Funeral shrine celebrates fallen Texas A&M cockroach

[TexasTowelie]

COLLEGE STATION -- Candles, flowers, teddy bears and poetry piled up in homage to a fallen Aggie, whose short and meager life yielded to posthumous fame.

The memorial, built of dozens of offerings and hand-scrawled notes of remembrance, seems less inspired by the unremarkable life than the two weeks for which the body lay unnoticed in the corner of a stairwell in the university's anthropology building.

It started small—a mere star-studded palette and pink paper tombstone for a dead insect dubbed Rosie Roach. But the budding monument caught the attention of a passing professor.

"There has been a dead cockroach in the anthropology building's stairwell for at least two weeks," professor Michael Alvard wrote on Facebook on December 3, along with a picture of Rosie laid beside her mini-headstone. "Some enterprising person has now made her a little shrine."

Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/strange-weird/article/Funeral-shrine-celebrates-fallen-Texas-A-M-6712892.php#photo-9143617