How was Carol's body prepared to go on display?
According to the Anatomical Gift Act of Pennsylvania, only certain types of institutions can accept gifts of human remains, and the Museum wasn’t one of them. Thankfully, the Director of the Museum is also the CEO of a hospital—an organization that could accept Carol’s body. The director accepted the gift and then transferred legal stewardship of the remains to the preservation team at the Museum.
The next step was to remove Carol’s soft tissue and organs so that her skeleton could be displayed. Her body was incredibly fragile and her bones even more so. The group with the greatest expertise in handling such a unique set of remains was Skulls Unlimited in Oklahoma…. but Carol’s body was in Pennsylvania. Moving human remains across state lines is a legal issue in of itself; Carol had to be transported in an air-tight casket known as a Ziegler Case, but eventually she arrived at Skulls Unlimited.
The standard approach for removing soft tissue from any remains, human or animal, is the dermestid beetle. These beetles eat flesh but not bone, and in a controlled environment can quickly and delicately clean a set of bones.
In Carol’s case, however, it was discovered that the beetles couldn’t differentiate between things that once were soft tissues, like ligaments, but had been turned into bone by FOP, and actual soft tissue. They were eating some of the rare pieces of Carol’s body that made her skeleton so unique! Instead, her remains were cleaned using water maceration—a process by which remains are soaked in water and allowed to slowly rot away as they would in a natural environment.
Water maceration cleaned Carol’s bones perfectly, and after seven months, she was ready to be shipped back to Philadelphia. Typically, a skeleton would be disarticulated for transport, with each bone carefully removed from the whole skeleton and individually packaged. This makes it easier to protect the bones and creates many small boxes that can more easily fit into the cargo hold of an airplane, as opposed to one very fragile, human-sized box. But Carol’s skeleton was once again too delicate to disarticulate; FOP means that many of her bones are literally fused to each other via thin bridges of yet more bone.
Finally, Carol’s remains arrived back at the museum. The curators had prepared to display her skeleton just like they did with Harry’s, in a way that would protect the bones and allow visitors to get the best possible view of the things that make their remains unique. Almost a year after her passing, Carol’s skeleton and jewelry collection was unveiled to the public on Rare Disease Day.
