Gather around children! Let's all look at Winnie-the-Pooh's skull!

The skull that belonged to the original black bear that inspired author A.A. Milne to write the series of honey-obsessed Winnie-the-Pooh books has been put on display for the first time at the Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum. And the skull shows that, indeed, the lovable bear had serious tooth decay due to a penchant for sweets.

You might be wondering why Pooh's skull is even at a surgeon's museum to begin with--or that there was an original bear to be the inspiration for Pooh. First off, A.A. Milne's son, Christopher Robin's (yes, same name as the book) favorite male bear in the children's books was, in real life, actually a female black bear, named Winnipeg, named after the city in Manitoba. Winnipeg's owner, Canadian Captain Harry Coleburn bought the bear as a cub in 1914--and took the bear with him to England for training during World War I, in what we can only assume was one hell of a transport across the Atlantic.

The original Winnipeg snacking on sweets and somehow not snacking on a child.

When deployed to France to fight, Capt. Coleburn left Winnipeg at the London Zoo, where she would live the rest of her days over the next couple decades. It wasn't until Milne took his son, Christopher, to the zoo--and that the boy decided Winnipeg was his favorite attraction--that the author began to create a children's book. Winnipeg had a sex change, went from black to gold, and became the classic we know today. Winnie-the-Pooh was born.

After the books were a huge success, visitors to the zoo routinely fed Winnipeg sweets (she was apparently a very friendly and docile bear). That surely made Winnipeg fat and happy, but it also rotted her teeth savagely. Dentistry on animals not being what it is today, no one thought much about it. When she died in 1934, her remains were donated to the museum, and the skull we see today ended up at the Odontological Museum section of Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum.

No word on whatever became of Eeyore.




I kind of wish I had a bear named Saskatoon now.