Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Filipino artist Gregory Raymond Halili spent three years creating a life-size skeleton out of pieces of washed-up coral!
Halili gathered all the coral he needed along the beaches of Calatagan, Anilao, and Bolinao in the Philippines, spreading out his search as the types of corals found differ in each area.
“The hardest “bone” to find was the skull. There are many corals that are shaped like a cranium but are not the right size. I wanted to be honest with the work, so I looked for a long time and finally found it on a Calatagan beach.”
Coral turns white when it dies, creating an eerie resemblance to bones and making it the perfect medium for Halili to work with. The mock bones in Halili’s piece appear to hover a few inches above a 7-ft-long driftwood table, an illusion he accomplished by drilling the wood and coral pieces, then connecting them all together with steel needles and superglue. He found the perfect coral pieces to fit together like a puzzle!
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