Is it possible to make sand from bones ? Would it have the same properties as regular sand?

Question

Context : In a magic city, artificers use various types of sand as components for their magitek contraptions.
I like the idea of having one type of sand made out of the bones of magical creatures and its true composition being a big secret, but I am not sure it would work.

Question: Would bone-sand behave like regular sand?
Would it be fluid enough to flow in copper tubes and to be used in an hourglass ? Or would it clump too much ? Would its grains be the same size as beach sand ? Could it be reused a bunch of times ? Would it be smelly ?

Answer 1

Bonemeal has a consistency between loam and sawdust.

Bone is a fibrous composite made of equal volumes of hydroxyapatite and proteins (mostly collagens and osteocalcin). When you grind it down, it breaks up into a porous, fibrous material more similar to sawdust than sand. The fibers give it an airy, squishy, and slightly sticky consistency, even after you've fully dried it.

Another key feature of bone meal is that it will break up into particles of many different sizes. Some will be large like sand particles and others will be microscopic like clay particles. In this way, it will behave more like loam than sand. So it absorbs water very well and becomes muddy instead of letting water just flow through it like sand.

... but it can be made more sand like with extra steps

After your grind and dry your bone, you will need to wash your bonemeal on a screen to get rid of the microscopic particles that will keep it loamy. Then you will need to tumble it to polish down any fibers that are sticking out... which will create more of the microparticles you need to wash away. It may require several rounds of this but eventually you will get roundish polished bone with a density and consistency in the range of some kinds of sand.

Would it be fluid enough to flow in copper tubes and to be used in an hourglass

When you are done, the particles will still be more porous, a lower density, and able to retain more water than most kinds of sand; so it will not flow as well as other sands, but it should be very similar to the pumicite sand you might find near volcanoes.

I like the idea of having one type of sand made out of the bones of magical creatures and its true composition being a big secret, but I am not sure it would work.

All that said, you will not be able to hide the fact that it is bone. You can make it look like sand, feel like sand, and move like sand, but bone has a distinct taste and smell no matter what you do to process it; so, even after you do everything you can to make it look and feel like sand, if someone puts some in their mouth, it will taste suspiciously like like the broth of whatever animal it was made from.

Answer 2

You can use mortar and pestle to grind pieces of bone into any size from small sharp pieces to rounded sand grains to fine powder.

Given enough time and erosion by wind, water and sun those levels of granularity can also be achieved in natural ways.

What you probably want to have is fully dried, mineralized bone.

Fresh bone has all sorts of living tissues to it and will start to rot soon if just left alone.

Drying takes quite some time under the sun and needs to have a way to get rid of all the tissue and pieces of flesh, nerves etc. - for example by ants, maggots and others.

Fully dried bone powder or grains probably dissolve/mix (not clump) in water since they are essentially made of salts.

As for the odor I cannot give you a definitive answer. Bone meal is used as fertilizer and animal food though, maybe you get an idea about it from that area.

Answer 3

Yes and No

What is sand?

Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a textural class of soil or soil type; i.e., a soil containing more than 85 percent sand-sized particles by mass.

The composition of sand varies, depending on the local rock sources and conditions, but the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal settings is silica (silicon dioxide, or SiO2), usually in the form of quartz.

Calcium carbonate is the second most common type of sand. One such example of this is aragonite, which has been created over the past 500 million years by various forms of life, such as coral and shellfish. It is the primary form of sand apparent in areas where reefs have dominated the ecosystem for millions of years, as in the Caribbean. Somewhat more rarely, sand may be composed of calcium sulfate, such as gypsum and selenite, as is found in places such as White Sands National Park and Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in the U.S. (Source)

So when other answers suggest that sand can come from creatures, it's a little misleading. It comes from the minerals of those creatures, like calcium carbonate (shells). Not just anything, and this is important. From that same source we read...

Sand is a non-renewable resource over human timescales, and sand suitable for making concrete is in high demand. Desert sand, although plentiful, is not suitable for concrete. Fifty billion tons of beach sand and fossil sand are used each year for construction.

In other words, all sand is not created equal. For example, whatever "sand" you can get from bone isn't suitable for creating integrated circuits, which specifically depends on silica.

Anything solid can be ground up into particles the size of sand. But does that make the result "sand?" The word is applied to a great many things and they're not all equal and they're not all interchangeable.

Which is a really long and fancy way of saying, "it works if the application you're thinking about is appropriate for it, and it doesn't work if it's not."

• Ground up silica is great for integrated circuits. Ground up bone is not.
• Ground up granite, gneiss and limestone is great for concrete. Ground up bone is not.
• Ground up silicon carbide is great for polishing rocks. Ground up bone is not.
• Ground up aluminum oxide is great for sandpaper. Ground up bone is not.
• Ground up calcium carbonate is great for antacid. Bone might be good for this, too... if prepared properly, because (for example) bone dust when breathed into the lungs can lead to Hepatitis B and C, Streptococci, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

So... yes and no.

On the whole and from a science perspective I'd vote no, bone sand would not behave like other sands. But it really depends on the application. In your case, where you're bringing magic into the mix, the answer is certainly yes. Thanks to the magic, bone sand would act like any other kind of sand due to narrative necessity. So if the question is, "would this be believable in the context of my world?" the answer is "oh, yeah!"

Answer 4

Would bone-sand behave like regular sand?

Yes, regular sand is made of many different substances. They all behave the same way when nature makes them into sand grains. Some is made by parrot fish, some is pulverised rock from rivers, but at the end of the day they're much the same.

Answer 5

It sounds like a good idea. Magical sands or powders have many uses.

The difference between "sand", which is usually silicon dioxide, and bone, which is usually based on calcium, is unimportant. What is important is that the sand-powder is derived from the bones of magical creatures.

The bones can be whole or ground to any size of particle, depending on how they will be used. Certainly the sand-powder can be used in an hourglass mechanism. It can be used inside a tube as part of your alchemy. There are no limitations except those you might invent. The "magic dust" or powder is an old trope; even Cheech and Chong used it in one of their comedy routines.

"...[T]he King turned him away and, taking from a shelf a retort filled with a dark blue fluid, set it on a bain-marie, and a lamp thereunder. Fumes of a faint purple hue came forth from the neck of the retort, and the King gathered them in a flask. He made signs over the flask and shook forth into his hand therefrom a fine powder." -- E. R. Eddison, "The Worm Ouroboros", Chapter IV, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Now, whence came this "dark blue fluid"? Your powder of magical bones can be transformed to a stable solution and stored as the first step of the magical operation. Then it can used as needed. Use your imagination.