Students build skeleton kits as a lasting lesson

There are two moose, two bear and two wolves in Tim Lundt's classroom at Burchell High School, and officials from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game couldn't be happier.

Lundt's anatomy class recently finished putting together actual skeletons for the three animals, and now the skeletal kits are being turned over to fish and game. From there, they will be available to local classrooms, providing a powerful learning tool.

"This hasn't been done with upright animals before in Alaska, so we were kind of learning as we went," Lundt explained.

"The first moose we put together became our prototype. It was a bit of a challenge," he said.

The project began last year, after Lundt secured a $13,000 grant from ADF&G. The Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward has a skeletal model of a harbor seal, but Lundt wanted to go one step further and do an upright animal. His class received the six skeletons from ADF&G and then set out to work.

"Last year's class boiled down the bones, soaked them in hydrogen peroxide and applied epoxy to coat them," Lundt said. "This year's group put the skeletons together and put the kits together."

The six kits are called, appropriately enough, "Moose in box," "Wolf in a box" and "Bear in a box." Three kits -- one of each animal -- will stay with Lundt's anatomy class, while the other three will be at the Palmer office of ADF&G for teachers to check out. Each kit contains everything needed to reconstruct the skeletons -- the metal stands, all the bones, a detailed instruction manual, a video and CD-ROM that Lundt's class produced, as well as all the necessary tools, including allen wrenches and a hot glue gun.

"All that teachers have to do is put the stand together with two wrenches, and there are only two wrenches needed to put together the skeleton. The rest of the bones are held together by rubber bands, and a few bones have to be held together by hot glue," Lundt said.

For the students, getting the chance to reconstruct skeletons helped them so much more than reading out of a book they said.

"The hands-on learning experience is better than anything I could have gotten out of a book," said Hezekiah Kelley.

Corrie Brotherwood, another student in the class, said the project wasn't just about using your brain.

"The sensory perception and learning potential is so great when you have a project like this," Brotherwood said. "You use your sense of smell, your sense of sight, your sense of feel. You see how everything comes together, and why. By reading a book, you lose all of that."

The students also said that once they put together one animal, they saw how anatomy is constant in many different species.

"The wolf has the smallest pieces, but if you can put together the moose, you can put together the wolf," said Nathan Jagger. "The wolf has more carpal bones and some of the bones are shaped a little differently, but it's the same kind of skeleton overall."

All six animals came from ADF&G, and the skeletons help tell the story about how they were killed. One wolf, for example, was a radio-collared animal that ADF&G monitored. He broke his fibula and tibia, but was able to survive. Then, he was caught in a steel cable snare and managed to chew through it. Fish and Game officials had to put the animal down, and through the skeletal reconstruction process, you can see the many injuries, including the crushed canine teeth on the animal's jawbone.

"The male wolf had some rough life experiences, with a couple of ribs broken and his jaw," Brotherwood said. "It's neat because you can look at the skeleton and see how bone structure repairs itself."