THE HUNTER SNIFFED something suspicious on Facebook. It was an ad for a mounted crow offered by the Old Cavern Boutique, a Montreal shop owned by Vanessa Rondeau. Crows are protected by the US Migratory Bird Treaty but not by similar legislation in Canada, so, when the hunter reached out to Rondeau in September 2019, she assured him that she could ship it from Canada into the United States without export problems. “I label them as art pieces,” she added.

The scent grew stronger when the hunter — in reality, Ryan Bessey, a US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) special agent on the lookout for illegal wildlife traffickers — spotted more ads from Rondeau. This time, she was selling a polar bear skull. Another red flag: Rondeau instructed him to “pm” her — send a private message — if interested. He agreed to buy the skull for $750, plus $30 for shipping.

The agency declined to discuss the matter while the criminal case against Rondeau remains open, but federal court filings detail the investigation. “An international oddities and curiosities market exists in which unique and often rare items are sought by collectors,” Bessey wrote in an affidavit detailing Rondeau’s activities. “In particular, skulls, both human and animal, are in high demand to oddities collectors.”

Eventually, in May 2021, US Customs and Border Protection officers busted Rondeau when she tried to cross into Canada from Vermont with 18 crocodilian skulls and heads, plus a three-toed sloth, horseshoe crabs, raccoon feet, sea stars, African antelope horns, puffer fish, shark jaws, and a human skull. She was charged with smuggling, wildlife trafficking, and false labeling. At this writing, plea negotiations are underway. But as recently as October, the shop’s Facebook page still advertised skulls of a vervet monkey, springbok, water monitor, and “deformed moose.” Its Facebook page now states, “We do not ship to the US. Thanks.”

Animal skull-collecting is not as rare as one might think.

Rondeau’s tale of “skull-duggery” isn’t unique. Animal skull-collecting is not as rare as one might think. In 2019, UK authorities arrested a man described in the press as “a bloke with an obsession for collecting the skulls and skeletons of animals, and even humans” and who admitted to illegally selling endangered rhino and gorilla skulls on eBay. A year earlier, Thai officials arrested two Vietnamese men for smuggling tiger skulls.

Skulls of a wide range of birds and mammals find their way onto the dark market. As a result, many of those species are being pushed further and further toward extinction. As Bessey wrote in his affidavit: “Typically, the rarer the species, the more valuable and sought-after a skull becomes.”

Regardless of its impacts, this black market is powered by collector demand — one that stems from a long history of our compulsion to collect. Historically, humans have looked to skeletons for secrets or symbols. We dig up fossils and preserve specimens for science. Skeletons provide insight into a world not our own. For some, they provide a way to possess that world.

Skulls, particularly, have a powerful hold on us.

EVEN IN OUR MORE science-infused times, skulls generate a powerful allure, an allure that pumps up prices and market demand for collectors willing to break the law. However, our relationship with skulls — and the role they play in our imagination, as well as in our legends and spirituality — extends far back in time, well beyond today’s black market.

In North Yorkshire, England, archaeologists have found evidence at a Stone Age site called Star Carr that Mesolithic shamans used deer skulls in their rituals. Elsewhere in Europe, philosophers at the height of the Roman Empire misinterpreted fossils and skulls as the remains of mythological giants. According to a study by paleontologists Marco Romano and Marco Avanzini, Greek scholars once thought that the large nasal cavity that held the dwarf elephant’s proboscis, or trunk, was the single central orbit, or eye socket, of the Cyclops.

Today, skulls continue to have symbolic significance in some cultures. For the Lakota tribes of North and South Dakota, for instance, bison skulls show up in sacred rituals, often as a symbol of gratitude for the mammal’s role in the tribes’ well-being.

Lupa, a self-described “pagan author” of books on spiritualism who goes by one name only, has described the use of wildlife skulls in scrying, the ancient art of divination. “This process involves peering into the cranial cavity, the place where the brain used to be, of a cleaned animal skull, both to guide your consciousness toward a divinatory state and to get in contact with the spirit residing in the skull itself,” she writes in Skull Scrying: Animal Skulls in Divinatory Trance Work. “When you look into the hole where the skull connected to the neck, you’re looking into the home of the spirit that remains there after death.”

