Japanese funeral home Nishinihon Tenrei wanted to create an ad that would break from the traditional funerary colors of black and white while still presenting a respectful image of their services. Tokyo-based ad agency I&S BBDO came up with this life-sized skeleton, celebrating the life of the departed through pressed…

This is what you get when you take data from a CT scan and convert it into a format that can be read by a 3D-printer. It's a skeleton. But not just any skeleton. The 3D model you see here was printed while the rat whose bones it's based on was still alive. Intact. Still wrapped in muscle, skin and fur.

Skeleton sculptor Tim Prince took a bit of the person-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors and added a pinch of Aliens' xenomorph queen to create this fearsome tribute to the horror comedy musical. I wouldn't put it past this critter to attempt world domination.

The subject of this photograph isn't an undead monster dragging its bones across the beach or some macabre temple designed to line up with the sun. It's just the sun peeking through the hollow eye of an ordinary fish skull.

This rather bizarre organism is Coronacollina acula, which lived on the seafloor about 550 million years ago. This sponge-like creature doesn't look like much of, well, anything, but its discovery throws a whole new light on the evolution of skeletons.

Welcome to the Concept Art Writing Prompt, a new, much-demanded feature here at io9. Each Saturday, we'll post a piece of artwork, and ask you to write a piece of fiction based on that artwork in the comments.

A recently-uncovered Neanderthal burial site in Spain has provided intriguing evidence that these ancient hominids believed in an afterlife and were capable of complex symbolic thought, all possibly before early Homo sapiens demonstrated these abilities.

This is Dimetrodon, the world's top predator about 270 million years ago. Living before the dawn of the dinosaurs, this striking creature was actual a distant ancestor of mammals like us. Now we've discovered the most complete Dimetrodon skeleton ever.

Where most humanoid robots have human-looking features on the outside but not inside, the Eccerobot team takes a different approach, giving their robot a humanoid skeleton, joints, and tendons so that it can better mimic human movement.