Skeleton Rattlesnake (Home Depot)

This is a BIG skeleton snake, I think a meter long, and while we've seen plenty of skeleton snakes in the past, they're usually just "bendable," made of semi-soft-ish rubber with a wire inside, or segmented in a way that's just kind of awkwardly wiggly. Not so for Home Depot's new bone serpent, made of hard plastic vertebrae chained together loosely enough that it's seriously as slinky and flexible as the real thing! You can realistically coil it and everything, wow!

Skeleton Jackalope (Home Depot)

I guess we've got kind of a desert theme between our two Home Depot examples; this Jackalope is remarkably accurate to an actual rabbit skeleton, except of course for the deer antlers, and of course the bone-colored ears for easy identification by the zoologically uninformed. A Jackalope is a taxidermy monstrosity to begin with, so there's no reason it can't still have ears on its skull anyway; maybe the taxidermist glued them on, or maybe Jackalopes do, in fact, have solid bone in their ears. How would YOU know?!

Skeleton "Pumpkin Pal" (Winco)

Aww, they call it a PUMPKIN PAL! A hilariously squat little orange-colored skeleton, with poseable arms and a movable skull-faced pumpkin head! All that confuses me here is the thought of this entity's actual tissue composition. If the pumpkin head is made of bone, then why is it still orange? Maybe pumpkin creatures just have orange skeletons, maybe this "skeleton" is in fact formed entirely of pumpkin flesh, or maybe there's just a thin, protective epidermal layer of vegetable skin growing over its bone tissue. In two out of three options, he doesn't technically belong here at all. You're not fooling anyone, silly flesh-bearer!

Pumpkin Skeleton Dog (winco)

Our maybe-skeleton Pumpkin Pal has a canine counterpart, though its head is entirely a dog-pumpkin hybrid, rather than a dog-pumpkin-skull hybrid. It's also two or three times larger than the Pumpkin Pal, which is even cuter, if this is in fact the Pumpkin Pal's Pet Pumpkin Pup.

Subtly New Sklider (Winco)

This is another knockoff of the classic Crazy Bonez skeleton spider, but it's one I've never seen before. It has the usual ribcage abdomen and finger-bone legs, with a faux-spider face that combines relatively realistic spider eyes with unrealistic insect-like mandibles and no palps to speak of! To this day, the Crazy Bonez original is still the only Sklider with an accurate arrangement of appendages, right down to its chelicerae! Still, this Winco imitation is cute enough. It's also not alone:

New Skeleton Bat (Winco)

Winco's 2025 Bonebat is similar to most Bonebats, but it's a tad more cartoonish with a happy, stylized fanged skull and unrealistic but nonetheless visually interesting wings, not formed from phalanges but from a

New Skelegecko (Winco)

The last of Winco's skelecritters is once again visually close to an existing model, the curled skeletal lizard that's become a semi-staple since its 2019 debut. This gecko offers a very nice alternative however, since it's molded in a scurrying pose rather than permanently curled into a semicircle! It's again a bit "cartoonier," though only in the fact that it still has a living gecko's bulbous little toes, and that's perfectly okay!

Grumpy Skeleton Owl (Winco)

Halloween skeleton owls are always grumpy-eyed, and they sadly never have the accurate, totally bizarre bony binoculars of actual owl skeletons, but this is still a cute one. Not related to the previous three bonebeasts, but made of a different quality plastic, some of you are probably just grateful that it doesn't have bony points on its head to fit a horned owl silhouette.

New(?) Skelepus (online)

I never saw these until internet listings in 2025, but they appear to be ripoffs of the mid-size Crazy Bones octopus skeleton, the only overt difference being longer, narrower, more alien looking eye sockets.

False-Headed Spider (Dollar Tree)

The Dollar Tree isn't what it used to be. As of last year, it no longer sells things for only $1, but a minimum of $1.25 and a maximum of whatever they feel like. The death of a low-income staple - not that it's a good thing when you have to rely on the kind of fragile junk they always churned out - and the death of the "$13 at Dollar tree" posts I used to have fun with. At least they put out an entirely new Sklider this year; it's one that stands pretty tall on its long legs, and its body interestingly isn't formed from bones, just bone-colored. It also looks like it was molded with more insect-like segmentation, possessing what appears to be an abdomen, thorax, and a separate head, but while the "head" clearly has multiple small eye sockets of its own, the thorax has a pair of its own, and only this pair has been given a dash of red paint. This decision effectively designates the middle segment as this Sklider's actual "head," so really, it just has a very strange cephalothorax that looks like two segments, which isn't even weird for a spider at all. They do that kind of thing all the time when they're mimicking ants! Perhaps this is a biologically natural spider, mimicking an unnatural inaccurate Halloween spider.

Skeleton Sloth (online)

I haven't seen this in person anywhere, but I've seen it for sale on a few websites. It's so cheaply made, the skull is little more than a smooth blob with eye holes, but that only adds to the charm of what is otherwise fairly recognizable as a bone-sloth, sculpted so you can hang it upside-down by its limbs! And sure, we've seen a lot of zany skeletons that technically make less sense, but of all the actual animals we've seen come and go from the bone wars, a sloth makes the funniest amount of sense so far. Funny both because, in a scenario where skeletons are moving around to begin with, the likelihood of an animate sloth skeleton is at least as above zero as anything else with a skeleton, but it's still significantly closer to zero than anything else we've seen.

Is a paranormal entity picking and choosing what skeletons to imbue with unnatural animation? Then there's probably no reason they really saw fit to choose a sloth except for sheer entertainment value, just because they could, maybe just because they happen to be among the many people these days who really really love sloths. Loves them enough to want a sloth's bones just sort of slowly, harmlessly meandering around in a tree, lazily eating dead leaves or miming the act of lazily eating leaves that aren't even there, depending on your expectation of animate skeleton behavior. I guess some skeletons are supernaturally imbued with a heart of violence, but then there's really not that much a sloth's bones are going to do...I think? I mean, maybe it's several times faster and deadlier once freed from the restrictive confines of the flesh, in which case it could be a pretty sweet sneak-attacker. Even if your enemies spot it in time, they're probably going to grossly underestimate the danger they're in.

There are certainly other scenarios to consider, of course, like an indiscriminate paranormal phenomenon breathing unnatural life into just whatever naked bone it comes into contact with. The thought of bone sloths hanging off the trees of a haunted rainforest is effectively unsettling! Otherwise, we must consider haunted zoos, haunted scientific collections, and haunted ethically questionable pet stores whose management is possibly about to get what's coming to them in any number of grotesquely comedic ways. It's gotta be the sloth that gets the very last laugh, right? Our hypothetical animal trafficker miraculously evades every screeching primate zombie, every bloodthirsty vampire ocelot, every vengeful komodo dragon wraith and lascivious adelie penguin revenant...but one humble victim of neglect has spent the entire night moseying its way into the villain's getaway boat, because there's probably a getaway boat. We probably got a glimpse of the carefree bones ambling their merry way just once, early on in our story, unceremoniously enough that we forget all about them by the time we see the dopey, little roundish skull slooowly rising up behind the fool's shoulder...

...Anyway, I know I said these were the Skeletons Thus Far, but there's actually at least one skeleton item I'm reserving for its very own post; the same one I'm reserving from the Home Depot review, too!