eaten first.

LOL. Beat me to this one. Should have been in the headline.

I'm feeling a new diet product here. Guaranteed results - how could you not make a fortune selling these things?

This isn't new or unique. I used to work in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and they used these beetles extensively, and for years.

Today 100 flesh-eating bugs. Tomorrow, the scarabs from The Mummy chasing britons all over London.

Ok, not a big deal. I don't think scarabs can swim.

Damnation Alley, anyone?

Yeah SU it's possible you did see some dermestids. You don't need to order them from some special place; scraping off old road kill works fine.

death is only the beginning

Rick O'Connell not available for comment?

I saw this on Ripley's Believe it or Not back in the 80s.

/Great for Sunday night dining experiences

I used to boil everything, but the wife complained that it smelled too much so I switched to dermestids.

Ah yes, the sentence from which recovery is impossible.

/collects skulls

Norwegian puffin hound

Puffi'n on what..... Or whom ?

They also strip bare hard-to-reach parts fo the skeleton

...Fo' shizzle.

Wonderful editing.

For everyone, including myself, who wants only to say "This is news?", this is straight from the article:

"The beetles, which belong to the species (Dermestes maculatus), have been USED FOR DECADES by museums to strip away the flesh from carcasses so the skeletons can be studied."

This is not strange, it's normal. Museums have been using beetles for decades. You guys ought to read a magazine occasionally.

Michigan's museum of Natural History has a bug room. Our archaeologists routinely brought in road kill to feed to the beasties so they'd have complete skeletons of Michigan's wild life to compare to animal bones found in dig sites. It stunk, but was faster than the paper bag method.

(find dead deer on the road. wrap up head in paper bag, leave said bag outside on window ledge all during winter, wait until spring thaw and then hand it off to an underling to clean off now liquid brain matter)

Ouroborus

DOPE!!!!

The Field Museum in Chicago has been doing this for many many years. This process is not new.

taxidermist use these on deer heads...a mount stripped of hair and flesh is known as a "european mount"

Like everyone else said, museums and collections have been cleaning carcasses this way for years... this is news how exactly?

This was even in the movie Relic. I'm sure *everyone* saw that memorable film...

Uh, it's not news, it's Fark.


/obvious?

they did this in some bad, brendan frasier movie didn't they?

/aware that the 'bad' is superfluous.

This is not strange, it's normal. Museums have been using beetles for decades. You guys ought to read a magazine occasionally.

My subscription to BeetleFancy just ran out.

Was just going to bring up 'Relic.' It's been on one of the premium movie channels a lot lately.

Smithsonian magazine had an article on this, maybe 10 years back. They've been using dermestids for about 100 years to clean fine bones on small critters, 'cause the beetles and their grubs can get into every nook and cranny.

Little bastards will clean out an improperly sealed mounted butterfly collection right quick, too.

Sorry if this repeats what somebody else already said.

Duh. I use ants to clean the skulls of my kills all the time.

2004-08-25 08:45:31 PM Sidi:
As far as choosing between maggots and gangrene/infection from decayed flesh...umm, I'll just ask for Dr. Kevorkian.
The finest surgeons in the world couldn't do an eight as good as maggots at debriding wounds. Maggots don't touch living tissue, they only eat the slough.
/maggot therapy owns decubitus ulcers.

Just wondering, has this practice been used by museums for years now?

Not that unusual, I would think.

I thought museums and universities and such had been doing it this way for ages.

this has been a standard practice, if not THE standard practice, for ages. Seen it mentioned in countless documentaries and articles.

Yeah, everyone does it this way.

Dermestid beetles have been used to deflesh specimans for both human and faunal collections for quite some time.

This is news? We did this in my high school biology class. Museums do this every farking day. Who cares?

Common knowledge, common practise.
It was even mentioned on the first season of fear factor.

This isn't new or unique. I used to work in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and they used these beetles extensively, and for years.

I saw this on Ripley's Believe it or Not back in the 80s.

This is not strange, it's normal. Museums have been using beetles for decades. You guys ought to read a magazine occasionally.

The Field Museum in Chicago has been doing this for many many years. This process is not new.

Like everyone else said, museums and collections have been cleaning carcasses this way for years... this is news how exactly?