Even beyond their cultural, spiritual, or mythological significance, our connection to skulls remains. We’re drawn to skulls. We hang them up in our living rooms as showpieces. As kids, we find pieces of them, a jawbone or antler, and can hardly resist the urge to pocket them and take them home. When I visit natural history museums, and I’ve been to many, I enjoy looking at display cases of skulls, though I own none and have no desire to acquire even one. I’m not alone in that fascination. Skulls seem to hold a special attraction to children. I’ve watched kids enthusiastically try identifying which species they belong to. Our fascination seems innate, perhaps remnant from our ancestral connections to skull-based rituals. Or perhaps we see skulls as a reminder of what we ourselves might look like stripped of all flesh.

What motivates skull collectors? Mammologist Darrin Lunde describes the appeal, even the compulsion, of collecting as “almost like human nature,” recalling how impressed he was the first time he saw a walrus skull and thought it, indeed, looks like a walrus. “It seems to magically capture people,” he says, “Bones live secretive lives. They’re on the inside. We generally don’t see them.”

Skeletons provide insight into a world not our own. For some, they provide a way to possess that world.

But, he explains, skulls matter a great deal to science as well. Lunde manages the Smithsonian Institution’s mammal collection with almost 600,000 specimens, most of which include skulls. The collection, the largest in the world, is heavily used by resident researchers and — in non-pandemic times — between 150 and 200 other scientists from around the globe annually. Their interests range widely, Lunde says. Some rely on skulls for help with taxonomy, such as naming species and defining their geographical limits. Others may take tooth scrapings to identify the microbiome living in a specimen’s mouth, or use new technologies to determine what pollutants an animal was exposed to or what foods it had been eating. Increasingly, research with skulls directly influences species protection.

For instance, experts recently used skulls to determine that endangered river dolphins in South Asia’s Ganges and Indus rivers should be recognized as two separate species. Among the world’s most endangered cetaceans, South Asian river dolphins are victims of degraded habitat, large infrastructure projects such as dams, pollution, fisheries bycatch, and declining river flows. “They occur in geographically separate river systems and never come into contact to be able to breed,” says Gill Braulik of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, the lead author of the study reporting the finding. The important impact of the study, he continues, is that “species get more conservation attention, priority, and funding than subspecies do.”

Other recent findings illustrate the wide scope of skull-dependent scientific research. Among them: A team in Australia measured lead in the skulls of wedge-tailed eagles and found elevated lead levels in more than half of the specimens. Also in Australia, researchers compared tooth wear and damage among 296 wild and captive Tasmanian devils and hypothesized that the results may relate to differences in their diets or behavior. Scientists in Brazil measured the skull size of Wistar rats to verify the effects of maternal malnutrition during breastfeeding. In Luxembourg, the deformed skulls of road-killed polecats provided the first evidence of a type of parasite infecting the weasel-like Eurasian mammal. And in Central Europe, scientists used skulls to track how the common shrew exhibits a dramatic decrease in its braincase, brain size, and body mass from summer to winter, followed by regrowth in the spring.

Evidently, skulls can tell us a lot about the “secretive lives” of animals, as Lunde explains. As part of his role at the Smithsonian, Lunde has led collecting expeditions in the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He has named about a dozen newly discovered mammal species, such as a Vietnamese rodent (Tonkinmys daovantien), a South Sudanese bat (Niumbaha superba), and a New Guinea rodent (Leptomys paulus). “I get the instinct to collect,” he says, “the sort of human curiosity about bones and natural history.”

BUT CURIOSITY can get us into trouble.

In his book The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, Kirk Wallace Johnson unravels the true story of a young American flautist and amateur fly-fisher named Edwin Rist. On a trip to London in 2009, Rist became so transfixed with rare feathers at the British Natural History Museum at Tring that he burglarized the museum’s ornithology collection to collect the feathers for fly-tying. Some of the dead birds he took dated back to the days of Charles Darwin. “His hobby became an obsession,” Johnson wrote.

So, too, for many skull collectors. Lupa, the divination author, wrote that “collecting skulls can become well-nigh addictive,” adding: “You might start with a single raccoon skull and end up with a huge collection that threatens to take over a large part of your living space.”

It’s this human impulse to collect that fuels businesses like Vanessa Rondeau’s — and keeps USFWS agents like Ryan Bessey busy.

