London's Science Museum has this plaster model, supposedly depicting the head of an executed Chinese Yangstze river pirate, in its collection. But what was the purpose behind creating the model, which depicts the blood vessels, trachea, esophagus, and severed spine? The pictures below are rather gruesomely detailed.

Just because you've cut the head off a venomous snake, that doesn't mean that the snake is done with you. One Santa Cruz homeowner learned that after he decapitated a rattlesnake that wandered into his garage and the head kept on going.

When most people think of beheadings they probably think of events far away in time and place, such as Marie Antoinette's 1793 guillotine execution during the French revolution.

An ancient Roman cemetery in northern England is home to 80 corpses of strong, muscular men who quite literally lost their heads. These decapitated skeletons leave behind a 2000-year-old archaeological mystery that spans all of Europe.