Interestingly, the animated human skeleton has been used as a symbol of death in Western culture since the Middle Ages, a personification that may have been influenced by the valley of the dry bones in the Book of Ezekiel.

The Grim Reaper, for example, is often depicted as a hooded skeleton holding a scythe (and sometimes an hourglass), which has been attributed to German painter and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger (1538). Death as one of the biblical horsemen of the Apocalypse has been depicted as a skeleton riding a horse. The Triumph of Death is a 1562 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, sowing an army of skeletons raiding a town and slaughtering its residents.