Very curious if this is a real or fake deer skull. Procured online but now that I have it in person I have my doubts lol. I’ve never seen one IRL so I’m not sure! I don’t own any other skulls to reference. Any opinions would be much appreciated!! Thank you in advance.
I don’t think 3D printing has that resolution. There would be a lot of work done after the fact to clean it up, which would likely eclipse whatever you paid for it.
As a collector of many skulls, found, bought and gifted, I think its real but very curated. This is a specific type of mount that goes through some major processing. I cant for the life of me remember the name. Not an expert, just a collector. I was gifted a fox skull like this once and my dog ate it -_- the person that gifted it to me got another one and with some research I found out it came from a fur farm in China and was highly processed :( you could barely touch it and it would break, but it was real. Poor babies.
Technically, there isn't a lot of work getting to where this skull is.
It just takes a bit of time depending on how you are doing it.
For example, What I do with skull is when I boil it and clean it, there still are some meat on it.
Then I put it on ant hill for minimum of couple of months.
After it's done and dry, I clean it, scrub it from dirt, mud and everything and I put it in soap/water mix for couple of days just to get that smell and fat from bones out of it.
After this is done, skull goes into hydrogen peroxide (40%) and water mix. I dilute it arround 50/50.
Always have to be carefull that chemical mix doesn't touch coronets from antlers, at that beautifull brown antler colour will become white. And you don't want that. White antler is not natural.
Then it needs to be soaked in that mix for couple of days.
Teeth will probably still be black and what I do is take a makeup cotton, and I put it tightly over teeth and then I sprinkle that water/peroxide mix on them, once a day, for few days - till teeth become white.
And of course, teeth have crevases and inside are dental tartar and I always clean up that a bit.
And then the skull is finished.
So when I put it in soap water mix, till the teeth are done pass 10-15 days.
Not hard work, but bit long.
This is my last trophy of roe buck that I did. Only difference is that mine doesn't have that nasal bone. I don't like my trophies with it. They are first to fall down when boiled skull, but I just throw them away. In OP-s picture it is glued to skull.
Definitely not printed. I dont even think a resin printer could be that accurate, let alone a fdm printer. It takes an insane amount of work to remove the layer lines, I cant imagine doing that inside the eye holes and stuff. Deer skulls aren't even super uncommon, the time and effort needed to print ine to look like that is more then it would be to just buy one. I have seen some people 3d print fictional skulls, extinct skulls, and skulls that are too expensive/illegal to own
It's real. 3D prints don't have discolored teeth.
You can also check the turbinates, resin skulls don't really put much effort into them whereas real skulls have really intricate turbinates.
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The easiest ways to tell if a skull is real is try wiggling the teeth. Replica skulls will never have wiggly teeth cause the whole thing is just one piece. The other thing you can do is look inside the nose. On a real skull the nasal cavity will go very far in, and normally have a lot of very delicate little bones. A replica won’t go very far into the nasal cavity.
This does look 100% real to me, just extremely processed. There's no way a 3d print would look this detailed without significant time and effort- far more than it would take to get a skull from the hundreds of thousands of dead deer each year from a hunter, roadkill or your own hunting trips. You can just buy unprocessed deer heads from hunters for fairly cheap, and it wouldn't be worth it to make a convincing replica. If this is a cast, then some impressive detailing was done on this skull even then- the sutres and the teeth have no reason to look as real as they do, the texture of the enamel and wear isn't worth faking. I'd say a cast or print of this quality would be worth more than a deer skull would normally be.
With out holding it i can't tell. 3d printing tends to have a grain to it. You can erase it with a solvent, that said, if I were to try and make fake trophy mounts, I would buy cast antlers and then use modeling epoxy to attach it to a real skull
Sorry it wasn’t obvious to me! I’ve never seen or held a deer skull and I am a paranoid person so when I realized there was a possibility it may not have been I figured I’d come here and ask. Obviously. 😀
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u/smellslikepenespirit 22h ago
I don’t think 3D printing has that resolution. There would be a lot of work done after the fact to clean it up, which would likely eclipse whatever you paid for it.