Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"\"If anyone asks, you're a black Labrador...\""}]

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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Wednesday, May 29, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

"If anyone asks, you're a black Labrador..."

Daily Smile: Wednesday, May 29, 2024

 "If anyone asks, you're a black Labrador..."

You Still Here

How to respond if cops pull you over for being a "suspicious person...."

You still here 8 16 26

<title>You Still Here? Sunday, August 16, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

You Still Here? Sunday, August 16, 2026

Wyoming Sunrise

Today's Wyoming sunrise was captured by Tom Denniston. Tom writes, "Top of the Snowies, Telephone Creek, looking toward Laramie. Special spot for our family viewing this sunrise since 1954. Feeling blessed!"

[{"type":"text","text":"To submit your Wyoming sunrise, email us at: News@CowboyStateDaily.com"}]

NOTE: Please send us the highest-quality version of your photo. The larger the file, the better.

[{"type":"text","text":"NOTE #2: Please include where you are from and where the photo was taken."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"NOTE #3: Tell us about your sunrise. What do you like about it?"}]

NOTE #4: We prefer horizontal photos. We can use vertical but horizontal is preferred.

Sunrise small 8 16 26

<title>Your Wyoming Sunrise: Sunday, August 16, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Your Wyoming Sunrise: Sunday, August 16, 2026

Coy Knobel

Don Day Weather

Mostly sunny in Wyoming on Sunday with a chance of afternoon rain in some areas. Partly cloudy to mostly clear overnight with a chance of rain in some locations. Highs from the low 70s to low 80s. Lows in the 40s and 50s.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":" "}]

Sunny today with a high near 84 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 54.

Slight chance of rain after 2 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 81 and mostly clear overnight with a slight chance of rain before 8 p.m. and a low near 54.

  Sunny today with a high near 84 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 56.

  Sunny today with a high near 79 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 45.

   Sunny today with a high near 81 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 51.

 Sunny and breezy today with a high near 74 and wind gusts as high as 21 mph. Mostly clear overnight with a low near 51 and wind gusts as high as 20 mph.

 Slight chance of rain after 1 p.m., increasing clouds today with a high near 74 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 42.

 Slight chance of rain after 1 p.m., increasing clouds and breezy today with a high near 80 and wind gusts as high as 21 mph. Mostly clear overnight with a low near 43.

  Slight chance of rain after 2 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 77 and mostly clear overnight a low near 42.

 Chance of rain mainly after 3 p.m., otherwise mostly sunny and breezy today with a high near 73 and wind gusts as high as 24 mph. Partly cloudy and breezy overnight with a slight chance of rain before 8 p.m., a low near 44 and wind gusts as high as 28 mph.

  Chance of rain mainly after 2 p.m., otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 80 and mostly clear overnight with a slight chance of rain before 7 p.m. and a low near 42.

Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park

:  Slight chance of rain mainly after 1 p.m., otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 72 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before 9 p.m. and a low near 37.

Slight chance of rain after 2 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 82 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before 7 p.m. and a low near 55.

:  Chance of rain mainly after 5 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 79 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before 8 p.m. and a low near 54.

  Slight chance of rain after 1 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 83 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before 10 p.m. and a low near 54.

   Slight chance of rain after 1 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 77 and mostly clear overnight with a slight chance of rain before 9 p.m. and a low near 57.

   Widespread fog before 9 a.m., sunny today with a high near 82 and partly cloudy overnight with a slight chance of rain before midnight, patchy fog after 3 a.m. and a low near 49.

:   Patchy fog before 9 a.m., chance of rain mainly after 3 p.m., otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 81 and partly cloudy overnight with a chance of rain before midnight and a low near 53.

Sunny today with a high near 81 and wind gusts as high as 18 mph. Mostly clear overnight with a low near 55 and wind gusts as high as 17 mph.

   Slight chance of rain after 3 p.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 77 and mostly clear overnight with a chance of rain before midnight and a low near 56.

:  Chance of rain after noon, otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 76 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 56.

  Patchy fog before 10 a.m., slight chance of rain after noon, otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 80 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 58.

   Patchy fog before 10 a.m., otherwise sunny today with a high near 84 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 55.

  Gradually becoming sunny today with a high near 81 and wind gusts as high as 18 mph. Mostly clear overnight with a low near 54 and wind gusts as high as 18 mph.

   Patchy fog before 10 a.m., chance of rain after noon (some storms could be severe), otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 76 and mostly clear overnight a low near 55.

