Skulls: brains and small meat

I just boiled a raccoon skull, but the brains are stuck up there. how do I get them out?
And small pieces of meat are stuck in small cracks.
And the cartilage in the nose, how do I get that out without damaging the small things of nose bone(up the nose)?

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Hooked wire

Use a bent or hooked wire and get up in there and scramble the brain into jelly. Some people put the wire into a drill and have at it that way. Boiling the skulls adds the problem of cooking the meat on the bone making it even tougher to remove. Try SIMMERING not boiling it with some sal soda added to the water or let it sit in a container of water for a few days with the brain still in it. As the meat rots a bacterial culture will develop and dissolve the flesh. This is a process called 'maceration' and is covered in the archives. Beyond that - a dental pick, fine tweezers and lots of picking away should clean the remaining meat off. Degrease then whiten if desired.

Water pressure

I made a simple device for just this purpose. I used a metal pipe cap that will screw to the end of a garden hose. Drill a hole in the middle of the pipe cap to fit a 10" piece of 1/4" copper tubing. Solder one end of the tubing in the hole. I then screwed the cap on to the garden hose. Turn on the water. With pliers pinch the copper tubing at the end till you have a very fine jet stream of water coming out. It will come out so hard that it will hurt your hand if you put it in the stream.

Now you have a tool that you can stick up in the brain cavity from the back. The jet stream of water will slice and dice the brain and flush it out at the same time. Brain is out in no time.

You can also stick the tubing up the back side of the sinus cavity and flush out the nasal cartilage. Of coarse this cartilage will have to me pretty much mush, either from maceration or stewing techniques Raven mentioned above. It is very easy to mess up the delicate sinus bones. The safest way to save those is with the dermestid beatles, which you also can read about in the archives

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Thanks.