Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Taxidermy

Winter 2009

Grover Krantz (1931–2002) and Clyde

I’ve been a teacher all my life, and I think I might as well be a teacher after I’m dead,” Grover Krantz told the Smithsonian’s anthropology collections manager David Hunt as they negotiated Krantz’s proposed donation of his skeleton to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. As a physical anthropologist specializing in hominoid evolution, Krantz gleaned his understanding and ideas by studying the bones of apes and humans. Following his death, his own bones would become available for study.

Odds were, however, that his bones would remain in a drawer, alongside the bones of his three Irish wolfhounds, which he had already donated, waiting for whatever … » More …