Skull symbolism is the practice of ascribing metaphorical significance to the human skull. The skull is most frequently associated with death, mortality, and the impossibility of achieving immortality. Even when other bones appear to be shards of stone, humans can often distinguish the buried pieces of an only partially visible cranium. The human brain has a special region for identifying faces that is so good at it that it can detect faces from just a few dots, lines, or punctuation marks; it couldn't tell the difference between an image of a human skull and a recognizable human face. As a result, both the death and the now-extinct existence of the skull are shown. Furthermore, a human skull with its massive eye sockets exhibits neoteny, which humans often find physically appealing—yet a skull is obviously dead, and the downward facing slope on the ends of the eye sockets may appear gloomy to some. Because of the visible teeth, a skull with the lower jaw intact may app...