Category Archives for Friday mystery object

Friday mystery object #292 answer(ish)

Last week I gave you a final mystery object from the Grant Museum of Zoology to help me identify:

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Part of the reason for that was because I knew I’d be starting my new job in Dublin where there is a great collection of comparative bird osteology that I thought I’d get a chance to look at in time to write this post.

Alas, I’ve had a whirlwind first week at Dublin’s Dead Zoo and although I’ve managed to take a look at a few sterna, I’ve not had much time to really think about them or consider the identification. I’ve also had limited opportunity to follow up on everyone’s very useful suggestions, although I have tried to use them as a guide to narrow down my perusal of the comparative collections.

However, I did get a chance to take some quick snaps of a range of bird sterna with my phone, so I’m going to provide you with a veritable feast of breast bones to compare the mystery specimen against:

Chicken
Gannet
Red-throated Diver
Great Cormorant
Manx Shearwater
Northern Fulmar
Lesser Black-backed Gull
Iceland Gull
Razorbill
Puffin
Brent Goose
White-fronted Goose
Grey Heron
Peregrine Falcon
Sparrowhawk
Marsh Harrier
Eurasian Eagle-owl
Blue-and-yellow Macaw

You can click on each image to see a large version – hopefully this will prove useful for future identifications!

None of them quite match the combination of having perforations near the straight and truncated bottom of the mystery specimen, which sports a broad triangular flattening of the lower portion of the carina or keel. This may be a feature of the particular individual, or it might be diagnostic – herein lie the problem with using strongly functional features for identification, as a juvenile or zoo specimen may have differences due to developmental progress of lack of use of a feature. To illustrate, this keel from a Griffon Vulture from the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland shows a significant asymmetry (although it’s hard to see the deformation in the image due to the shadow – I’ll see if I can get a better image):

Griffon Vulture sternum

Griffon Vulture sternum

It’s also worth noting that the Grant specimen has had the top of the sternum cut off, so the overall shape is a little misleading. From comparing the sterna of a variety of bird groups I’m in agreement with the emerging group consensus that this is probably from a pretty large bird of prey.

Thanks for your input on this – I will check some more next week when I have a zooarchaeologist looking at the comparative bird collection and I’ll get the chance to dig out some more material.

Cheers!

Friday mystery object #292

This week I have my last mystery object from the Grant Museum of Zoology, since I am starting my new job as Assistant Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland next week. However, there is one specimen that’s been getting on my nerves the whole time I’ve worked at the Grant, as it says on its label that it’s from an Albatross, but I simply don’t believe it. Can you help me work out what this rather dusty specimen actually comes from?:

dsc06030No need for cryptic clues I think, since it’s probably going to be a little bit of a challenge and some discussion seems likely – which will be easier if we all know we’re talking about the same thing.

Have fun with this one!

Friday mystery object #291 answer

Last week I gave you this skull from the Grant Museum of Zoology to identify:

mystery291

I thought this would be a fairly easy one and so I wasn’t surprised when Chris was straight in with a correct identification, in a suitably cryptic manner of course.

The huge open sinuses inside the orbit and openings around the auditory bullae (as spotted by palfreyman1414) immediately suggest that this is an animal that dives deep underwater, as the large openings help prevent pressure from building up inside the skull. The shape of the teeth are another giveaway that this is a fish-catching mammal in the Order Carnivora. It is of course a seal.

But what kind of seal? There are 33 species of pinniped, so there are a few options, although the large and distinctive species like Walruses can be ruled out for obvious reasons. In this size range and with multicusped teeth like these we’re looking at one of the true seals (the Phocidae) at the medium to small end of the size range.

When you start looking at the skulls of seals in this range, you need to look  closely. It lacks the flat top of the head and steeply sloping profiles following the nares of a Grey Seal, plus the interorbital distance (the distance between the eyes) is much smaller.

It lacks the inflated nasal region of the cold water Bearded Seal, Ribbon Seal, Ringed Seal and Harp Seal, which need well developed nasal turbinates to help warm the air they breathe in. It also lacks the deflection of the zygomatic below the orbit that is seen in the smaller species like the Caspian and Baikal Seals.

