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JonsBones carries a wide selection of real human skulls, long bones, articulations, flat bones, and literature. JonsBones is the leading provider of real human bones — all responsibly sourced.
Find out what your countries restrictions are if you want to buy a human skull or bone.
The 24-year-old selling human bones. With a vast bone collection worth over $600,000 and a large social media following, Jon Pichaya Ferry is revitalising the field of osteology. During a visit...
- 4 min
- Overview
- Historical Heads
- Modern Donors
- Law and Order
- Shroud of Secrecy
Last month, eBay banned human bone sales. But it’s still happening on other websites, and lawyers and academics are starting to take notice.
In 2011, an archaeologist in the United Kingdom picked out one of the many human skulls sitting on his shelf. The 17th-century European male was missing most of his teeth and mandible, but the skull was clean and generally in decent condition. The archaeologist photographed it, described it, and listed it on eBay.
At the time, the popular online auction site allowed anyone to trade in human bones as long as the remains were clean, articulated, and for medical purposes. The 17th-century skull was neither articulated nor did it go to a doctor, but it did fetch the archaeologist $750, minus the usual fees from eBay and PayPal.
This was the skull that started Zane Wylie’s obsession. Wylie was studying facial expressions, and he wanted an authentic skull to study how muscles attached to the bone.
“I looked online to see if I could get a real skull, and to my surprise, there were several dozen available,” says Wylie, who asked to go by the pseudonym he now uses for business purposes.
He named his acquisition “Yorick,” the first of many skulls he’d eventually purchase online. By late 2011, he had started carving designs into them and selling them on his website and at conferences, eventually making a living primarily through his boney art.
Right now, most human skulls in the general U.S. market come from antique medical skeletons.
In the 1700s, medical schools had to provide skeletons for their students, and the supply largely came from India. Hindered by changing laws in 1832 that put an end to unchecked grave robbing in the U.K., British doctors pressured Indian people who dealt with the disposal of human remains to sell the bones instead.
Soon, India had a thriving bone industry that supplied much of the Western world with medical specimens. The history, the opportunity for entrepreneurship, and the fact that many families were too poor to cremate their loved ones helped India dominate the human bone niche.
But in 1985, one dealer was caught selling more than 1,500 child skeletons of unknown origin. India promptly banned exporting human remains over concern that people were being murdered for them. For a while, China took over India’s role as global bone merchant, but they also banned exports in 2008.
Head of the Templars
Wylie calls this piece his Jacques de Molay tribute skull. Molay was the last known grand master of the Knights Templar. He was among the Templars arrested for heresy in France on October 13, 1307, which is often erroneously tied to Friday the 13th becoming an unlucky date.
People in the medical world and related fields can still get new human skulls from U.S. donors. That’s because not all bodies donated for non-transplant anatomical science are studied whole. A doctor might teach her medical students elbow surgery using a dead person’s arm, a chiropractor might want a cleaned spine, and a retailer might take the head for cleaning and sale. (Find out how modern body donation is saving lives.)
Skulls Unlimited is the only company in the U.S. that is legally cleaning human heads that come straight from donors. When they receive a donor head, they cut off as much meat as they can, and remove the brains with a special tool. Then the cleaning crew dries the skulls for a few days before putting them in a colony of dermestid beetles, which will eat off the rest of the fleshy bits.
The company will only sell donor skulls to bona fide doctors, nurses, dentists, anthropologists, and people with valid scientific or medical reasons to have them. However, they sell antique skulls to anyone who wants them.
In addition to Skulls Unlimited and The Bone Room, OsteologyWarehouse.com, Skullstore.ca in Canada, and countless brick-and-mortar stores across the U.S. also specialize in selling bones of various species, including humans. You can find human remains for sale on private websites like Wylie’s, plus on some big online platforms like Facebook. (Facebook declined to be interviewed for this article.)
For now, these bone collectors don’t legally need any credentials to buy and sell human skulls that are already on the market. And in the U.S., there is no federal law prohibiting trade and ownership of human remains other than those from Native Americans.
In 1985, India banned exporting human remains over concern that people were being murdered for them.
Many collectors erroneously believe that only three states—New York, Georgia, and Tennessee—ban trade in human remains across state lines, based on a post on The Bone Room’s website and reiterated in their August newsletter.
In reality, the laws are lacking in some states, unenforced in others, and nearly impossible to fully comprehend by buyers, sellers, or site administrators.
Seidemann, who is an attorney at the Louisiana Department of Justice, agrees that the laws are too protean and complicated for sellers to keep track of. “It’s a moving target,” he says. There is no comprehensive online resource to determine the legality of trade in human remains on a state-by-state basis, and neither academics nor collectors (even the ones with lawyers) were able to cite the details of each state’s laws when asked by National Geographic.
Lamb of God
Ethical concerns are no less complicated. Damien Huffer, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, would like to see collectors stop trading in human remains, especially archaeological and ethnographic specimens, on social media. Ownership is “legal by default,” he says, “but that doesn’t wave away all the issues.”
Holy Heart
Carvings on this skull pay tribute to Saint Clare de Montefalco, a Catholic abbess who lived in Italy in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Legend says that when she died in 1308, a small crucifix was found in her heart.
Photographs by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic
Huffer and his colleagues monitor website tags used by human remains traders on Instagram and other social media sites. He suggests that other users do the same and report people who sell remains to Facebook and Instagram. That way the companies are aware it is happening, even though right now neither of those websites has anything in their terms of service or community standards that restrict such sales.
Still, collectors usually have their own code of ethics, and most know what to avoid.
Jan 7, 2021 · Selling skeletons. Under section 32 of the Human Tissue Act, it is an offence to take part in commercial dealings in 'controlled material'. Controlled material in this context is material consisting of or including human cells (excluding gametes and embryos) that is removed from a human body for the purpose of transplantation.
Oct 7, 2022 · Anthropology. Human skulls are pierced with coffin nails and human bones are turned into Ouija board pieces; almost nothing is off-limits in the U.K.’s thriving online human remains trade, a...
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Jan 17, 2024 · Despite there being no major current production of human skeletal remains, there is no federal law preventing ownership, sale, or distribution of the bones in the US today, because this would make criminals out of average folks who have remnants of their education left in their homes.
