Editor’s Note: In this year’s Boo Topographics, Bucky Miller writes about the anatomical incorrectness of so many Halloween animal skeletons. Read last year’s installment here. 
We all knew the fake animal skeletons should not have bone ears, but they did. At least this helped in telling them apart. No ears, that’s a monkey. Ears, that’s a cat. We were at CVS.
They keep coming, and every year another variant. This fall, once again, I am new in a new town. Seems everywhere in October the weather gets really right for walking around. Sometimes it makes me think of my last night in Ditmas Park, or Hyde Park, wherever. Skeletons everywhere; three feet, twelve feet, a bat, a pug. That’s how this project started. Back in Houston, in 2020, skeleton theater was booming in Woodland Heights lawns. I made some notes.
No person of flesh could ever crack decorative skeletons, even if they wrote for a lifetime, but over the past five years, I have done my best. Future texts in this vein may require pumpkins. Think about it: When a person carries a pumpkin, they are also walking around with their own head. Tell me there’s not something there.
We’ll see.
For now, I’m clinging to skeletons, but only because of those flaps. Emily, who pays close attention to animal shapes, was the first to point them out to me. So nonanatomic! They sprout like overzealous sprues from the hollow plastic heads, pretending to populate a world where you pet a dog and sprain your wrist on the ear.
Look up two mammal skulls — try bear skull and badger skull — and the indicating malformations start to make sense. Somewhere in recent history, the bone executives paused all their skull Googling and met. One said they must be shown things that don’t exist to know what they are supposed to see. Another agreed. A third dissented, said “Ears won’t sell” and was promptly thrown out of the steakhouse. He now markets chocolate bunnies.
Happy Halloween! You should not care about any of this. Witches beckon. If, however, you find yourself haunted by an incorrect ear, try a real animal instead. Now there’s some floppy mystery.
