Interesting link: website where you can buy reproductions of practically any skull
I was recently shown a video from youtuber Stephan Milo, a guy who makes lengthy videos about paleolithic humans and early hominids. Like a lot of YouTubers working in science and history related fields, he uses a healthy amount of stock footage. These YouTubers usually subscribe to stock footage services that allow them to access a visual language far beyond their own personal capability as camera operators.
For this reason, I have become very incurious about the visual language of educational YouTubers. (I am still curious about the visual language of hikers and bikers, but not about the footage used by guys who explain hydroelectric dams.) If it's all probably just stock footage, you may as well allow your how-it's-made impulse to die.
But whenever Milo talks about an early human who died, like, a hundred thousand years ago, he will then do close up shots of that early human's skull, sometimes indoors but also sometimes in picturesque or thematic locations, like... a snowbank.
In the first video I watched from this guy - and I'm sorry to report that I don't have it in my account history and I've forgotten which one it is - it took me several different skull shots in improbable locations, like snowbanks, before I realized that he was filming an actual object and not using a 3D model or stock footage. I actually paused the video and said, "there is no way on earth he's subscribed to a stock footage subscription service that has accurate early hominid skull footage." And soon enough, the video eventually showed him in an office filled with recreation skulls. He seems to own something like a dozen of them.
There are a surprisingly large number of people making these things, mostly out of resin. They sell them both in their own online stores and on places like Etsy at a variety of scales. At least one place Milo has mentioned getting his bones from, however, is Bone Clones, which is an incredibly fun website to browse.
This place seems to be a top source for reproduction bones in the United States, so if that's part of your professional field, this website is probably normal to you rather than funny and interesting. The company makes resin skulls that are clearly interactive classroom aids, like skulls that come apart magnetically for teaching purposes... but they've also got a bunch of skulls, bones, and full skeletons that seem less like a hands-on classroom activity and more like display art. You can get a direwolf skull with a "tarpit finish" exactly like the ones from the LA Brea tar pits. (In fact, the skull likeness is licensed from the Tar Pit museum??) You can get a crow skeleton on a wooden stand. Hell, you can get an articulated gorilla skeleton (for five and a half thousand dollars). You can get a fossil giant beaver skull, a 1:9 scale Tyrannosaurus, or the skull of an extinct "pseudo-tooth bird." I don't give a shit about bones but I do really enjoy reading all these product descriptions, searching up the associated Wikipedia pages, and imagining the person who either professionally requires or desperately desires an elaborate recreation of this creature's skull.
Oh, also: you can get dozens of reproduction bird eggs.
The hominid skulls come in two categories, full price and economy. The economy skulls are just under 200 bucks; the regular ones cost between 200 and 500 USD. They have dozens of different skulls and each one has a shockingly specific price. For example, you can get a copy of the fraudulent Piltdown Man skull for $319. If you have $423 specifically burning a hole in your pocket, you can get this recreation of a certain Australopithecus skull discovered in Ethiopia in 1992. (All the skulls are detailed "clones" of specific skulls discovered in real life.)
Anyway, the site has more fake bones than you could possibly imagine, and I don't know anything about this shit, but I spent over an hour poking around it and reading the incredibly detailed product descriptions. I also enjoyed this strangely depersonalized description of the company's history, which manages to describe the founder's passionate interest in bones without including his name or any autobiographical detail at all. Fascinating stuff!!