  Slight chance of rain after noon, otherwise mostly sunny today with a high near 77 and partly cloudy overnight with a low near 52.

  Patchy fog before 10 a.m., slight chance of rain after noon, otherwise sunny today with a high near 79 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 58.

   Sunny today with a high near 77 and mostly clear overnight a low near 54.

   Mostly sunny today with a high near 77 and mostly clear overnight with a low near 50.

   Sunny today with a high near 79 and mostly clear overnight a low near 50.

Daycap small 8 16 26

<title>Don Day's Wyoming Weather Forecast: Sunday, August 16, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Don Day's Wyoming Weather Forecast: Sunday, August 16, 2026

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Around Wyoming

A slew of fantastic fossils from Earth’s earliest primates have been discovered in southwestern Wyoming, offering new insights into the evolution of humanity’s tiny, sap-sucking great-uncles and aunts.

A new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports on the tiny fossils of three prehistoric primates excavated at Smiley Draw, a sandstone site in the Wasatch Formation of the Eocene Period.

Among paleontologists, Wyoming is well known as one of the best places in the world to find 

. These discoveries add to that reputation while also showing how much remains to be found.

“We've made the picture of the early Eocene more complicated than what we once thought,” said Chris Beard, a Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “There will be much more to learn about these fossils, especially from southern Wyoming. There's a reason we're working down there.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Fascinating And Frustrating"}]

Wyoming has been a hub of primitive primate paleontology since the 1880s. The first fossils of lemur-like primates, dating to around 55 million years ago, were discovered in the Bighorn Basin around that time.

“A whole lot of work happened in the late 20th Century in the Bighorn Basin, especially with respect to this animal called Tetonius,” Beard said.

Tetonius, named after the Tetons, is a “vaguely tarsier-like creature,” as Beard described it. It was around the size of a modern-day mouse lemur, less than a foot long and under 2.5 ounces, but its closest living relatives are modern tarsiers.

Tarsiers are tiny, tree-dwelling animals known as “dry-nosed” primates. Endangered populations of these tiny primates still exist in the rainforests of Southeast Asia.

In their study, Beard and his colleagues described a new species of Tetonius, T. varleyorum, from Smiley Draw, an Eocene site in the Great Divide Basin in Sweetwater County.

“In Wyoming, you typically find Eocene-aged fossils in mudstone that erodes very easily,” Beard said. “This particular site is very unusual, if not unique, as it’s a layer of sandstone chock full of fossils. It’s rare to find Eocene fossils in sandstone, so Smiley Draw is exactly the opposite of what we normally expect.”

According to Beard, the discovery of a new species of Tetonius, based on its age and anatomy, is highly significant.

“It’s obviously a different species because it’s younger than the Tetonius and its younger descendant, Pseudotetonius, from the Bighorn Basin,” he said. “The fossils we found in Sweetwater County occur after that whole lineage has gone extinct in the Bighorn Basin.”

The study also describes fossils of two rarely found anaptomorphines, another group of prehistoric primates. Arapahovius gazini and Anemorhysis savage have never been found in the Great Divide Basin, and only a handful of other specimens have been found.

What’s significant is that the fossils of these three primates were found at the same site, which means they coexisted at the same time and place. That just raises further questions about life in the early Eocene.

“We’re finding animals that lived together at Smiley Draw that never ever cohabitated in the Bighorn Basin,” Beard said. “Tetonius, Arapahovius, and Anemorhysis don’t coexist there, but we find them together here.”

That’s why Beard said it’s “frustrating,” from a paleontological perspective, to compare Smiley Draw with the well-researched discoveries in the Bighorn Basin.

“We have an idea that animals evolve, they go extinct, and other animals replace them,” he said. “What we're finding at Smiley Draw is the animals that we think are going extinct at a certain time in the Bighorn Basin probably aren't going extinct elsewhere.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Gradual And Parallel"}]

Tetonius, Arapahovius, and Anemorhysis are all omomyids, a family of early tarsier-like primates known from several Eocene sites worldwide.

Beard said Wyoming’s omomyids are excellent examples of gradual evolution, which is what Charles Darwin proposed in his landmark 1859 book “On the Origin of Species.”

“There was a huge debate in paleontology about how evolution proceeded,” he said. “Did it occur gradually, the way that Charles Darwin predicted, or did it conform more to a punctuated equilibrium model, which was made famous by Stephen Jay Gould and his collaborators?”

The fossils of Tetonius and Pseudotetonius from the Bighorn Basin are a textbook example of gradual evolution. While they are distinctly different animals, Beard said the fossil record shows “no break in the single lineage chain from primitive to advanced.”

