elf skulls
You know how elves have those long pointy ears that stick out beyond their heads? Like not like Vulcans/Romulans, those ears are a lil longer and pointy than human ears but they're still pretty close to the skull. I'm talking about the ones where they either stand up real tall or explicitly flare outwards, anime elves have that a lot and a lot of other elves do, too.
So yeah, anyway those kinds of ears aren't cartilage they're actually bone. It's an adaptation that helps keep the ear structure safe, if they were made of cartilage they'd always be getting scraped and scratched and caught up on things or worse, on account of they stick out so far. Elven earbones are attached to the rest of the head via a joint that lets them swivel, though depending on the culture/region some elf societies frown on moving their ears so it's discouraged to do so, and it gets to the point where they're so used to not moving them that if they do it hurts, which only reinforces the idea that they're not supposed to use them. It doesn't help that the ears themselves aren't jointed so they become longer surfaces to manipulate on their own, especially since there isn't much room to build up muscle in that area. Other elf communities don't have that stigma so people there just move their ears as much or little as they're comfortable doing.
Basically what this means in the context of this post is that elf skulls keep the long ears when they die. Which, you may have already known, so why did I write this? Simple,
[The following explanation is under a spoiler tag as it discusses sexual relations in contexts that may not be appropriate depending on your current environment]
It's because I was thinking about pr0n where elves get their ears grabbed during sex and like, if their ears were cartilage that would probably be so painful that it would be considered an "extreme" kink (I'm not using the word "extreme" to judge here, just to classify it as being a level above what most elves would be into. It's like being into suspension instead of mild bondage, or being into getting whipped over getting spanked; not necessarily bad (assuming enthusiastic consent ofc), just several levels above what the majority of people who are even into these categories of kinks tend to prefer.)
And like, given how most elves seem to be characterized I just don't think they're going that far into the scene, they have regular pain tolerances after all. So, it makes much more sense for their ears to be bone. Sure there's a little cartilage in there to facilitate more delicate aural operations but there's still an overlying bone structure that persists after death with the rest of the skeleton.
All this is of course only referring to like your D&D Tolkien-style elves with the long pointy ears though. Keebler elf skulls look basically like a Smurf skull, except of course for the "caps". Many think Smurf "caps" are clothing accessories but they're actually also solid bone, but unlike D&D Tolkien elves, don't even have the thin covering of flesh and skin on top. They're more like dino or rhino horns that are more or less completely exposed to the elements (I know rhino horns are keratin, I'm just using them as an example of how that looks on a living creature). Why are Papa Smurf "caps" red then? Well, it's…a little gory for primetime. Suffice it to say, there's a reason each tribe only has one at a time.
OK, for reasons of how my writing process works I had actually written the previous paragraph *first*, and didn't realize I was going to go into so much detail about the kink stuff ^^ So, while I'm not going to get graphic, I might as well outline the violent bits a little more now since the kink talk already means this is no longer PG-rated.
It's because in extremely ancient times, the position of Papa Smurf was attained by combat to the death (they used their bony "caps" much like pachycephalosaurs). And while they were perfectly capable of washing their "caps," they chose not to in order to broadcast their standing in the hierarchy, as an implicit threat to anyone who challenged their leadership. Over the millennia, that bloody practice has fortunately fallen out of favor and is barely remembered anymore in most Smurf enclaves except by the most avid history buffs. The mass combats were detensified down to duels, then hunts, then ritual sacrifices of smaller creatures (this is what most laySmurfs think the start of the tradition came from). Then it got to the point where death was no longer part of the tradition; for centuries they would sustainably harvest blood by catching and "tapping" mosquitoes (the capture process itself becoming part of the Papa Smurf ascension ceremony, in festivals similar to human rodeos but on a much different scale in many ways).
Nowadays of course, for public health and ethical reasons, the red color is achieved by vegetable or artificial dyes and inks. But yeah, that's why the "caps" of super old Papa Smurf skulls are brown whereas the "caps" in more recent skeletons can be either white or the same color as they were in life, depending on what coloring process was used and how it stands up to the elements/preservation techniques used.
Having said all that, I don't hypothesize about the skulls of sometimes-called elves who live in or around Celtic mounds bc I don't need to be cursed on top of all of the dystopia. so do not ask me!!