Problem getting root bone to work with multiple skinned meshes

I have two separate meshes that use the same skeleton. The first is a dragon body and the second is the dragon head. They are both skinned mesh renderers and the bones are all set up correctly. If I take the skeleton structure and put a copy under each of these meshes, it works great. It finds them and animates them. But I really don't want to use two copies of the same skeleton hierarchy. I saw a few posts about setting the root bone and it makes sense but it doesn't work. The animations show yellow text (missing bone references).

Here is the setup that works:



The two DRA_DAG objects are the skeletons. All of the bones are named correctly and it works.

What I want to do is have one skeleton that both read from and I set the bone root.



Both skinned meshes are set up with the DRA_DAG as the root bone.



What is this setup supposed to look like? The animations don't play and when I click on the renderers all the text is yellow. I have tried to put the skeleton under another child root to see if that made a difference but it doesn't. What am I doing wrong?