SAN FRANCISCO -- Raymond Bandar, 74, started collecting skulls as an art student in the 1950s. On his honeymoon, he filled up the back of a convertible with horse and cow bones. His house is stacked full of skulls, from the bedroom to the "bone palace" in the basement.
A fraction of his collection of 6,000 heads is part of Skulls, a new exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences opening Saturday in San Francisco.
Skulls are "masterpieces of sculpture," Bandar said, sporting a homemade tie made of a hyena neck bone and a black shoelace.
While some may hesitate to display these unconventional works of art in their living rooms as Bandar does, humans have always been fascinated by skulls, curators say.
The museum's exhibit of over 1,500 skulls will educate visitors about the diversity of these heads and the stories they reveal.
"We see this as a marvelous vehicle for conveying information about the course of evolution -- how animals have changed through time and adapted to their environments," said Nina Jablonski, chairwoman of the academy's anthropology department.
"You can tell so much about the life of an animal by looking at its skull -- how big it is, how old, what it ate, what its day-to-day habits were," she said.
Bandar's collection of over 800 California sea lion heads line an entire wall. The opposite wall displays horned animal heads, similar to the bleached animal skulls seen in Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.
The exhibit also features heads of tapirs, orcas, giraffes, camels and 45 different breeds of dogs. Rare finds like a set of locked deer antlers and a ram skull with four horns instead of two are also among the treasures.
"Each skull represents a unique set of data," said Douglas Long, collections manager of the academy's ornithology and mammalogy department. It's "a personal snapshot about the animal and the animal's life."
While patrons see a real diversity of hard heads, said Jablonski, the exhibit also shows that the "basic plan of these skulls is all the same: the box to enclose the brain, and smaller boxes to partly enclose the ears, the eyes and the nose."
The skulls on display came from the museum's inventory as well as Bandar's collection.
Bandar, now a field associate at the academy, started collecting skulls not only for their artistic beauty, but because he knew he was going to be a teacher.
"Skulls make great teaching tools," said Bandar, who taught high school anatomy and biology in Oakland.
Bandar built his collection from roadkill as well as from dead animals he discovered along San Francisco's Baker Beach and other local beaches, like nearby Point Reyes. The Marine Mammal Center calls him to take care of dead seals and sea lions that wash ashore. He records each animal found, as required by law.
To preserve the skulls, the academy puts the animal heads through a process some might find grisly.
Scientists carve the skin and meat off the head, take the brain out, then dry the skull to a "jerky-like consistency," Long said.
The skull is then placed in a colony of flesh-eating beetles that eat the dried tissue.
A beetle box will be on display when the exhibit opens.
The beetles clean off about 99 percent of the cartilage and ligaments, then the skull is soaked in ammonia.
Much of the bird and mammal collection is available online for researchers.
The exhibit features a handful of human skulls at different stages of life, but they are not a focus of Skulls.
"They're only one of many wonderful species," Jablonski said.
Jablonski said the academy decided not to exhibit skulls from different tribal groups because of cultural sensitivity.
"It really might create a controversy that would detract from the primary purpose of the exhibit," she said.
A portion of the exhibit displays examples of skulls in art and pop culture -- from the distorted skull in Hans Holbein's painting, "The Ambassadors" to boneheads on Grateful Dead posters.
