How To Clean Out A Turtle Shell

does anyone know a good way to clean a turtle from it's shell? i want to keep breast-plate attached as well. i know nothing of this topic. any help would be appreciated!
thanks guys!
Beetles would be best as long as you watch them. Otherwise, they will eat the outer scutes on the shell. It sounds like you have a whole turtle so I would clean off what you can by hand first. Along the backbone inside is the hardest part. What kind of turtle do you have?
thank you!
I boil for a short time, pull off most of the meat and then macerate my skeletons and skulls. so i have no beetles. i never liked them.
i'm not sure of the breed, it was my nephews pet and want to clean the shell for him.
There's nothing you can do wrong with turtle shell. Just macerate it.
Macerating it is probably the worst thing you can do with it, it will fall into a lot of pieces which you won't be able to put back together anymore, not even if you are very well trained. So beetles are your friends or you have to hand pick everything out but that is very hard to do. If you are experienced and have a mature specimen you could consider maceration while keeping the shell together with a lot of bands/yarn, but it is tricky and you'll loose the plates which the shell is covered in.
Of course, you also know that boiling skulls - even "for a short time" - is also a bad way to go. If you want to keep the plates over the shell, then don't macerate it.
Galen 218-263-7177 www.EdgewaterTaxidermy.com

Here is another idea . depending on if you put it in the freezer right away after it died you could have me freeze dry this for you . Just a thought . check out my website if you have time .
But then you would have the whole turtle then . the head and legs and tail and all that . You would then have a freeze dried mounted turtle.

I would have to cut into the bottom of the shell to pull out as much as I could and you would then see that but this is a option you might want to think about .

Galen Getting
218-263-7177 Central Time
www.edgewatertaxidermy.com
great skulls, i have always heard boiling is bad, and when i first started out i would boil the whole thing till every piece of flesh was gone, which i can see now how the bone suffers, but honestly comparing skulls of the same species and batch with boiling some for a little and then finishing with macerating compared to full macerating, i couldn't see the difference. i have rarely had to even degrease them if any at all doing so, and they come out pure white after everything is done. even after sitting for several months no grease will come to the surface to be visible. but when i boil is is just about 10 or 15 minutes to get some of the meat to harden up a little to make stripping it a bit easier. very low heat with just creek water. but since it is nice and warm out i have just been doing straight macerating of the skulls.
but almost all of the stuff i do is my personal collection or friend's kills. i am mainly into wet preserving, that's where my area shines. so i don't have the time or patients to deal with beetles at the moment unfortunately.

as for the turtle shell, that is what i was worried about, the scutes falling off. if it is just that they will fall off and i can pull them out and reattach them like when you clean bird beaks and claws then that would be no problem for me. i have no problem getting elbow deep in some dirty water to pull them out. i have a few turtle's in my freezer as well so trying different methods i think will be my best bet.

cleaning all by hand as much as possible and leaving one outside in my grounded metal cage and macerating another to see how hard this is your referring to.

so my conclusion from yinz = if i don't got beetles i'm SOL, correct?
You can reattach scutes. Will post some pics when I'm done with my turtle shell that was buried underground for 2-3 years and it did fall apart.
PA Well-Known Member

So much depends on the species of turtle as well as the age of the individual. The collection I care for has over 2600 turtle shells prepared by almost as many ways as a skeleton can be prepared, though the brunt were run through a dermestid colony. Some are completely in small pieces and probably boiled where others were boiled but fully intact. Fully adult Chrysemys, Trachemys, Pseudemys, Kinosternon, Terrapene or Sternotherus could certainly be boiled and cleaned without falling apart into pieces, but juvies of any species might completely fall apart. Pick-up skeletons - ones allowed to weather after being eaten by maggots have a much higher likelihood of falling apart.
Boiling is an option but you will never be able to fully clean the shell as there is no way to remove the meat/tissue within the spinal column. Secondarily small species of beetle, such as Anthrenus sp. will invade your shell and finish the job for you. These species are everywhere and can subsist by simply eating the hair your wife drops on the floor when combing her hair or dead flies in the windowsills or overhead lights.

The scutes may fall off, but a fresh specimen should not have that happen unless it is decomposed already.

Regarding boiling as a means to clean skulls and skeletons... In the very old days everyone routinely boiled skulls and skeletons, which was my primary method from about 1964 to 1978. I still have many of these skulls and they are in fine shape. Boiling will often set fat into the bone if you don't remove the brain before doing so, and excessive boiling will damage the connective tissue within the bone (collagen and other materials), but boiling itself does not cause the skull to flake off. It is the additives of washing soda or other compounds containing sodium or other active ions in the boiling (sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate,..) which totally destroys skulls, or utilization to sodium/potassium compounds (sodium hyporchlorite, Sodium perborate, etc) like bleach to whiten the skulls. You can also destroy a skull with a solution containing too many Hydrogen ions (acidic) or to many OH ions (basic).

You might check the archives for other posts:
http://www.taxidermy.net/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=13881.0

http://www.taxidermy.net/forums/ReptileArticles/01/01EA2735C7.html

http://www.taxidermy.net/forums/ReptileArticles/04/04471B5E67.html
PA is certainly one of the most knowledgeable people in the biz. I'd trust him to clean anything, because he pretty much has!
With that said, I disagree with one point: the process of boiling, in and of itself, can (and should) cause flaking. If you are removing ANY collagen, then you are by definition weakening the bone structure. Obviously the timing matters - if you boil something a little, then only the surface will have this connective tissue removed (leaving only the brittle mineral content). If you boil something longer, then all you will have left is the mineral part of the bone and some delicious stock! Haven't y'all boiled a chicken over night? The skeleton is toast (crumbles - that's how you know the stock is done), but the liquid is luscious. All the you did there is to dissolve the collagen. That's the stuff that turns to jelly when you put it in the fridge. Great for cooking - crap for skull cleaning.

