The Bone Room—a local sensation for 24 years—attracts kids and grown-ups alike.

The cobra skeleton caught Marlene Furtado’s eye as she passed by The Bone Room on Berkeley’s Solano Avenue. The dry bones, a Slinky-like coil of toothpick-thin ribs, told her that this was no ordinary store. “That’s something that would hook anyone with any curiosity,” says Furtado, a 70-year-old retired insurance litigator who lives in Albany.

Inside, a grinning skull sits perched atop a snaking tower of vertebrae. “I’m a camel!” proclaims a cheeky hand-lettered sign dangling from its neck. Iridescent green pheasant wings cover the wall, as do ornamental light boxes displaying delicate bat skeletons. Battered cabinets line the walls, stuffed with arrowheads, natural glass rocks, and other oddities.

Cluttered but cozy, The Bone Room has been thrilling kids and grossing out moms with its post-mortem menagerie since 1987. The unusual boutique recalls a Ripley’s Believe It or Not odditorium, a museum souvenir shop, and a gothic parlor. Owner Ron Cauble, however, prefers to simply describe it as a natural history store.

Stuffed scream:Taxidermic specimen at Berkeley’s Bone Room. Photo by Pat Mazzera..

“It’s not the same to dissect a frog online,” says Cauble, who, at 71, sports a scruffy beard and snowy white hair often pulled back in a ponytail. “When there’s no formaldehyde smell and no real viscera, it doesn’t do the trick. Having a 3D object is more stimulating. We are like a museum, with two key differences: One, you can buy the exhibits; and two, you can ask questions of me or any member of my knowledgeable staff. At a museum, it’s often difficult to find a docent.”

A person so fascinated with bones might come across as morbid. But Cauble is a jovial man who displays intense curiosity about the world around him. Today, he’s dressed in a black shirt and vest, accessorized with a silver bracelet cast from armadillo rib bones. He doesn’t wear the bangle to make a statement—he just thinks it’s neat.

To hear Cauble tell it, his plans to open The Bone Room percolated for years—plus he always wanted to own a human skull. Other, that is, than his own. The result: an entire store dedicated to skulls, femurs, vertebrae, and other bones of all shapes and sizes and species; petrified trilobites and mounted piranha; insects mounted in light boxes and preserved in amber; cabinets filled with porcupine quills and shark teeth; and, curled up in a corner tank, a giant lemon-colored Burmese python.

“I wanted to be surrounded by interesting things and interesting people,” Cauble says. “I’m lucky that I’m able to please myself. I never married, and I didn’t have kids—I much prefer being a pseudo-father to my employees—so I could afford to be poor. I was free to take the leap and start a strange business.”

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As a child in Indianapolis, Cauble wasn’t aware that natural history was a field of study. “My parents never even took me to the natural history museum,” he jokes. “Now that’s child abuse!”

Not until he was an adult did Cauble find his first natural science obsession: reptiles. But instead of studying books about cold-blooded critters, he sold a beloved motorcycle and some silver bars to fund the 1970 debut of the East Bay Vivarium, which he ran for the next 23 years.

Then one day in 1987, he cleared the reptiles out of one of the Vivarium’s rooms, arranged a small cache of animal skulls in the space, and dubbed the display “The Bone Room”—since, he says, it was “literally a room full of bones.” The display kindled a new interest in natural history, not just the living, breathing bits of it, but the dry, dead parts, too. For awhile he ran both shops together, and then sold the East Bay Vivarium in 1993.

Last year, Cauble expanded the venture, opening The Bone Room Presents in the space formerly occupied by the Native-American art gallery, Gathering Tribes. A salon that includes an art gallery, The Bone Room Presents hosts weekly art openings, book signings, lectures, and classes by preeminent thinkers in the natural realm. Past speakers have included Mary Roach, eclectic Oakland author of books like Stiff and Spook, and San Francisco–based Adam Savage of the TV series MythBusters. (Savage spoke about his recent infatuation with dodo birds and his quest to find and assemble a complete dodo skeleton of his own.) Most events are free to the public, although Cauble’s bone-cleaning classes have a small door fee.

Some of the bones here are, yes, human. No U.S. law prevents their sale (most of the store’s inventory comes from various overseas suppliers), but Cauble admits they—especially the skulls—are controversial items, with customer reaction running the gamut from repulsion to reverence. Cauble just wonders, among other things, about chemical composition, morphology, and negative space.

