My Mini-Museum

The Skull Index is an entirely volunteer-run non-profit collaborative educational project. We are working with private collectors, educational institutions, and museums to create a public free to use osteological reference website.

The project was developed in 2023 between @birbbones, @dread-doughnuts, and another friend. We recognized that a gap exists between professional organizations and private specimen collectors, which we hope to bridge with our project. We also recognize that there is a lack of publicly available resources for hobbyist collectors and especially in the age of AI we feel it's important to create one.

We are always accepting submissions of new specimens for the website. If you have a specimen you'd like to submit more information can be found on our Get Involved page. The best way to get in touch with our team is either via email ([email protected]) or by joining our Community Discord Server, though we can also be contacted through messages and asks on this blog!

New submissions will be posted to this blog as we upload them to the website, however, we also have a queue running of previously submitted specimens that will be posted once a day.

We hope to see the project grow even more in 2025!

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)