Monthly Archives for June 2011

Friday mystery object #101 answer

As promised, here’s a quick answer to last Friday’s mystery object:

The big nuchal crest (ridge running along the back of the skull that meets the sagittal crest) points to this being a carnivore.

The large auditory bullae (the bulbous bits on the underside of the skull which relate to hearing) and very rounded notch in the occipital condyles (the bit of the skull that attaches to the atlas vertebra of the neck) suggest a cat, since dogs have a more V shaped notch and smaller bullae.

This is the back of the skull of a Leopard Panthera pardus (Linnaeus, 1758), in fact it is part of the same specimen as mandible F from last week.

Friday mystery object #101

Although last week I hinted that I may stop the mystery object, I’ve decide to try out a different system. Rather than give an extended answer on Monday (a time-consuming business) I will simply provide a very brief answer. Hopefully this will free up some time to do other things.

This week I present you with another partial piece of skull that I recently reunited with the rest of the specimen it came from. There’s no scale bar to keep it challenging!

Any idea what this is?

As usual, you can put your suggestions, comments and questions below and I will do my best to answer. Good luck!

Friday mystery object #100 answer

Friday was the 100th mystery object and I am considering making it the last one, since I’m finding it hard to come up with new objects every week. Moreover, I find that I don’t have time to keep up with all the other things I want/need to do.

However, I may keep FMO running for a bit longer with a slightly different format for the answer (since they’re what take the most time to write). So here’s the quick answer to Friday’s object, or should I say objects.

From top to bottom: A, B, C, D, E, F

From the top, the specimens belong to:

So congratulations to everyone who had a stab at identifying these mandibles – since all of you got some of them right.

If you have any thoughts on the continuation of the Friday mystery object, please feel free to let me know in the comments section below. Perhaps I should do a monthly mystery object or have them in a more ad hoc way as I find interesting objects? Your input would be of great help.

Many thanks!

Friday mystery object #100

It’s the one hundredth mystery object and I’ve decided to give you a challenge that I had to deal with at work this week.

I found a box of mandibles with no data, I identified them and checked them against their respective specimen types in the Horniman collections (that I’ve worked hard to organise for such a purpose).

The whole process took me half a morning and 5 of the 6 specimens were successfully reunited with the skulls they were separated from over 70 years ago – a satisfying outcome for a curator (our fun is cheap).

Now it’s your turn to identify the mystery mandibles (click image for bigger version):

From top to bottom: A, B, C, D, E, F

Put your suggestions and questions in the (newly organised) comments section below and I’ll do my best to respond.

Best of luck!

Friday mystery object #99 answer

On Friday I gave you this rather cool skull to identify:

There was no doubt that this was a carnivore of some sort, given the sharp canines and the massive carnassial teeth. Most of you spotted that it was the skull of a juvenile or subadult, given the partially emerged teeth and the unfused sutures. Most of you also spotted that it was a canid of some sort, given the overall shape and the tooth arrangement.

The correct identification was arrived at in short order by David Craven and many of you concurred with his neatly veiled answer of

Could I paint you a picture of this animal?

This answer is a reference to the name of an African carnivore, the  Continue reading →

Friday mystery object #98 answer

On Friday I gave you this skull to identify:

Everyone spotted that it was from a monkey, perhaps unsurprisingly since monkeys have a very characteristic appearance, with a globular braincase and forward-facing eyes. The orbit is enclosed by a solid bony ring and there is a post-orbital wall made up of the sphenoid and ethmoid bones, that produces a cup-shaped eye socket.

But there are a lot of different monkey species – around 286 if you include the Apes (as you should). We can see that this specimen belongs to the Catarrhini clade (the Old World Monkeys and Apes) since it only has 2 premolars instead of the 3 premolars you’d expect in a New World Monkey (N.B. some extinct Catarrhines known from fossils have 3 premolars, so this useful distinction doesn’t actually help define the clade).

The size of the skull and the the shape of the nose region and the mandible isn’t quite right for an Ape, or a typical Cheek-pouch Monkey (like Macaques or Baboons), leaving us with the Colobinae (which includes Colobus Monkeys, Doucs, Langurs, Leaf Monkeys, Proboscis Monkeys, Snub-nosed Monkeys and Surelis).

Once we get this far it becomes rather more tricky to identify what species we’re dealing with (and it doesn’t help that the names are applied somewhat inconsistently), so I must offer congratulations to Jake, jonpaulkaiser, curatorialtrainee, henstridgesj, carlos grau and Steven D. Garber, PhD – all of whom suggested perfectly possible candidates amongst the Langurs and Snub-nosed Monkeys.

This skull is actually from a  Continue reading →

Friday mystery object #98

This week’s mystery object may be a bit harder than usual, but I’m sure that someone will get what it is:

As usual, you can put your questions, comments and suggestions below and I’ll respond as best I can – hopefully better than I managed last week, when I was in Ireland without ready access to the internet…

Good luck!