Huzzah, it’s Friday!
Here’s this week’s celebratory bit of dead critter from the Horniman Museum for you to identify:
I hope you have fun with it! As usual I will do my best to respond to your questions, observations and suggestions as the day goes on.
Good luck!
Zygoma 
I’m no expert, but it looks like a small
Lizard. Maybe a skink?
Not a skink, but it does indeed look like a small lizard
I’m gonna stick my neck out and say turtle. Don’t know what sort of turtle, they all look the same to me.
Not a turtle – they don’t have teeth or big holes in their skull behind their eyes (temporal fenestrae as Jack calls them)
Excellent object! Not a lizard, but it sure looks like one. You’d have to look really hard to tell the difference – having three eyes might help.
Sorry to say it Jack, but it is a lizard! I thought it was a Tuatara when I first saw it too, so I’m glad you (presumably) made the same mistake
Well, egg on my face! With those wedge-shaped front upper teeth, and that parietal thinning it really does look like one.
Looks pretty turtley to me. Very small!
It does look a bit turtley (or rather, tortoisey) – but I think that might be more to do with similarities in diet…
Two things turtles don’t have – teeth and temporal fenestrae.
Diapsids (even non-lizards), on the other hand, have teeth and TWO temporal fenestrae…
Ok. So not a turtle then!
I think it is a Sphenodon (tuatara) skull.
That’s exactly what I thought when I first saw it, but alas, it’s not
Crikey – I was going to say tuatara, but I see that it’s not. If not a lizard… then what? It doesn’t look like a snake. Amphisbaenian as a wild guess.
But it is a lizard!
I like the idea of a young lizard skull. But who’s he belong to? It would have to be a weirdish looking skink, at least one from Australia probably, if it’s a skink, because the New World ones and the African ones are more prosaic looking, that is, they look more like regular lizards. What about a lizard with a big weird head and huge eyes, and an odd mouth? That sounds like a nocturnal lizard. The gekkos love coming out at night, they have big eyes, so how about a young gekko head. Tokay gekkos have big heads. Australia has some bizzarro gekkos. That’s as far as I can plumb the depths of my saurian shallowless.
Iguana?
I couldn’t find any gekko skull like this one. Nor any iguanas. I checked gila monsters, but they’re also way off. This is a good one. The teeth are something we should be focused on. Agamids have done all kinds of things with their skulls and teeth and Horniman Museum represents skulls of African fauna better than most Western museums.
Uromastyx?
I’ll second that. They are primarily herbivores, which seems to match the teeth.
Is it a chameleon of some description?
Mind you, the teeth look like those of my bearded dragons!