Beetle colony helps clean bones for oddities dealer
Jonathan Alberico’s Aurora home is teeming with skulls, creepy crawlies, macabre artwork and a collection of poison bottles.
“Aw, man, we’ve been too busy to decorate for Halloween this year yet, but I wish you could see it when we get around to it,” Alberico said.
The bones in Alberico’s home aren’t cheapo plastic seasonal decor. They’re bonafide animal skeletons, and they’re the eccentric 36-year-old’s livelihood.
Alberico is the owner of The Learned Lemur, an oddities shop that opened in a new location this summer — on Friday the 13th, no surprise — at 2220 E. Colfax Ave. in Denver.
The shop, which bills itself as “Colorado’s premier oddities dealer,” is stocked with vintage medical equipment, taxidermied animals, plants and other peculiarities.
But Alberico’s specialty is bones.
The Learned Lemur offers bone and skull cleaning — a service for those looking to tidy up a trophy buck for mounting, clean off a carcass nabbed on a hike or even create a skeletal remembrance of a lost furry friend.
Alberico said he is a stickler for ethically sourced materials and skeletons, but he’s got a few key employees who aren’t on the payroll: colonies of dermestid beetles that live in climate-controlled chests in Alberico’s home workshop that eat the flesh off the bones their boss deposits.
“We clean about 1,500 to 2,000 skulls a year with those guys,” Alberico said. “They’re our hardest working employees.”
Alberico’s home office space likely looks different than yours. His beetle den, with an eau de rotting flesh, features freezers housing their projects and beetle abodes. On a recent October day, a swarm chowed down on coyote and beaver skulls slated for The Learned Lemur’s shelves.
In another room of Alberico’s novelty-laden home, which features enough plants to take on a jungle-like quality, the bones of Werewolf the beloved pup were organized on a tabletop. On his days off from the oddities shop, Alberico spends his time meticulously piecing together bones of clients’ late pets. The animals’ remains are cleaned off by the beetles, go through chemical baths and come out as squeaky clean bones ready to be puzzlepieced back together into a skeletal tribute.
“I can hear him telling the animals that they were good boys or girls while he works on them,” said Bex Schimoler, Alberico’s partner, who also works at The Learned Lemur.
Alberico grew up on Denver’s historic Antique Row, refining his taste for the weird while digging through old barns and buildings as a kid with his dad on the hunt for treasures for their family’s antique shop.
He remembers playing in his backyard as a kid and discovering a bird skull under a bush.
“I still have that skull, and it’s one of the pieces I’ll always have,” Alberico said. “It was that kickoff moment that made me realize weird stuff is neat. I quickly became bored with what most people considered antiques. Even as a little kid, I started gravitating toward the unusual stuff and bizarre stuff — anatomical models, biohazard suits.”
Now, The Learned Lemur is the amalgamation of years of collecting curiosities. Every item has a history, and Alberico is eager to share.
Take the mink bones he said he obtained after U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers found a rash of wild mink that tested positive for COVID-19 near a Colorado campsite. The agency called on hunting professionals to kill the mink out of fear the animals would pass the disease to humans, Alberico said, and he got dibs on the skulls.
“I hate that they died, but it’s like a little piece of history,” Alberico said. “This is a historical marker for our time.”
And Alberico is pleased to have found his community, who he said are more varied than people might think.
“Everyone from your staunch, hardcore gore to a witch to a schoolteacher,” Schimoler said. “We do get more people wanting us to memorialize their cats than dogs. I think cat people are just inherently creepier.”
The shop is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Alberico plans to expand it into a tattoo parlor and host performances, too.
“I think Denver has a pretty good community of collectors and weirdos,” Alberico said. “It’s kind of interesting to see how many people are really, really excited to accept that it’s OK they’re unusual and weird.”