But was it a catalog purchase?

[kierthos]

A New Zealand 'teaching aid' skeleton turns out to be real.

Just... wow. I mean... okay, odds are they're never going to be able to figure out whose skeleton this was, but could you imagine explaining to the relatives of the deceased? "We're really sorry, but it seems we've been using your great-great-great-grandfather's skeleton to teach students for over 100 years now. Our bad."

Comments

[thedeadcat]

*head-tilt* They're treating this like it's a shocking, horrible thing? DUDE. This used to be COMMON PRACTICE. Our colleges are still filled with skeletal displays that are the real thing. There's even a very famous haunting on a Stateside college campus relating to it all.

Students who needed a new skeleton would go out, do some discrete grave-robbing, and spend the next few days cleaning and priming and attaching their new skeletal anatomy display. (It was only ever regarded as a problem if they went after new graves, or left a blatant mess behind, or you know, didn't recover the grave neatly so no one would notice that the body had been made off with...)