If you were to go clicking down Alan Dudley’s anonymous-looking English street in Google’s Street View, there’d be no reason to stop outside his anonymous-looking English home. But inside, in a space no bigger than a child’s bedroom, Dudley has amassed one of the world’s most impressive private collections of skulls -- some 2,500 of them, incredibly well-organized and impeccably preserved. A good chunk of the animal kingdom is represented -- fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals fill the space. British journalist Simon Winchester’s first reaction to the collection was horror. “I thought, ‘This is macabre, this is horrible, this is grotesque,’ because I was, I think like most of us, brought up to associate skulls with piracy or warning or danger or death,” Winchester says. “But then you see beneath the muscle and the skin something so beautiful, so finely constructed, that you can understand the fascination that someone like Dudley has. It may sound rather corny, but it gives you a new reverence for life.” Winchester was so moved that he, along with an ex-BBC producer, created an app that showcased the collection. Though highly regarded when it launched last year, the app didn’t sell particularly well. But publishers in New York were interested in the material. When he was asked to turn the app into a book, Winchester happily agreed. The result is Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection, which was published earlier this month. The book features hundreds of Dudley’s skulls, supplemented with rarer specimens and Winchester’s writings on skull lore and history. We spoke to Winchester about what he learned and the most interesting skulls he discovered. These are some of his favorites. Above: Babirusa from North Sulawesi Winchester loves “the extraordinary canine teeth that look like horns but are actually teeth which curve back into its own head and make it look utterly weird.”

Dodo “I’ve been awash in dodo mythology since I was 17 or 18,” Winchester said of the extinct flightless bird. “I studied geology at Oxford. To get to my lectures, we would pass the case with the dodo.” Winchester adds that our fascination with the dodo “tells a lot about our attitude toward creatures, science, mythology, literature—an awful lot is wrapped up in it.” This skull is not part of Dudley’s collection. If it were, says Winchester, “he’d be in a lot of trouble.”

Piltdown Man In the early 20th century, Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist in Britain, made an astonishing discovery: a half-chimp, half-human skull found in the Sussex village of Piltdown. It came to be known as Piltdown Man, the missing evolutionary link that conclusively proved Darwin’s theory. But after Dawson died -- a hero to the world -- scientists uncovered the truth. The skull was a total fake, perpetrated by a fame-seeking serial forger. Winchester calls Dawson “the Jayson Blair of paleontology,” after the disgraced former journalist who fabricated stories for The New York Times. “It’s a wonderful scandal. And it shows how deluded the Brits were. For a long, long while, everyone believed that the missing link had been found—and that the missing link was an English gentleman!”

Hippopotamus “The hippopotamus is merely huge,” Winchester says, “but has these adaptations like the eye sockets which are sufficiently protected by bone that it can more or less submerge itself and still keep a watch on you.” It’s the biggest skull in Dudley’s collection.

Gaboon Viper “The Gaboon viper is just weird. So delicate. It looks dangerous even as a skull, with its great big fangs,” Winchester says. Note the jawbones, held loosely together so each side of the jaw can work independently.

Black-Headed Spider Monkey “It’s a physically very beautiful thing, with its great big eye sockets,” Winchester said of this creepy child-like skull.

Crystal Skull Thanks to films like Indiana Jones, the crystal skull is “woven into our modern-day consciousness,” Winchester says. “The fact is that nearly all of these are forgeries as well, produced by this Parisian dealer. Crystal skulls are very beautiful, but the idea that they’re bogus is most interesting.”

Phrenological Bust “I’m fascinated, once again, with deluded idiocy,” Winchester said, referring to phrenology, the long-ridiculed study of a cranium’s shape and size as it relates to a person’s personality and abilities. “Not only do we have the legacy of these rather nice museum pieces—these charts on bone or plastic or china heads showing things like amativeness and weird qualities like that—but the person that unmasked it all and derided it and eventually sent all the phrenologists fleeing in disarray is Peter Roget of Roget’s Thesaurus. If you look up ‘phrenology’ in Roget’s Thesaurus today, you’ll see that he got the last laugh by linking it with palmistry and all these other similar lunacies.”