This week I’ve got something with a bit of character from the exhibition space at the Dead Zoo:
Any idea what this fuzzball might be?
As usual you can put your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments box below.
Zygoma
Adventures in natural history collections
Zygoma 
I thought I had a shrewed idea until I saw the Bilby in the background which could show this isn’t the elephant in the room. Coot is legs be too Bandi?
I agree with Chris as well. This one doesn’t appear to have been barred from the zoo so I’m guessing it met King Midas.
Lovely bit of wordplay 😉
I agree with Chris. A bagged badger with a long nose?
Mere ale plus Satan?
Where is The Dead Zoo located at? Because this place looks so cool!!!
It’s in Dublin, on Merrion Street – it’s pretty amazing!
So cool
any indication on size?
Apologies, I replied to this from my phone, but it doesn’t seem to have posted. It’s about yay || big (that’s about squirrel size)
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.jsAntechinus?
I should say a kind of Elephant shrew?
Poor creature – it looks quite exhausted – did he die of an orgy? The ears look papery and notched, pale eye ring – and it has a marsupial look- I’m guessing an antichinus, but it’s just a stab in the dark – hard to tell how bit the specimen is!
Chris gets points for excellent humor. But the enlarged eye and thin pre-nibbled ears suggest something else…but not the flying pterosaur although similarly named. Great teeth too.
Superficially rat-like… but more like a children’s book rat than a real one! The teeth visible in the lower jaw are clearly not a rodent’s!
The toes on the hind foot are surely a giveaway. Looks like something that did a bit of hopping or jumping before it got to the dead zoo.
At a guess, if we had pictures of the skull there would be holes in the palate and an in-turned angle on the lower jaw.
Antechinus, Jennifermacaire, is I think in the right country for this one, but the hind feet don’t look right. This has a long nose, so I’m going to guess it might be a long-nosed … . How badly does fur fade in preserved specimens? If I’m right, this one has close relatives with prominent stripes on the hindquarters, but there’s also an unstriped species (if Wikipedia’s photos are anything to go by). In other words, I’m guessing that Palfreyman’s “bagged badger with a long nose” is right.
(But I did like the suggestion of death by orgy: there’s a look to that eye…)
Vampyrum spectrum (Linnaeus) – Linnaeus’ False Vampire Bat