Grover Krantz donated his body to science, but only if they took his best friends too
Best friends to the bone

Grover Krantz decided to donate his body to science, but not without his best friends.

Before and “after” Images of Grover Krantz with his Irish Wolfhound, Clyde. Credit: nationalpurebreddogday.com

The anthropologist told his colleague David Hunt of the Smithsonian:

“I’ve been a teacher all my life and I think I might as well be a teacher after I’m dead, so why don’t I just give you my body.”

Krantz added, “But there’s one catch: You have to keep my dogs with me.”

Hunt laughed,

‘Well, how many dogs are we talking about, Grover?’

Krantz dead-panned,

‘Just three — maybe four.’

The thing is, these were Irish wolfhounds, which stand up to seven feet on their hind legs.

In the drawer with Clyde’s bones is the memoir Krantz wrote about his beloved Irish Wolfhound.

He gave Clyde credit for making the difference, he wrote, “between being a functioning human being and a drunken bum.”

Clyde used to sleep on an old sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of Krantz’s bed.

One night, Krantz came home drunk and flopped down on the sleeping bag with Clyde.

“In the morning, I woke on the floor alone and discovered him sleeping up on my bed,” he wrote. “A fair trade in his mind, I suppose.”

Inside the book is a photo of Clyde standing on his hind legs with his huge paws perched on Grover’s shoulders.

Krantz tried to persuade Hunt to display his skeleton and Clyde’s in that exact position at the museum.

Hunt told The Washington Post.

“I said to him, ‘That’s a neat idea but it’s probably not something we could do,’ “

In 2003, Krantz’s skeleton was arranged in a green cabinet at the National Museum of Natural History alongside the bones of best friends Clyde, Icky, and Yahoo.

Krantz himself saved Clyde’s bones and even started to articulate them before his illness and death.

Hunt even has Krantz’s baby teeth!

Krantz was a legend in anthropology circles.

He was sort-of-famous outside them, too, as the quirky professor who drove around the Pacific Northwest with a spotlight and a rifle, chasing down Sasquatch.

Krantz’s bones have since been used to teach forensics and advanced osteology to students at George Washington University.

In 2009 Kranz got his wish.

The best friends were displayed in their favorite pose in the exhibition “Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake.”