Second Plumage, Feathered Hawk Skull

It remembers what it used to wear.

Feathers carved into the bone

Plumage laid over the braincase, each feather overlapping the one behind it, getting finer as it runs back. It stops in a clean line at the orbit, and from there down it is bare bone: cheek, jaw, beak, all of it left alone so the skull still reads as a skull.

Every feather is washed, so the barbs inside each vane hold their shadow. That detail is the reason to own this one rather than the plain version, and it is the part that took the longest to get right.

It has teeth. Hawks do not have teeth.

There is a row of them along the jaw, under the eye, where a real bird of prey has a smooth slender blade of bone and nothing else.

We know. It happened somewhere between the sculpt and the bed, we looked at it for a while, and we kept it. Everything else about the skull is right: the hooked beak, the heavy bony brow over the orbit, the nostril openings, the fenestrations behind the eye, the sutures across the braincase. And then the teeth.

So this is not a replica of anything. It is a hawk that does not exist, catalogued as though it does, which is the most honest description of everything in this range.

The plain one is SPECIMEN 006

Same skull, no feathers, clean bone. If you want the specimen rather than the artwork, that is the one.

Never an animal

No bone, no beetle cleaning, no permit, no smell, and nothing died for it. Sculpted from scratch, printed and finished by hand in Australia.

Looking after it

The beak tip is a long thin taper and it is the part that breaks. Lift it by the braincase, never by the beak. Dust with a soft dry brush. Out of direct sun, because PLA softens around 60 degrees.

The numbers

• Printed, carved and finished by hand in Australia, then washed by hand so the feathers read.
• SPECIMEN 007. That number belongs to this design and will never be given to another.
• Dimensions to be confirmed.

How it is made

Modelled from scratch, printed here on our own machines, then cleaned up, finished and packed by hand. Nothing is outsourced and nothing is cast, so every piece carries faint layer lines and no two come out quite identical. We could sand those out. We would rather you could see it was made than see it was manufactured.

PLA, which is a corn-starch derived plastic. It is rigid, it holds fine detail better than almost anything else at this price, and it has one weakness worth knowing: it softens at around 60 degrees. A sunny windowsill in February is the one place it should never live.

Ordering one now

Everything here is made to order. Nothing sits in a box waiting, which is why you are not paying for a warehouse. Order it and yours goes into the next batch, usually within a fortnight, and you are emailed when it goes on the bed and again when it ships.

Change your mind before it is printed and we refund it in full without asking why. After that you still have every right you have under Australian Consumer Law, which we cannot exclude and would not want to.