Dead Heads in San Francisco

So the exhibit isn't as sunny as, say, a T-Rex blockbuster. But it is intriguing, especially if you run into co-curator Ray "Bones" Bandar while exploring the show, as I recently did. Bandar, highly recognizable with his pouf of silvery hair and rumpled clothes, showed me around as if I was touring his home, which, in a way, I was.

"I got a freezer and refrigerator full of specimens," said Bandar, who keeps thousands of skulls at his San Francisco abode. "I tell people I am a carver. I carve meat from the bone."

Bandar travels extensively, scouring the land and shores for collectibles, including sea lions in Northern California, horses and cows in Baja and car-struck marsupials in Australia. To Bandar, every skull is "fantastic" or "fabulous."

His zeal is contagious. A case featuring 34 breeds of dogs, including a Pekingese frozen mid-yip, documents "man-made evolution," vis a vis domestication and cross-breeding. And even though the canine heads look nothing like Fluffy in the flesh, they still elicited the universal "Ooh, puppies, how cuuuute!" response. "Let's see if we can find Oley," said a mother, steering her child to the golden retriever.

When life's big questions -- i.e., "Why do some animals have a large sagittal crest?" -- started to fry my brain, I retired to the play area for some fun and games. At one station, I could superimpose other species' skulls onto my own visage, so I could see what I'd look like if I were an African forest hog. (Or, rather, what a hog would look like with green eyes and a ponytail.)

For the finale, I inched into the dark vault called the Beetle Box, where thousands of flesh-eating carrion bugs were doing their bit for science: nibbling away on carcasses (this is the final phase of bone-cleaning). Gross? Yep, to the point that a beribboned tot cried out, "Mommy, can we get out of here? I don't like the skulls. They're creepy."

She had a point.

-- Andrea Sachs

Admission to the California Academy of Sciences (55 Concourse Dr., in San Francisco's Golden Gate State Park) is $8.50, but visitors who bike there or take public transportation (MUNI buses run from downtown) save $2.50. Free admission on the first Wednesday of each month. Info: 415-750-7145, www.calacademy.org.