Funeral shrine celebrates fallen Texas A&M cockroach

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."

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