Why Macon college students look past ‘sketchy’ part to piece together animal skeletons

In just over a decade, students at Wesleyan College have built one of nation’s largest collections of articulated animal skeletons at a small college.

“Articulated” means the students start with a pile of bones and assemble the skeleton. There are no numbers on the bones or any guide, so they have to figure out how it all goes together.

That’s not easy, said Barry Rhoades, a biology professor who teaches the vertebrate zoology class in which the skeletons are assembled. Even he isn’t always sure how to solve the puzzle.

If one bone is put in the wrong place, it can throw off the entire skeleton and students may have to start over.

They may also find they have two or three bones left over at the end and no idea where those go.

“If you can imagine taking apart some complicated thing when you were a child and your parents have to figure out how to put it back together,” Rhoades said. “That’s kind of what this is.”

Rhoades teaches the class every other year, and each time they add seven to eight skeletons.

Students in the class are typically interested in becoming veterinarians or they may be pre-med. All of them are biology majors.

“They are learning how the joints work and how the joints fit,” he said.

The first assemblies happened 11 years ago, when a student assembled the skeleton of a finch. Then, the class put together the skeleton of an opossum.

Among the 93 completed skeletons, they have a tree sloth, various species of turtles, a goat, a stork and an alpaca.

Rhoades stays away from exotic animals, large animals or anything endangered. He also is careful about where he gets the skeletons. Ideally he wants them to come from a zoo where the animal died naturally.

“Where you get the animals from is the somewhat sketchy part,” he said. “You have to pay attention to what you are doing.”

He has the skeletons scattered all around his lab and is running out of room. Currently there isn’t a place for the skeletons to be viewed by the general student population or the public, but he is hopeful that could happen someday.

One possibility, he said, is to have a spot in the library where some could be shown.

“Right now it’s a bit of a collection without a home,” he said. “Every time I do three or four skeletons I wonder where I’m going to put them.”

There will be an opportunity soon for people to see some of the skeletons. The dates have not been set, but in a couple of weeks Rhoades said some will be part of an exhibit at the Macon Arts Alliance.

This story was originally published April 2, 2019 at 3:19 PM.