SKULLS. 2011 by Simon Winchester. Touch Press. iPad. App webpage.

Reviewed by Brian Switek

No set of bones better exemplifies the natural history of an animal than its skull. Postcranial skeletons are all well and good – the vertebrae, limbs, and associated parts all testify to how an animal moved and behaved – but skulls are the most iconic aspects of a creature’s ossified frame. The skull is the seat of the brain, and, therefore, the senses, and the critical details of how an organism perceived its world can be detected from this complex arrangement of bones. As much as any group of bones can, a skull summarizes the essence of an organism – to draw from my beloved non-avian dinosaurs, a Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops skeleton would just not seem as magnificent without their fantastic, iconic skulls attached.

Not everyone shares my affection for skulls. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago, I spotted a bleached raccoon skull along the side of a trail in the New Jersey woods. I put the skull in my camera bag, carried it home, and put the cranium in my desk drawer. Fortunately for me, my wife has been very kind about my fascination with bones and thought nothing of it. But when my wife’s best friend was petsitting at our apartment a few months later, and said friend opened my desk in search of a pen, she was horrified to see raccoon remains staring back up at her. To me, the skull was a representation of the raccoon’s life and evolution, but she saw the skull as a symbol of death and decay.

Simon Winchester’s Skulls – an ebook-iPad app hybrid – explores the various meanings of the haunting bones. Skulls are objects of natural history, have been misappropriated to support discrimination, and can act as warnings of impending doom. What a skull means rests in the eye of the beholder (and those eyes, of course, are set into skulls themselves.)

Skulls was not what I was expecting. I thought the app was going to be a virtual museum of various specimens that users would be able to manipulate to get a better look at the various components of the craniums. And while there is that aspect to the program, Skulls tries to be more.

Each of the app's interactive skull images is organized within twelve different sections which focus on cranial components, how the bones are collected, and the cultural meaning of skulls. In the introduction, which outlines what a skull is, a series of representative specimens stream past on the right side of the screen as Winchester explains on the left, with certain keywords linked to particular skulls. (Users can read at their own pace, or choose to have Winchester read to them in his halting cadence.) On that first page, the word “majesty” is linked to one of the fabricated crystal skulls which led Steven Spielberg to run the Indiana Jones franchise into the ground, and the simple mention of “skulls” at the bottom corresponds to the strange cranial architecture of a long-spine porcupinefish. The piscine skull looks like good inspiration for one of H.R. Geiger’s techno-biological horrors.

There’s more than one way to explore the selected skulls. Readers can proceed linearly through each of the twelve short sections, they can hit the “gallery” button at the top of the screen to explore the highlighted skulls in each section, or can simply tap “The Collection” on the main page to bring up a constantly-rotating collection of alphabetized skulls. The best part of the latter option is the ability to view multiple skulls side-by-side via the “compare” button. The saber-fanged weapons of a Smilodon look all the more fearsome when viewed directly next to the much shorter, stouter canines of its distant, living relative, the lion.

But this is also the most frustrating feature of Skulls – the app only allows users to zoom in and rotate along the horizontal axis. You can’t flip the skulls to have a look underneath, or explode skulls to play with their various parts. With a little more effort, Skulls could have acted as a rich, virtual reference for anatomy students or anyone interested in learning more about osteology, natural history, and evolution. Instead, Skulls is more of a virtual museum – you can look, but your ability to learn directly from the bones is severely constrained. (Ironically, the publisher of Skulls, Touch Press, lets you to flip planets and moons in another of their apps, The Solar System, which we reviewed last month.)

Though limited, the app’s gallery of spinning skulls is fun to fiddle around with. The ebook portion only left me puzzled. While I greatly enjoyed the format of having parts of the text correspond directly to the stream of skulls on the right side of the virtual page, there was no central narrative or story. Winchester jumps from a general overview of skulls to a profile of skull collector Adam Dudley before moving on to bizarre cranial modifications and the meaning of osteological iconography. There is no flow between sections – they all stand on their own and vary in style. “A Skull’s Component Parts” – in which Winchester avoids actually describing the various bones which make up a skull – is presented in an encyclopedia format, while Winchester’s visit to the skull of 17^th century Ottoman military leader Kara Mustafa Pasha was composed as part history and part travelogue. And section 6 – “The Skull of the Dodo” – feels entirely out of place. Winchester says almost nothing about dodo skulls, and instead recapitulates the extinction and artistic representations of the extinction icon.

Strangest of all, Winchester goes on a brief tear about paleoanthropology in the “Science and Pseudoscience” portion of the book. After addressing how some misguided researchers used craniometry to buoy their own racist notions, as well as recapitulating the Piltdown Man scandal, Winchester settles into a wandering discussion of human evolution. “It can fairly be said,” Winchester writes, “that in the history of biological science never has so much been imagined by so many on the evidence of so little than those who have studied the skull and wondered about human evolution.” Granted, specimens of fossil humans are rare and often quite fragmentary, but Winchester does nothing to support his claim that much of what we think we know about our ancestors is “imagined.” Indeed, rather than support his claim, Winchester quickly moves on to say that the human skull has changed only little in the past three million years and that human evolution has ultimately halted. The first statement feels contradictory to the rest of the section – in which Winchester mentions how brain size, brow ridges, teeth, and facial construction have changed among our prehistoric kin – and the second assertion is only armchair philosophizing. While changes to our physical form might not be apparent, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that human evolution continues to this very moment and can be tracked in our genes.  

Ultimately, Skulls feels like a disorganized tour of a virtual curiosity cabinet. There are lots of fascinating tidbits along the way, and Winchester shows a clear enthusiasm for his subject, but I reached the bottom of the last page without understanding what the point of the entire exercise was. Skulls is a disorganized celebration of cranial bones and is of little utility as a reference. I couldn’t help but laugh in disagreement when, in the last section, the app dubbed itself “a near-perfect survey” of skulls. The mashup of biography, history, editorial, and encyclopedic catalog made Skulls feel like a concept stretched too thin and spread too wide. Unlike an actual skull, the app’s various components never come together to create a functioning whole.

Brian Switek is a freelance science writer and author of the book Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature. He regularly blogs about paleontology at the WIRED Science blog Laelaps and the Smithsonian blog Dinosaur Tracking. His next book – A Date With a Dinosaur: On the Road With Old Bones, New Science, and My Beloved Brontosaurus – will be published next year by Scientific American/FSG.