Yes, yes this is indeed standard practice and is NOT news at all.

They've been using dermestids for about 100 years to clean fine bones on small critters

/oh

Lots of "yeah, well, okay" posts, and no "This is the way is MUST be done!! Down with chemical flesh-eating solvents!" posts from the enviro types. Why do some threads get just a few responses and others go infinity?

These sorts of bugs were used on an episode of "American Gothic", where Bruce Campbell was locked into a box with these and eaten alive. It has been a sort of nightmare of mine ever since.

Beetles are for pussies.

Give me a big boiling pot of soapy water any day. Boiling water does the job much faster and it leaves the bones pearly white. The secret ingredient it bleach. The problem with the beetles is that they don't know when they've done their job so they just keep on eating away. You lose a lot of the fine bones with beetles.

The only problem with a pot of boing water is the fact that the smell will kind of put you off beef stew for a while.

Where is the SPCA? Where is PETA? Isn't this abuse? Do they get coffee breaks?

Though it may be news to some, this is the way anyone gets a skeleton out of a carcass whether they are a taxodermist, in forensics, or making a skeletal display in a museum.

Umm what other way is there?

Flesh-eating Beatles, anyone?

The beetles will be kept under tight security.

ha ha ha ha!

6 months later

"We don't know how this could've happened," said a frantic Professor Wink. "The beetles were to be kept under tight AAAAAAAUUGH!"

You'd think I, of all people, would have something to say about this.
I sure showed you though.

the biology department at my college uses them to clean skeletons. i never thought it was all that strange.

The curse of hom dai!

thank you EmeraldDragon, that was the first thing that popped into my head. i too saw the horrendousness that was that film. and loved it. why? because they SHOWED two kids bite the big one! classic!

Flesh eating....69 posts until I got here

Flesh eating....69


mmmmmmmmm

A few notes on methods (mostly for gargoyle and ghare): the reason musuems generally don't use ants is that ants tend to carry away the smallest bones (earbones, ends of digits, etc.) and dermestids don't. Boiling will indeed produce pearly white bones, but these are often (always?) warped by the heat and are useless for taking measurements on. One of the reasons that museums keep osteological collections is so that people can measure the bones. Therefore, boiling may make a nice conversation piece, but not a good specimen.

(There, HalfmastTrousers, you really can argue about methods, even on a beetle thread!)

me thinks Bricktop would not approve, since his pigs go thru bones like butter.

i saw the cleveland museum of natural history's flesh eating beetles once... we went into the room they housed them in... thew were cleaning skulls and carcasses...

mmmmmm... the smell of rotting animal carcasses...

Expanding on various comments of the normality of this - it is a very standard practice of not just museums but anyone seeking to clean skeletons for preservation (there was a segment about a fellow who did it for money a while back on the newer Believe It Or Not show). The beetles can really thoroughly clean the bone without causing any damage that even the most careful mechanical or chemical cleaning might.

To the person who asked about the waste build-up, my understanding is that they actually gut, skin and strip the majority of the meat off the carcasse before letting the beetles have at it. I'm sure the beetle digs need to be cleaned from time to time but it isn't as if there is a whole carcasse worth of meat converted to beetle droppings in the box.

Ah, with all this talk about swift boats and prisoner abuse and terrorism, isn't it swell to have a nice conversation for a change?

THIS gets approved? Jeez. This is NOT Fark-worthy. I work in a museum. Everybody who suspected this practice is just business as usual is absolutely correct. What a crap article. Maybe we can find an story about people using computers at work! That would be so unusual!!!

/really bored today..
//gonna go play with the 'bug box' now...

eggrolls... while I understand your frustration, this is the kind of story that will be news to the majority of people who read it. The implication in the headline that there is something special about this is sort of dumb, but it is still I think worth a look for anyone interested in, er, this kind of thing (death, bones, bugs, etc.)

The dude in the teevee spot I mentioned who ran a bone-selling business said he wanted to be field-stripped and have his carcasse fed to the bugs when he died. Probably be tough to pull that one off legally, more's the pity (how cool would that be... show up the first day on the job and there's the founder's skeleton on display in a glass case in the lobby...)