Design is a funny, marvelous, occasionally unsettling thing — especially when evolution itself is the designer.

Take these 60-year-old pictures of skulls and bones. Seen in a certain light, and photographed for LIFE by the great Andreas Feininger — a craftsman with the eye of a scientist and the heart of an artist — the bones of creatures as varied in size, behavior and temperament as fish, bats, elephants, hummingbirds and humans are eloquent totems, raising questions about life, death and what we ultimately leave behind.

In the end, perhaps the way that humans and our fellow creatures appear when seen at the most elemental level — in other words, how we look when stripped to the very bone — says more about us than we’d like to admit. But even as these pictures summon thoughts both morbid and exalted, one thing remains strikingly clear: in the right hands, bones can be incredibly, mind-bendingly cool.

Many of these Feininger photographs appeared in the Oct. 6, 1952, issue of LIFE.