Last week’s bird was so popular I thought I’d give you another to identify this week. It’s a bit harder than last week’s Kookaburra and I’ll be very impressed indeed if anyone gets it to species, but I’m sure many of you will manage to identify it to family level.
I will be teaching young folk about skulls and mermaids at Camp Quest in Somerset this Friday, so I might not get a chance to respond to comments, although I’ll do my best.
Good luck!
Zygoma 
From the legs I’m guessing it’s some kind of wading bird?
Yep
Lapwing?
Maybe…
Yeah, I’m going Charadriidae
Maybe a Dotterel? C.morinellus.
Charadriidae it is, although not a Dotterel
Looks like a member of the Charadriidae family (plovers, dotterels, lapwings). No clue given as to its geographical distribution, so I’m going to restrict my guesses to Europe. It’s quite large and has a prominent rear-facing fourth toe, which narrows it down to just a few possibilities including the Grey Plover, White-Tailed Plover and Sociable Plover. But the most likely seems to be the Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus).
That’s a great spot on the fourth toe. But given Paolo says it’ll be hard to resolve to species, maybe not V.vanellus? Another Vanellus?
Maybe V.gregarius, slightly longer legs?
Could be. I based my guess on likely availability of specimens, but Paolo could have gone for a rarer species.
Yes, well, hard to resolve depends on who’s doing the resolving!
Excellent observations!
Forget the bird–what connection are you going to make between skulls and mermaids? 🙂
The unifying thread is about identification methods. Our mermaid at the Horniman wasn’t properly identified, so we did some research into its construction and reassessed past identifications that suggested it was made of monkey sewn onto a fish. The teeth were a dead give-away.
Did the poor bird die for our sins?
I expect it died as a result of someone’s sins…
I would just point out that you have tagged it as Chordata …
The fact that it has a skeleton means it has to be in the Chordata, so that doesn’t really help much!
I have no idea what kind of a bird that could be, but I think that it’s a very funny thing to deal with such a kind question! =) Good luck to all of you who are still trying!
We’re a funny bunch!
I looked up lapwing on skullsite.com and it could be. The bird skull I have that looks most like it is a woodpigeon but the legs are too long. PS. Happy birthday for last week !
Thanks!
😉 excellent detective work by the way!