“Collecting skulls can become well-nigh addictive. You might start with a single raccoon skull and end up with a huge collection.”

In 2016, for instance, an Oregon judge sent Eoin Ling Churn Yeng and Galvin Yeo Siang Ann to prison for six months and fined them $25,000 for conspiracy to smuggle wildlife into the US. Ling and Yeo owned Borneo Artifact, an online business that had been smuggling endangered wildlife into the US for more than a decade before USFWS agents blew open their scheme. Authorities nabbed them for selling skulls of three orangutans, four helmeted hornbills, one langur, and one babirusa, or wild pig, as well as other animal parts, to undercover agents. Several of those species are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) or the US Endangered Species Act. Investigators found photos showing the pair had offered to sell more than 50 skulls in a six-year period.

The same year, Graham Criglow, the owner of Strange Cargo Exotics, a Texas-based Internet wildlife-related business, pleaded guilty to illegally importing the skulls of two CITES-listed Bornean orangutans smuggled from Indonesia. Authorities intercepted the skulls “bound in bubble wrap, paper, and aluminum foil” at the San Francisco Airport’s air mail center. “Aluminum foil is commonly used in an attempt to conceal smuggled wildlife from detection during x-ray screening,” court documents said.

Yet another case involves trafficker Arongkrom “Paul” Malasukum, who peddled skulls, claws, and teeth of African lions, tigers, and leopards. USFWS agents charged him with illegally buying a tiger skull and other animal parts at auction in Texas and shipping them to New York and then on to Thailand, falsely labeled as “dog toys” and “home decorations.” Investigators determined he’d received more than $150,000 for 68 packages of parts from protected and endangered species. He pleaded guilty and got a nine-month sentence in 2018.

Recently, in Anchorage, Alaska, federal agencies made another big bust of a skull-trafficker, an art gallery owner named Walter Earl who had been illegally buying and selling walrus-ivory head mounts — skulls and tusks of a federally protected marine mammal — for many years. In the run-up to his arrest, three of them sold for prices ranging from $2,500 to $9,500 each, court documents show. In August 2021, a federal judge sentenced Earl to six months of home confinement and ordered him to pay more than $400,000 in restitution and fines for wildlife trafficking and tax evasion. Nobody else, including customers, was charged in connection with his activities, according to Assistant US Attorney Steven Skrocki.

Experts warn that the illegal trade in skulls and other wildlife parts creates a major obstacle to the preservation of biodiversity. Impacts can be serious for some species, such as the rare helmeted hornbill, a Southeast Asian rainforest bird valued by collectors and jewelry makers for its distinctive skull and ivory casque, the helmet-like bone on its bill that can fetch a trader up to $1,000 per bird. According to a report from TRAFFIC, a UK-based nonprofit that tracks international wildlife trade and pushes governments for stronger enforcement, in 2020, Indonesian authorities confiscated 71 helmeted hornbill casques, as well as pangolin scales and the skins and bones of a Sumatran tiger, detaining the suspected trader and his driver. An earlier TRAFFIC study determined that officials had seized at least 2,878 casques, skulls, and other hornbill products in 59 confiscations from 2010 to 2017.

“The threat level shifted from ‘endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’ in a very short time, and the reason was poaching,” Kanitha Krishnasamy, TRAFFIC’s Southeast Asia director, says in reference to the bird’s classification on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. In other words, our desire to possess the helmeted hornbill skulls is pushing the bird to the brink.

SO HOW DO HIGH-END purchasers rationalize their patronage of illicit markets — in essence, their participation in international conspiracies to commit white-collar crimes? Criminologists Donna Yates of Maastricht University in the Netherlands and Simon Mackenzie of Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, study how avid collectors of illicit “rare and precious commodities,” such as wild orchids, fossils, and artifacts, “draw socially acceptable accounts to offer as explanations of why they break the law.”

Illegal wildlife trafficking, such as collecting rare and unique skulls, falls under what they call “green criminology.” As they put it in a 2016 paper: “Collectors of rare and precious goods have an attachment to certain loyalties perceived by them to be higher than the law.” These collectors, “without apparent guilt or shame,” may claim a “moral good,” or deny that their misconduct causes harm, or assert that any supposedly harmful effects are exaggerated. That denial of injury is made easier by their distance from the “scene of the crime.” And the risks of getting caught, they say — “the thrill of transgressing a legal norm” — can add to the attraction and excitement of illicit activities.

