Abstract: We introduce a registration-based propagation strategy to extract temporally coherent skeletons from the animated surfaces. We first extract complete skeletons for the key frames of the animated surfaces, and present a spatio-temporal L1-medial skeleton extraction method to extract the initial skeletons for the immediate frames between the key frames. As these initial skeletons may not be complete, we then develop a global skeleton alignment method, which effectively warps the key skeleton to these initial skeletons subsequently. By using the geometry merging, we propagate the geometry of the warped key skeleton to the initial skeletons, and produce temporally coherent skeletons for the input animated surfaces. Our system can be applied to the raw scanned animated object and requires only minimal user interaction to extract complete and temporally coherent animated skeletons. Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.