Overall the morphology is most similar to either the Spotted Seal or Harbour Seal, but picking between the two is tricky, especially since the Harbour Seal has around five subspecies that vary somewhat in size and shape of things like the auditory bullae. There is a list of characters that can be used to distinguish between the skulls of the two species by John J. Burns in the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. Using that as a guide I think this is a Harbour Seal Phoca vitulina Linnaeus, 1758.

Thanks to everyone who had a go at identifying this – I hope you had fun with it!

Friday mystery object #291

Today’s mystery object is a fairly straightforward one from the Grant Museum, although I’m hoping that we’ll get a species identification for the specimen. Any idea what this is?

mystery291

As usual, a nice cryptic clue would be appreciated so that we can have some fun and not give away what it is too soon for those who are developing their identification skills. Enjoy!

Friday mystery object #290 answer

Last week I gave you this skull from the Grant Museum of Zoology to identify:

mystery290

I thought it was a fairly easy one and, from the slew of correct cryptic answers, I think many of you spotted what it was quite quickly. However, if you’re not familiar with this sort of abstract critter, you probably found it more of a challenge.

In terms of physical characteristics, the vacuities (holes) in the palate are a sure indicator that this is a marsupial – as Allen Hazen pointed out. He also recognised that it has a broad head and short rostrum (nose) for a marsupial, narrowing down the possibilities – particularly for an animal of this size – Wombats or Koalas.

For me these two main options can be quickly distinguished by looking at the zygomatic arch, which is high at the rear and runs downward in the Koala, but which  runs horizontally in Wombats. The skull of the Koala is also very square and flat on top, whereas Wombats have a more domed braincase.

Mystery 116

Many of the cryptic clues referred to bears, since these animals are often called a Koala Bear for some bizarre reason – I must say that I’ve never seen much similarity between a Koala and a Bear, although once upon a time people thought Red Pandas were bearlike as well and I suppose the two species have some fuzzy, tree climbing and specialist-diet type similarities.

Koala climbing a tree. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Koala climbing a tree. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

So well done to everyone who managed to identify the specimen and provide some great cryptic clues, especially Chris who was first on the scene with a reference to bears and the obscure ‘pap’ which is the first solid food of Koala joeys, which is partially broken down eucalyptus released from the caecum of the mother.

A special mention for palfreyman1414 who was tenacious is working out the mystery and who also managed to provide a reference to a story I’d not heard before about a man in New Zealand who reported an unlikely incident to Police and got in some trouble for it.

Friday mystery object #289

This week I’ve decided to go for another mini mystery object from the Grant Museum Micrarium. Any idea what this is and what it’s from?

mystery289

As always, your thoughts, questions and suggestions can go in the comments box below.

Also, if you have any images of tiny things you can share them on Twitter with the hashtag  to win a signed copy the excellent new book by Ed Yong – it’s well worth a read!

Have fun!

Friday mystery object #288 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object from the Grant Museum of Zoology to try your hand at identifying:

mystery288

Not the best photos, but they do show some of the key features I used to work out what it is.

There were a lot of comments with a variety of different groups of animal being mentioned, although everyone recognised this as a mammal immediately. The large broad tail was recognised by Allen Hazen as an adaptation to swimming, but its unusual proportions threw some people into thinking this was something quite basal, like a marsupial or member of the Pilosa. The presence of a clavicle supported that to some extent as many of the more recent mammal orders, like the Carnivora, have a reduced or absent clavicle.

The hind feet were also recognised as an adaptation to swimming by palfreyman1414, but he was sceptical that this specimen represented just one species, suggesting it might be a chimera. However, I wouldn’t do that to you (unless it was an April Fool prank) so the real animal remained to be identified.

Hiroto Nakatsubo raised the possibility of it being a rodent, but commented that it was on the big side. This could have pointed at Beaver, as many people suggested, except the specimen lacks the distinctive tail morphology. All of this followed my own though path for working out what it is – a medium large aquatic rodent that isn’t a Beaver.

That narrowed it down to Capybara, Muskrat, Coypu or monster Water Vole. Of these, only one has the size difference between fore and hind limbs, plus the distinctively weird acromion process on the shoulder – the Coypu Myocastor coypus Kerr, 1792. So Isaac Krone was the first to get the correct identification, which he hinted at with reference to the Coypu’s alternative common name Nutria and the genus name which means “mouse-beaver” in Greek. Well done to Isaac!

