Friday mystery object #412

After last week’s foray into insects, I have a nice chunky vertebrate skull to for you to have a go at identifying:

Any idea what this might be from? I have a feeling this may be way too easy for some of you, so let’s keep the answers cryptic or perhaps poetic, so everyone gets a chance to figure it out for themselves. Have fun!

11 thoughts on “Friday mystery object #412

  1. Chris has it, a strpey predator from the apple isle of oz. Number of molars and inflected angles confirm it.

  2. So it is a mammal but not a placental?
    The idea is suggested by the shape dental.
    Were we to talk of living beings, we’re told
    Like they weren’t human so hey, like “tigers”
    They could be bought and sold

  3. Looks sorta doggy, but dogs don’t have a third upper molar, and this animal had (dodging the issue of whether the fourth one is a premolar or a molar or a retained dP) seven upper post-canines. And the ventral view shows a suspiciously in-turned process at the angle of the lower jaw. I was going to comment on these features, but I see Adam Yates got in ahead of me. So: what he (and others) have already said!

  4. There’s another un-doggy feature here: the brain case seems to taper down much more posteriorly than that of a canid. Quoting from an abstract I found at a website called “koala.com,”:
    Absolute ECV for small Australian and New Guinea marsupial carnivores (Antechinus and Sminthopsis) were found to be comparable to eutherians of similar body weight, but large marsupial carnivores such as the Tasmanian devil and thylacine had substantially smaller ECVs than eutherian carnivores of similar body weight.(ECV = endiocranial volume)

    • Further un-doggy features visible here include the large holes in the palate, the posterior extent of the jugal bone so that it reaches the jaw joint and the opening of the tear duct outside the rim of the eye socket.

  5. Thanks, Adam! I was so proud of myself for recognizing the inflected angular that I didn’t notice the palatal vacuities!

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