Here’s Where “The Walking Dead” Goes Wrong With Zombies - Facts So Romantic

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Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a cop—and sinks it straight into the ghoul’s forehead.

This isn’t any specific scene from AMC’s The Walking Dead. It fits the bill for many of them. But is the human skull—zombified or not—really weak enough to yield to a knife?

Some parts of it are, of course. “Even a pencil has been able to reach the brain” through the thin bones that house the eye, one forensic case report states. Heath Ledger’s Joker took advantage of this weak spot when he showed a clutch of Gotham’s crime lords a “magic trick” in The Dark Knight.

Another weak area on the skull is “the temporal, in the region of our ears,” says Michelle Hamilton, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University. At about 4 millimeters thick, it’s the “thinnest bone in the entire cranial vault,” she says; according to a forensic case report on…
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