This Friday I have another distinctive (but pretty awesome) specimen from the Grant Museum of Zoology for you to identify:
As usual, if you’re a bone expert and know what this is, please leave your clues and hints in the comments section below, to give everyone else a chance of working it out. Have fun!
Zygoma 
Well, this one is Devilishly tricky, innit? It’s got me in quite a spin…
Getting ‘Sarcy’ with the bone experts now, are you Paulo?!
ferocious little animals with pungent odor and one hell of a bite! such a pity they’re under threat from a particularly nasty cancer 😦
Palate looks a bit vacant in parts. I bet it’s got a pouch! Is it perhaps a skull of a Loony Toons cartoon character?
Clue: Lacrimal fossa just outside the orbit
Honey badger?
Or Logan? Another mustelid!
Actually, given the first few clues I think the answer is pretty obvious, and it’s not a mustelid…
Not much of a challenge after all those painfully obvious clues!
well “NO more soup ‘pa you ‘all”
i’m excited i saw similarities in the restricted brain case with our lil pocketed friend.
Glad to see Tone is on the same whirling plane! We waited too long to issue our tricky answer before his. We were too busy foaming at the mouth, spinning wildly at our students, and acting as the spastic tornadic demon-spawn we tend to be. Daniel (J.) and Daniel (C.) from the U of C (across the pond in Chicago not Chichester).
So I got it wrong in every way except for noting that it appears to have no room for a brain at all. Have seen wildlife programmes in which this lot, even as young siblings, attack each other with a ferocity unbounded.
That is, if all the other clues have led me in the right direction…
Very interesting dentition if those molars and premolars have converged on the carnassial design.
O.k., I see others have got there ahead of me, and with a more precise identification. But, f.w.i.w., here is what I thought BEFORE reading the hints from Tone, Chris, Cindy, Ric and henstridgesj:
Over-all resemblance to various non-feline Carnivorans (so I can sympathize with Matt Fairley), but more than three incisors on each side of upper jaw. And, now that I am looking for such things, palatal vacuities. So probably not a “good beast” but rather an “after beast.”
M***th*****s primitively have four molars in each quadrant. I see a little something behind the obvious third molariform. Is this a reduced, vestigial, fourth molar? In which case, there is a further similarity to Canids and Mustelids and Ursids: reduction or loss of the last upper canine. Convergence rules?
But I hadn’t gotten as far as identifying the species. I briefly thought of a larger, and recently (20th C) extinct, species from the same island, but I don’t think their skulls were as robust as this one.
My favorite Looney Tunes character to watch on Saturday mornings!