All skull cleaners should avoid getting the bone up to the heat level that dissolves the collagen. That's the sweet spot - between breaking down the fats (SW says it's 115F+), but keeping the temp low enough to keep the collagen solid in the bone (looks like that's 140F: http://www.scienceofcooking.com/meat/slow_cooking1.htm - the research paper in that page gives 136.4-150F). With that said, I keep it under 120F as it seems that certain types of fats set into the bone at that temp.

Check out my recent discussion: http://www.taxidermy.net/forum/index.php/topic,310147.0.html

Also, I downloaded the actual research paper on the subject "A theoretical approach of the relationships between collagen content, collagen cross-links and meat tenderness" if any of you are interested in the ridiculously detailed story.
PA Well-Known Member

You must also know that the average age of a chicken what is butchered for meat is somewhere about 6 weeks old - and bone is not set well at all at that stage, and of coerce it fall apart.
I had read the discussion pertaining boiling, and while the surface may be a little degraded, the ultimate quality is very little changed. I can show you small to large skulls I cleaned 35-40 years ago that have no flaking at all and they were boiled with a Coleman camp stove in a garage, or small ones boiled with a candle in small cans suspended by wire from the ceiling in my parents basement. I learned much better methods in graduate school, but some methods still work.

The very interesting thing today in the general large museum crowd by "professional conservators in the know" is to actually not bother with degreasing at all. Any form of degreasing by solvents or detergents or heat or water, etc. beyond the general cleaning does actual measurable destruction of the bone tissue. There is a dissertation that documents much of this by an old friend who worked here years ago but has retired.

Stephen Williams, Destructive Preservation: A Review of the Effect of Standard Preservation Practices on the Future Use of Natural History Collections, Göteborg Studies in Conservation 6 (Göteburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999).

He reviewed most material on the subject and did a number of projects investigating the ways used to clean bone material. Essentially every method causes some destruction.

3-4 hours of boiling a deer skull in reality probably causes no more damage than soaking it for 3-6 months in 115 degree water containing some dawn dish detergent and a spritz of ammonia. measurable degradation occurs in both cases.

However, 99% of the customers and all owners of skull collections prefer clean white skulls rather than grease laden bones. But the amount of damage caused by degreasing causes cracked bone, cracked teeth, shrinkage, warping and all sorts of changes in the original condition of the bone as it has just finished being cleaned by whatever method is employed.

Old fat soaked bone doesn't always clean up well. I had a few old skeletons assigned to me dating back into the 1800's in order to clean them up - as the curator did not like the fat within them. One, an ostrich form 1899 was very grease soaked as it was a captive specimen from a zoo, which routinely feeds their captives WAY too much food. I tried the easiest, less destructive methods I could use and progressed to harsher ones until it was a little better. In retrospect, I should have left it greasy as the bones eventually cracked and the surfaces became less than what they had been.

Full skeletons often show a lot more damage than simple skulls, and most of the time I deal with complete skeletons. The number of people actually studying osteology in collections has shrunk dramatically from what it was 30 to even 100 years ago. Paleontologists use my recent collections much more than Ornithologists or Herpetologists. I would surmise the Mammal collection has a similar bent today.

And, in fact, digimorph and similar technologies
http://www.digimorph.org/
http://www.drexel.edu/now/news-media/releases/archive/2012/February/3D-Printing-Technology-Robotic-Dinosaurs/
will make cleaning skeletons the old way, especially small species and juveniles, totally obsolete.
The only people doing it will be taxidermists and bone collectors. The bones can be scanned from a fluid specimen with absolutely startling detail.

Boiling will cause some damage, but negligable on fully adult, bone hardened individuals which are carefully tended while being cleaned. Boiling never removes all the tissue of a skull as there is always areas that never get cleaning. Boiling is not the best method, perhaps 4th or 5th best method, but it produces a product that will pass the test of time. Just my opinion.
An opinion based on years of hard earned experience! I too have "simmered" specimens in the past with lasting results, but on a forum like this that is mostly informing beginners, I'd steer everyone away from hot methods.
Thank you both very much for your input! There has been posted quite some interesting information here lately, that goes a bit further than the usual post and I'm happy for that!
As I promised here are pictures of my turtle.
Fortunately only bosom part has fallen apart.
Yes it has some mineral stains but honestly I don't care.
I do have most of the scutes but will leave it without them.
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Voltrax the shells are cleaned nicely but didn't you keep the colored scutes from the outside of the shell?
I wrap turtles and their shells in gauze, run them through the beetles or rot them in water, either way. Once completed, treat them like an egg shell, very carefully. Then rinse, shampoo, repeat, against a screen to gather up the skeletal pieces. Suspend the bones, shell, and skull, in straight chemical baths (the usual stuff, most use) depending on if I need them to be white or tan. Thoroughly dry (which seems to bind the shell back together), followed by a dip in a water-down elmers glue formula, so they are sealed, pretty, and don't smell like,.....well,...turtles.
Nice glue up job Voltrax, I agree they are difficult to get back together. Especially the last piece.