Coypu showing off its weird discrepancy in limb lengths. Image by José Reynaldo da Fonseca, 2006

Coypu showing off its weird discrepancy in limb lengths. Image by José Reynaldo da Fonseca, 2006

 

 

Friday mystery object #288

This week I have a mystery skeleton that emerged from the collections of the Grant Museum of Zoology recently and required identification:

mystery288

Apologies for the slightly rubbish photographs, but I’ve taken pics of the bits I found most useful in making my identification.

Any thoughts on what species this specimen represents? You can put your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below. Have fun with it!

Friday mystery object #287 answer

Last week I gave you this specimen from the Grant Museum of Zoology Micrarium to try your hand at identifying:

20160915_121009-1.jpg

I enjoyed the variety of entertaining answers, ranging from a preschool drawing of a grandma with a beehive hairdo to a larval Alien, but I was also impressed by the range of cryptic clues about the identity of the specimen.

A favourite was a reference to “dealing with a pea covering” or variations on that theme, which gives us “Cope” and “pod”, which is what this is – a Copepod (which means “oar-foot” in Greek). For those of you unfamiliar with copepods are small crustaceans, many of which live as zooplankton and that as a group may make up the majority of the Earth’s animal biomass. They’re tiny, but there are countless billions of them.

This one isn’t as tiny as many of its relatives, because it has a rather different lifestyle to planktonic forms. This is a sea louse and it’s a parasite of fish. They feed on the mucus, skin and blood of fish and if they reach high levels of infestation they can be a real problem, potentially killing fish. This particular specimen has two trailing egg cases, which I think threw some of you. It was removed from a Brill and as Daniel Calleri recognised from a visit to the Grant Micrarium, it’s Lepeophtheirus hippoglossi (Krøyer, 1837).

If you’ve been to the Grant Museum and have photos from the Micrarium, or if you have any photos of tiny animals, you might fancy entering a Twitter and Instagram competition by sharing them with the hashtag #MicroMultitudes, Have fun with your photos!

Friday mystery object #286 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object to identify, found on a beach in Ireland:

mystery286

It led to a lot of great cryptic comments relating to marine birds and sternum keels, but Lena was the first to comment and was spot on with the species (or at least as far as I can tell!)

Bird sterna are quite distinctive, with overall shape giving an indicator of mode of life. Long narrow but well-developed keels like this tend to be seen in marine birds that use their wings to fly underwater. The shape of the bottom and sides of the sternum tend to be quite specific to particular genera and species, making sterna pretty good for identification.

Of course that depends on having good comparative material and I was delighted to find John Rochester’s very helpful Flickr page, that has a comparison of British Auks (in this case we’re talking about the geographical British Isles rather than the sociopolitical concept of Britain).

If you take a look at those images you’ll notice that one fits the shape very well indeed – the Guillemot or Common Murre Uria aalge (Pontoppidan, 1763).

1024px-common_murre_rwd2

Guillemot with its meat and feathers on. Image by Dick Daniels, 2011

So that’s the identification I gave to Emer, Ronan, Rory and Paddy who found it on their hols!

 

Friday mystery object #285 answer

Last week I gave you this unassuming bit of bone, that I found with no identification in the Grant Museum of Zoology stores:

mystery285

Daniel Jones and Daniel Calleri identified the element as a radius, but beyond that there was a general feeling that identification of species was a bit on the tricky side. Palfreyman1414 pointed out that it’s something approximately human sized, with Lena ruling out an ungulate, suggesting that it could be from a carnivore or possibly a marsupial.

I must admit that my mind immediately went to carnivores and I initially thought it could be from a Black Bear, since it’s fairly robust and about the right length. However, after checking the ever helpful Adams & Crabtree book I realised that bears are even more chunky than this.

It didn’t look right for a dog since they are straighter, have a flatter profile and a narrower distal end. However, it did look right for a big cat and I’m fairly certain that it’s from a Leopard Panther pardus (Linnaeus, 1758). If you want to compare a Leopard with a Dog radius you can see them compared in this paper, along with a good description of the bones of the Leopard forearm.