The key observation is the significant changes in the lower jaws of these primates, which Beard and his colleagues observed in fossils from the Bighorn Basin and the Great Basin Divide.

“These animals start out with fairly long lower jaws and lots of teeth in between their back teeth, the molars, and their front teeth, the incisors,” he said. “Through time, their lower jaws get compacted from front to back. They lose some teeth and develop a rodent-like incisor that sticks out of the front of their jaw, getting bigger and stouter over time.”

The purpose of this overly large incisor remains a mystery. Beard said that if you asked three different paleontologists, you’d get three different answers.

“In my opinion, they're using that big front incisor to gouge the bark of trees,” he said. “A lot of modern animals do this to stimulate sap or gum or resin to come out of the tree.”

Tree sap contains a lot of sugar. For a tiny primate with a high metabolism, that sap would be a valuable source of energy and nutrition.

Is this change in jaw and dental anatomy driven by a change in diet, or were the omomyids perfecting the tools needed for millennia of the same diet? That’s another debated question, but Beard said the latter is the most likely answer.  

These questions are significant to the new discoveries from Smiley Draw because they show the same thing happening – the shortening of the jaw, loss of teeth, and larger incisor – in Tetonius, but not exactly the same as in the Tetonius from the Bighorn Basin.

“The T. varleyorum from Smiley Draw has shorter haws and fewer teeth, so it’s similar but not exactly the same as what we see in the Bighorn Basin,” Beard said. “These are two different lineages evolving in parallel to achieve the same result.”

Parallel evolution is a well-documented phenomenon in nature. The legendary finches Darwin collected in the Galápagos Islands are an excellent example, as the different but related birds had beaks shaped to suit their diets on their isolated islands.

It’s more evidence that something strange was going on in Sweetwater County 55 million years ago.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hyperthermal Events"}]

Beard and his colleagues are studying all the mammal fossils recovered from Smiley Draw to see if they have the same story as the recently described omomyids. If they do, it would be further proof that different things were happening in different parts of Wyoming.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” he said. “We find animals living side-by-side at Smiley Draw that were already extinct or never lived side-by-side in the Bighorn Basin. They were only going extinct locally in the Bighorn Basin.”

Climate change might explain this discrepancy. The Eocene was a roller coaster of climate, which usually leads to extinction or adaptation for flora and fauna.

“We've got lots of iterations of what we call hyperthermal events in the Eocene, where the world warms up very rapidly and cools down again,” Beard said. “When the world warmed up, animals that were more tropically adapted spread northward, from Sweetwater County to Park County. When it cooled down, and they were no longer happy, the animals went back down. It's a very dynamic thing, and we're picking up a lot of these oscillations by looking at Smiley Draw.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Our Great Uncles"}]

This new study on prehistoric primates raised more questions than it answered. That’s not a bad thing, as it gives Beard and his colleagues more reasons to return to Smiley Draw.

Beard said his team was at the site collecting fossils in June. Some of those specimens are already being studied using a micro-CT scanner in North Carolina.

“I can tell you that we found additional fossils of early primates and primate-like creatures that are totally new just two months ago,” he said. “We’ll have a lot more to reveal from Smiley Draw.”

They’re not the only ones looking at overlooked spots in southern Wyoming. Paleontologists with the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History at Duke University have been finding 

phenomenal Eocene fossils in Bridger Basin

, including the best specimens of the earliest known primate-like mammal in the fossil record, Plesiadapis.

“The Bridger Basin is the Madagascar of the Eocene,” curator Matthew Borths told Cowboy State Daily in December 2024. “We transition from a few primates on the landscape to a lot of diversity, hopping around in the rainforests of Wyoming.”

Borths’s dream was to find an omomyid in the Bridger Basin, as they’re humanity’s closest Eocene ancestor. There’s no shortage of omomyids in Smiley Draw, which is less than 200 miles northeast. 

Beard said Wyoming is “better than any other single place in the world, including Europe, Asia, and Africa” for paleontologists studying the origins and evolution of the earliest primates. That’s just from what’s been discovered, let alone what’s still out there, waiting to be found.

“Wyoming is incredibly fundamental to understanding the deep origins of humans,” he said. “None of these animals are the direct ancestors of humans. They're probably great-uncles and great-aunts, but that doesn't make them any less important. In fact, in my opinion, it probably makes them more important.”

That’ll keep Beard and his colleagues busy for decades. There’s a lot more to find, study, and understand – if that’s an excuse to get dirty in Wyoming, all the better.

