Fossilized Skull
| Fossilized Skull | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Sell Price | 100g |
The Fossilized Skull is the head of Professor Snail's largest specimen and the only bone in the set that cannot be dug, fished or mined for. It comes out of Golden Coconuts and nowhere else, so finding it is a matter of collecting those hard nuts and having Clint crack them open one by one. The first coconut opened always gives a Golden Walnut, and every one after that has roughly a one in seven chance of holding the skull. A single skull finishes the head of the Large Animal, and the completed skeleton pays six Golden Walnuts along with a Banana Sapling. Because the coconut supply can be bought as well as foraged, this is the one bone that money and a Monday trip to the desert can solve.
The in-game description reads: It's a perfect specimen!
Overview
Golden Coconuts turn up in three places around Ginger Island. Shaking a Palm Tree that has a coconut hanging in it sometimes drops the golden kind instead of the ordinary one. Tilling the island's artifact spots can produce them as well, which is why a hoe belongs in the bag on every visit. A Blue Discus pond on the farm starts producing them too, once its population has grown past eight.
None of them can be opened by hand. Clint takes a Golden Coconut at the Blacksmith for a small fee and breaks it the same way he breaks geodes, and a Geode Crusher is no substitute for him. What falls out is drawn from a short list: tree saplings, Pineapple Seeds, Taro Tubers, a Mahogany Seed, a stack of Iridium Ore, the Golden Helmet, or the skull. The odds across that list are flat enough that a dozen coconuts will usually produce the bone.
Buying the nuts is faster than hunting them. The Island Trader swaps ten ordinary Coconuts for one golden one, and that trade opens once the first Golden Coconut has been cracked. Ordinary Coconuts are sold at the Oasis in Calico Desert on Mondays, so a stack of desert shopping converts straight into skull attempts without a single Palm Tree being shaken.
The skull belongs to the Large Animal display in the Island Field Office, the tent that Professor Snail works from once he has been blasted out of his cave on the upper dig terrace. That frame also wants a pair of legs, the ribcage, the spine and the tail, and the walnuts and sapling only arrive when every piece is in. The donation screen will give a hint on any bone still missing, which saves a lot of guesswork on this one in particular.
Extra skulls are not wasted. A Bone Mill grinds one down into fertiliser, either Quality Fertilizer, Speed-Gro of both grades, or Tree Fertilizer, and sometimes returns two batches for the one bone. The spool of a Sewing Machine turns a skull into the Skeleton Shirt, and the dye pots in Emily and Haley's house at 2 Willow Lane read it as a yellow dye. Handing one to a villager, on the other hand, is taken as an insult by the whole valley.
Notes
Keeping a stock of coconuts is worth doing for its own sake. The same cracking that yields the skull is the road to the Golden Helmet, a hat that sits on the same drop list, and it also gives up the Mango and Banana Saplings that make an island orchard pay.
Golden Walnuts earned from the finished skeleton go towards the parrot payments that open the rest of Ginger Island, so the professor's bone collection and the island's own progress pull in the same direction.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
