Bone Jovi becomes head of security at Brooklyn Bone Museum

Bone Jovi has taken over security at The Bone Museum in Brooklyn, New York, a fitting post for a cat living inside a museum that says it holds the largest collection of human osteology on public display in the United States and the largest public collection of human spines in the world. The 4-year-old cat now patrols the exhibits, greets visitors and has become a fixture in a place built around the careful handling of human remains.

His path to the museum started with a cat adoption event in partnership with Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends said Bone Jovi came to its New York lifesaving center from a shelter in Georgia, completing a 900-mile trip from Atlanta to New York before landing at the museum. Staff tested him in the space and found that he was comfortable there, which turned a hopeful adoption into a permanent role as the museum’s official cat and feline ambassador.

The museum has described Bone Jovi in a string of working titles that sound part security detail, part front-of-house staff. He has served as a greeter, tour guide, walking feather duster and resident professional mouser, then climbed to head of security. In a recent TikTok post, The Bone Museum said he joined a year ago and quickly worked his way up, now patrolling exhibits, supervising staff meetings, inspecting gift shop inventory and accepting visitor compliments.

Bone Jovi also stepped into a role with a local precedent. Before him, the museum said a cat named Chonky Boy served for five years before retiring because he was partially blind and mostly deaf. Bone Jovi followed that tradition, giving the museum another resident cat at a time when institutions with collections and storage spaces still value cats for pest control and for the steady presence they bring to public rooms.

The museum has framed Bone Jovi as part of a longer tradition of cats in museums, libraries and archives around the world, where they have long been treated as practical helpers as much as mascots. In Brooklyn, that old arrangement now has a new face, and Bone Jovi has turned it into a visitor attraction in his own right.