Sea Otter Skulls, Santa Barbara, CA

I'm making a few mixtapes for a friend -- the playlist being a skill I've sent packing into semi-retirement. Long story; not very interesting; traditions are hard to break. I give good tape though, if I do say so myself. Plus, The nice thing about having expensive toys is using them to print your back catalogue for frivolities like liner notes and tracklisting graphics.

These little buggers were part of an exhibit put on by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History of errata that isn't on display; obscure stuffed birds, Native American oddities, dead shit in jars of fluid. From the press release,

Over a span of 90 years the Museum has collected more than 2.5 million artifacts and specimens to preserve, document, and promote understanding of the fascinating diversity of the world around us. TREASURES provides a glimpse at some of our more eclectic and rare collections. Also enjoy a video that gives a virtual "behind-the-scenes" tour of the Museum's collections and research areas.

These are Sea Otter skulls, and apparently the bones acquire a tint over time due to the purple pigment in their favorite food -- sea urchins.

In another one of those you-can't-go-home-again moments, this exhibition was set up in a hall that used to have an expansive display of small stuffed local birds in wall cases, as well as rows and rows of floor cases containing sample nests and blown eggs of the various California species. Of course, now it's cleared out for this particular traveling show and I suppose the bird exhibit probably wasn't as cool as I imagine it would be now (it was pretty boring back then; not as cool as the mammoth skeletons, anyway).