Discussing this concept of “higher loyalty,” Yates told me, “There’s this narrative: I know what the law is, I acknowledge the law, I see that in some situations this might be wrong, but in my situation, I’m saving the thing, I’m protecting it. That narrative always conveniently results in the person getting what they want.”

That type of rationalization appears most often at the top of the supply chain — the white-collar criminals who can afford the purchases and are least likely to be arrested and prosecuted. Based on her research in Latin America and elsewhere, Yates says that “the lowest-level people in such crimes” — such as poor residents in jungle areas who initially find the skulls by poaching or otherwise — “take the most risk and are most likely to be caught. They are engaging in coping economies and tend to know certain intermediaries will buy certain things.”

Julianna Stevens and Michael da Cunha have a different perspective as co-owners of Evolution, a New York City store that sells “natural history collectibles,” including skulls, bones, fossils, taxidermy specimens, and insect displays. Says da Cunha, “You start collecting, you come to a shop like ours and get yourself a little raccoon or skunk or fox skull. When you want to grow your collection, you try to get what nobody else has.”

Stevens says some would-be customers may not realize that a specimen they want is illegal to trade in or requires a special permit. “If they don’t know any better and come across the wrong type of vendor, they will get those things.” Some well-to-do people, she observes, are “not used to hearing ‘no.’ Sometimes we have to say no. If they don’t like that answer, they keep looking until they find someone who says yes.”

“It’s actually frustrating trying to do business in this field,” adds da Cunha. “We see every day, every month, people doing illegal stuff.”

Whether they buy skulls through online trafficking, at open markets and flea markets, or another way, collectors usually act with impunity. “I don’t think there’s a lot of fear,” de Cunha says. “Sometimes people come in here bragging about things they have in their house that’s illegal.”

Arrests at other levels of the skull supply chain remain uncommon as well, even when authorities seize contraband, says TRAFFIC’s Krishnasamy. In the “most ideal situation, confiscation leads to arrest,” she says. Yet those “ideal” situations are infrequent in light of the scope of trafficking. “We don’t always get information on what happens in prosecution,” Krishnasamy continues, but the “track record is not great. We don’t see a lot of convictions.”

Though the USFWS and similar agencies in other countries strive to crack down on wildlife trafficking, their personnel and investigative resources are limited. Meanwhile, the dark networks of criminal poachers, corrupt officials, unethical dealers, and ultimately greedy purchasers who drive the market are well-established and undeterred.

At best, the authorities snare a tiny fraction of those responsible for the illegal trade in skulls and bones.

WILDLIFE SPECIES, ENDANGERED or common, are the ultimate victims of our compulsion to collect, the obsession of customers who insist they need to possess what few other people can have. But there are other consequences as well.

The Smithsonian’s Lunde has noticed that collecting is getting tougher, even for legitimate scientists, due to loss of habitat, endangerment of species, complexities of permits, and the need to follow international and national laws. “The laws are there to protect these species,” he says. But he also sees how a “growing fascination” with natural history items among collectors has led to “a disdain for collecting, even for really valid scientific reasons” among some wildlife advocates. Extinction is at stake — as well as future research that depends on skulls.

“Collectors of rare and precious goods have an attachment to certain loyalties perceived by them to be higher than the law.”

As I worked on finishing this article in my Michigan State University campus office, my mind drifted to the famous graveyard scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the doomed prince of Denmark holds up the skull of the king’s former jester. “Alas, poor Yorick,” he intones, before launching into a dramatic eulogy about the inevitability of death and decay.

I shook the scene from memory and decided to take a ten-minute walk across campus to the university’s museum of science and culture and view some of the skulls on display. Many of these belong to extinct species: the giant beaver that was lost 10,000 years ago, the eastern elk that disappeared from the planet by the late 1800s, the Columbian mammoth of the Pleistocene Epoch, the dawn horse — or eohippus — that lived and died during the Eocene. “Alas, poor giant beaver, poor eastern elk, poor dawn horse,” I said to myself. “Gone. Gone. Gone.”

And then I envisioned, sometime in the near future, an unscrupulous collector secretively holding the skull of the last-known helmeted hornbill, or the last known Bornean orangutan, or the last known black rhino.

Alas.