This is the latest in a series of drawings by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. (This one also harmonizes with the Halloween season.)
This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Archaeology Prize that was awarded in the year 2013 to Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl, for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days — all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not.
The documented that research in the study “Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton,” Peter W. Stahl and Brian D. Crandall, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 22, November 1995, pp. 789–97.