“I love Wyoming, personally and scientifically,” Beard said. “We wish that we had a perfect fossil record, but we don’t. 

"What we have are snippets and glimpses; we try to piece together what it means. Wyoming has been overlooked for a while, to be honest, and we’re very fortunate to have such an amazing fossil record there.”

Smiley inset 8 15 26

<title>"Something Strange Going On": 55 Million-Year-Old Primate Fossils Found In SW Wyoming | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A slew of fossils from Earth's earliest primates have been discovered in southwestern Wyoming. Scientists say the tiny primate fossils, around the size of a mouse lemur, is evidence something strange was going on in Sweetwater County 55 million years ago.

"Something Strange Going On": 55 Million-Year-Old Primate Fossils Found In SW Wyoming

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Raymond Felix brought a brand-new bike to Sturgis this year. New to him, that is.

“We bought it about two weeks ago,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I traded my Sporty in. I said, ‘We’re going to Sturgis, so I want a better bike.’”

The bike is a 2017 Softail Slim FLS with 5,000 miles on it, “practically new” for what was Felix’s first trip to Sturgis. He went with his family — his mom and dad, Leon and Alisa, and his girlfriend, Yessenia Marenco. 

The four were among hordes of bikers — literally thousands — riding the Devils Tower loop for a Sturgis Rally tradition called Wyoming Wednesday. 

Sundance’s claim to fame on Wyoming Wednesday is a burnout contest that’s been going on for more than half a century in front of the historic Dime Horseshoe Bar.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Legend Of The Burnout"}]

Local legends say the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s burnout actually started inside the establishment, which takes its name from a horseshoe pattern inlaid into the bar top with dimes.

The story goes that a bar patron decided to do a burnout inside the bar and the owner chased him out.

Other riders joined the fun, putting on their own spontaneous burnout event on the street in front of the bar.

It started a tradition that has continued ever since, though these days it’s more of a planned thing, complete with bike mechanics who swap used tires for new, saving the bikers’ good tires for their return trip to either the Sturgis Rally or home. 

The bar has since also built a stage for the bikes, elevating them above the crowd so everyone can see. That also helps keep the smoke over everyone’s heads. 

A set of fans blows the clouds of acrid, billowing smoke away from the bikers. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Big Father-Son Moment"}]

Felix had a dream for his first Sturgis, and watching the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s Burnout in Sundance was it.

But he didn’t just watch the burnout as he’d planned.

Jess Jones, owner of the Dime Horseshoe Bar along with her husband, Casey, is persuasive that way. 

She kept calling for entries, and Felix’s dad, Leon, kept urging Raymond to enter.

“They talked me into it,” he said. “I was like, ‘All right, let’s do it. I’m down for it.’”

Felix’s parents have been coming to Sturgis — and to Sundance’s burnout — since 2011. But until this year, Raymond couldn’t join them. All four work for the same delivery-driving business, which makes planning time off together tricky.

“It’s hard for all of us to take vacation at the same time,” Leon said. “This is the first year we got to do it.”

A friend showed Leon and Alisa all the cool places to go, including Sundance. 

“We love it,” Alisa said. “It’s amazing. Seriously, every year we look forward to coming.”

For Leon, finally sharing Sundance with his son — and seeing him compete so well in the burnout — was not just a great memory. It is a father-son milestone he cherishes. 

“It’s like a father’s dream to have your kid come ride with you,” he said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hitting Sixth Gear"}]

Felix had been told he probably wouldn’t be able to cycle his engine past fourth gear. 

But when he hit four without signs of strain, he kicked it up to five and then six. 

Smoke, he explained, is the whole point of a burnout. 

“The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” he said. “So you go through first, second, third. You want to keep the gears shifting. But so it handled six just fine.”

Family and friends replayed the moment he hit sixth gear, and Raymond’s eyes lit up.

“Check this out,” he exclaimed. “The sixth-gear pin! I was in sixth gear!”

That ultimately earned him enough crowd appreciation that he took third place, along with a $250 cash prize. 

First place, and the $750 in prize money, went to Bill Snider, a regular from Michigan who said he will put the money back into his bike.

Snider was in Sundance hanging out with his daughter, Erica Goble, and her fiancé.

Goble drove to Sundance from Colorado to be with her dad, and said she thought the event was “pretty cool.”

Snider told Cowboy State Daily he spends little time at the Sturgis Rally itself, preferring to spend his rally time in tiny Sundance and Hulett in Wyoming.

“We go over there, but we go over there once, buy a T-shirt and leave,” he said.