“Some people look at the skulls, and skeletons, and pinned insects, and get over-focused on death,” Cauble says. “And some people seem to think that fear, and especially the fear of death, is a virtue. They tell us what scares them, and what they don’t like. I’d rather talk about what I like, and about life. The reality is that we should fear some things—like people with guns, and politicians—but to let that be the focus of your life is sad.”

One parent, he recalls, brought in her child to see the camel skeleton. “Yes, dear,” said the parent as the child pointed. “It used to be real.”

“Excuse me,” interjected Cauble. “It’s still real, now it’s just dead.”

For all The Bone Room’s startling souvenirs, there’s a sly sense of humor at work here, evident, for example, in the glass case on the counter displaying a pair of intertwined snake skeletons. “Mating woma pythons,” reads the label. By bringing death into the open, Cauble hopes to make it less terrifying. He makes bones into a joyous affirmation of life, like the incongruous, colorful skulls one might find in a Día de Los Muertos celebration.

“Part of being a Bone Room employee or even a Bone Room customer is having an interest in natural history,” says Cauble. “I put my employees through a training session heavy on science, and everyone in The Bone Room picks up some ‘ologies.’ But the one thing I can’t teach is love. You have to bring that in yourself.”

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Furtado, the former litigator, studies mounted grasshoppers from The Bone Room for help in designing exotic lures for fly fishing. A. Angelos, a Bone Room patron in his early 40s, once bought a pound of feathers to make into jewelry and accessories, as well as a cat skeleton that he prominently displays in his Berkeley living room. Anatomists, artists, and veterinary students buy animal bones for study; dog trainers buy human bones to help train rescue dogs. Most famously, the MythBusters team patronizes the store when they need to buy human material to destroy on their TV series. And kids buy bones here just for the thrill.

“Kids come in with their eyes agog, just in awe,” says Furtado. “And adults become kids again when they walk over that threshold.”

With buckets of teeth and pickling jars full of ocean invertebrates, there’s always something new to see. Furtado nearly stumbled over a gaping alligator head on the floor her first visit. But it intrigued her enough that she later returned, bringing a friend and her friend’s 8-year-old son.

“The great thing about The Bone Room is that the employees treat kids just like adults,” says Furtado. “If kids want to see something on a top shelf, they’ll bring it down for them to see it. If kids have a question, they’ll answer it patiently and courteously.”

Sabrina Klein Clement, an arts and education consultant from Oakland, has been bringing her son Christopher, now 12, to The Bone Room since he was a toddler. For Klein Clement, the draw is the chance to see things that are everywhere in nature, but that we seldom stop to think about. For Chanukah this year, Christopher asked his mother to get him a pickled baby shark in a jar. “Any time any friends come over, that’s the first thing they want to see,” says Klein Clement. “I’ve also bought polished ammonite fossils for my nephew’s bar mitzvah and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘This is the coolest present ever!’ You know that when you buy a present at The Bone Room, you won’t have to worry about it being something they already have.”

That’s the sort of excitement that Cauble likes.

Frustrated by natural history museums that talk down to visitors and universities that ignore the work of self-taught researchers, Cauble says that scientific exploration is too often considered the exclusive domain of scientists quarantined in laboratories and universities. Although he has a chemistry Ph.D. and once worked as a rocket scientist for the U.S. Army, he’s quick to point out that his extensive knowledge of natural history comes entirely from self-study and constant questioning.

“Universities should not be the only place one can gain an education,” Cauble says. “In many ways they are very protected, unnatural places that take you away from the real world. Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, primarily thought of himself as a lepidopterist. Although he wasn’t university trained, scientists recognize that he made real contributions to our understanding of butterflies and evolution, but his is a remarkable case in these times.”

In the 1800s, nonprofessional naturalists helped to unearth fossils, identify new birds, and dream up theories. Even today, Cauble says, a weekend astronomer working out of his garage with a store-bought telescope can still discover a new asteroid.

“I am trying to resurrect the fine old word ‘amateur,’” says Cauble. “There was a time when amateurs were respected for their contributions to science.” He likes to point out that the word comes from the Old French, meaning “lover of.”

“What would you rather be?” he asks. “A scientist, or a lover of science?”

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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay writer and frequent contributor to The Monthly. His wife collects rodent skulls, but he loves her anyway.

The Bone Room Presents 

(Thursdays at 7 p.m.)

Oct. 13: Artist Ray Troll and paleobotanist Kirk Johnson on their book, Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway

Oct. 20: Megan Curran’s lecture, “Ill-Gotten Brains: The Grisly History of Sourcing Bodies for Anatomical Learning”

Oct. 27: Sharon Levy on her new book on megafauna, Once and Future Giants

For info: (510) 526-5252 or boneroompresents.com