This week I have a rather nice specimen for you to identify:
Any idea what this skeleton comes from?
As usual you can leave your suggestions, comments and questions below and I’ll do my best to respond. Good luck!
Zygoma
Adventures in natural history collections
Zygoma 
I’m guessing a desert animal- lives in Asia and Africa.
(It’s hard to just give “clues” for my guess)
Another clue might be they live in burrows.
So far so good…
Is it dippy or a bit ruff ?
Definitely a bit Dippy
What do “dippy” and “ruff” mean? I’ve never seen or heard those used as descriptions, and I don’t even know what they describe! Disposition? Fur? I’m so curious!
Aha! You’ll have to wait until Monday! I promise I will elucidate on those clever clues from Jake though!
Could his name possibly be Skippy? Although ‘Skippy the burrow-dwelling desert rodent’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, I’ll admit…
I don’t see it responding to Skippy – although it has a cousin who probably would
My first guess was a kangaroo rat but I think the specimen’s forelegs are proportionately too short …..
Well spotted!
Chinese?
Not Chinese
The angular process on the mandible seems very strange, I can’t find anything that looks like that.
It is rather odd – I may have to look into that!
J.j.?
Nope (but you’re pretty much there!)
Is it from Madagascar? It looks like a squirrel head on a little kangaroo body. I can’t believe the length of those tibia! It must rely solely on its hind legs for locomotion, without ever really using its forelimbs.
It’s not from Madagascar, but you’re right, it doesn’t use its forelimbes for locomotion
I can only see three toes, not four.
….so I think that brings me in line with Jake’s dippy animal.
ah, but then I see that there are four levels of dippyness. I may need to count my toes again.
My first thought was actually ‘springhaas’… but it’s obviously too small for that. Which leaves me with the fact that it has two feet, and, by the looks of it, three toes. Don’t think I can be any more precise than that, though.
I thought I would look up springhaas (when you see it on video, you just want to have one) and found a reference to The Royal Natural History, vol III, which I have here on a high shelf, not often visited. There is a drawing there, page 110 of another animal, which shows a skeleton with a very strange spikey shaped angular process on the mandible, but still not a good match.
“the angle of the lower jaw in D…. is shallow and perforated by a large foramen” Marcus Lyon Jr US National Museum proceedings Vol XXIII Plate XXV has a drawing fig 4. at the end of his Comparison of the osteology of the ………Now I must stop fussing with this and go and walk the dog.
That’ll be the right type of beastie – the large foramen was new to me… thanks for pointing it out!