In Wyoming, he said, he has found people are welcoming and treat you like family — and that’s what keeps him coming back.

Burnout 20260812 165049 8 15 26

<title>Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally riders have packed Sundance, Wyoming, for its annual burnout for more than 50 years. Legend has it the burnout started inside the Dime Horseshoe Bar. “The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” says one rider.

Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout

Jake nichols 720

Jake Nichols

Wyoming Life

Harvard University once claimed to possess up to three books in its libraries that were bound in human skin.

Thanks to relatively new technology, two of the works in question have been debunked, but not without leaving one proven authentic and opening a rabbit hole filled with questions.

[{"type":"text","text":"First, books bound in the largest organ of humans are a thing. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"In fact, the practice was once more popular than one might think. "}]

Second, in response to binding books in human skin, Wyoming history says, “Hold my beer.”

The Cowboy State has an ashtray, a medicine bag and a pair of shoes all made from the remains of a notorious outlaw who met his demise at the end of a rope.

[{"type":"text","text":"Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover"}]

Two decades ago, the internet was abuzz with hoax-or-real tales of literary works bound in human skin, particularly a few tomes reportedly owned by an Ivy League school.

It started in 2006 after an article appeared in the university publication “The Harvard Crimson.” 

Written by Samuel Jacobs, who was named editor-in-chief of Time Magazine three years ago, “The Skinny on Harvard’s Rare Book Collection” zeroed in on three unique books in the university’s 15 million-volume collection purportedly bound in human flesh.

Jacobs fleshes out the texts, ranging in content from medieval law to Roman poetry to French philosophy. A lawbook, for one, has been discredited in its claim to be skin-wrapped. It’s bound in flesh, but not human.

“Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae” is a Spanish lawbook containing material dating back to 1605. It was bought for $42.50 from a New Orleans book dealer in 1946 and shelved in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard, according to the library’s curator, David Ferris.

Nothing about the book’s cover seems out of the ordinary, though it appears to have a hue suggestive of skin tone. It’s what is handwritten in purple ink on the book’s last page that sets one’s skin to crawling.

“[T]he bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”

DNA tests performed in 1992 proved inconclusive. The tanning process was partially to blame, but truthfully, technology just wasn’t up to the task until more recent scientific advancements in what is known as peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) made positive identification possible.

In-house testing performed by Harvard using the analytical technique for protein identification PMF proved conclusively that Wright’s remains do not bind the 400-year-old book, nor do any human’s. The cover is sheepskin.

Another book in question — a 1597 French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses housed in the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine — also was proven to be sheepskin even though a small penciled annotation appearing on the inside cover reads: “Bound in human skin.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The Hide That Binds"}]

The myth busting leaves Harvard with one final volume touted as epically epidermically bound.

“Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’ame” is part of Harvard’s massive Houghton Library collection. The meditation on the soul and afterlife was gifted by the author to a friend, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, sometime in the mid-1880s.

Bouland, a noted medical doctor and prominent bibliophile, bound the book with the skin from an unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. A note was found inserted in the book after it was donated to the university in 1954 by the widow of John B. Stetson Jr. (yes, that Stetson, son of John Sr., founder of the famed cowboy hat company).

The two-page note is handwritten in French by Dr. Bouland. It reads, in part:

“This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman.”

The same testing conducted in early 2014 that disproved Harvard’s two anthropodermic-bound books was able to confirm the binding of “Des Destinées de L’am” as most likely that of a human.

Other written works confirmed bound in human skin can be found at the John Hay Library at Brown University (four volumes) and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (five books, including three of which came from the skin of the same woman).

Perhaps the most famous example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a book gathering dust on a shelf at the Boston Athenaeum.

The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen Alias George Walton

,” is a memoir of Walton’s. He narrated the autobiographical story to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison while on his deathbed in 1837.

He insisted the book be bound in his own skin and given to a man, John A. Fenno Jr., who fiercely resisted Walton’s attempt to rob him. Fenno’s daughter reportedly gifted the work to Boston Athenaeum, but the library/museum has no written proof of that. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Literarily Interred"}]

OK, books bound in human skin sounds revolting. But the practice was once somewhat accepted, if not common.

Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin dates back to at least the 16th century, according to a study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2014.

This is the macabre story of a once-common practice of binding books with human skin — and how Wyoming did that one better by skinning notorious Wild West outlaw "Big Nose George" and making him into a pair of shoes. His skull was made into an ashtray.

Daily Smile: Wednesday, May 29, 2024

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