A bit of a tricky challenge – so next time I may try to do something a bit more distinctive!

Friday mystery object #284 answer

Last week I gave you this part of a skull to have a go at identifying:

mystery284

It’s quite a distinctive structure and very particular to one particular group of mammals. It is of course an external auditory meatus (or ear hole as it’s more commonly known), but instead of opening directly into the auditory bulla (the inflated bony bulb that holds the ear bones) it has a long and robust tube.

Lee Post, Daniel Calleri & Dan Jones and Allen Hazen recognised this characteristic feature as belonging to a Beaver and Richard Lawrence went one better and narrowed it down to Castor canadensis Kuhl, 1820 – an identification that I agree with having seen the whole skull:

beaver_skull

I’m not sure if there’s any real functional reason for the ear tube, but it looks to me like it might be a “spandrel” a feature that’s an artefact of another adaptive feature – in this case the articulation of the mandible.

beaver_jaw

Gnawing through a tree trunk is no easy task, so it’s not surprising that the Beaver has some serious adaptations to deal with the work involved. Unlike carnivores, which have a fixed lateral mandibular articulation powered mainly by the temporalis muscles, rodents have a dorso-ventral articulation usually powered by the masseter muscles, which allows the jaw to move backward and forward. In the Beaver the sagittal crest suggests that the temporal muscles are more involved than usual which, with the orientation of the articulation, may necessitate the ear tubes as lateral braces against which the mandible can secondarily articulate. That’s my guess…

Great work on identifying this specimen using very limited information!

Friday mystery object #283 answer

Last week I gave you this zoomed in picture of a specimen to have a go at identifying:

mystery283

It was a bit tricky, so I also gave you this bonus clue to help:

mystery283_bonus

I was impressed to see that, despite the limited information available from the images provided, many of you managed to work out that this shows the lightweight ‘honeycomb’ structure that supports the casque of a hornbill.

That was the first challenge but, as ever, I was keen to see if you could get the identification to species – far more of a challenge considering the lack of a side view of the skull and lack of a scale. To make up for that I’ve decided to provide the necessary image here:

Ceratogymna atrata skull

I won’t say what species this is in this post, as I normally would, just to give some more of you a chance to make the identification yourself. However, what I will say is that the very first response by Wood contained a link to an image of the correct species and later to a blogpost featuring this very specimen. In that post there is a discussion about the appearance of the casque, with speculation about whether it had been damaged during preparation, resulting in its appearance. However, as Richard Lawrence pointed out, this appearance is actually normal for the skulls of several species of hornbill.

I will also say that the discussion between Daniel Calleri & Dan Jones and Richard Lawrence about whether it was a hornbill from a genus starting with A or B was interesting and I initially thought it was an A, but am now convinced that it’s a C.

If you’re desperate to know which species it’s from, here’s a link to the skullsite.com page about it.

 

Friday mystery object #283

This week I have a mystery object for you that’s a bit different from the usual. Any idea what this zoomed in picture is showing?

mystery283

It’s probably a bit of a tricky one, so if you want an extra image that makes it much easier you can click on this link for a bonus clue.

Please leave your suggestions in the comments below – I’d love to find out your thoughts and let me know if you needed the clue. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #282 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object supplied by Dr David Hone:mystery282

This is the premaxilla of a fish, but that doesn’t narrow things down much, since there are 28,000 species of bony fish, leaving a huge range of possibilities.

There were several suggestions of Wolf Fish, which is what I originally thought it was myself, but that’s not what it is. Then the suggestions of various Wrasse species started cropping up – which is a lot more likely.

My first look at Wrasse teeth came when I tried to identify the fish used in the Horniman’s Merman:

SONY DSC

There are a lot of Wrasse, over 600 species in fact, so it can be hard to narrow down the species, especially when few comparative specimens are available.

One very helpful osteology resource for identifying fish from their bony bits is Osteobase which lets you pick a bone and start making comparisons. It’s worth keeping in mind that you need to really explore the taxonomic tree on the left of the page to get a real appreciation of how useful it is – so for example, after selecting the premaxilla, if you look at the Perciformes (the Order containing the Wrasse) you see a huge range of premaxilla specimens that help narrow down the bone you’re trying to identify.

This clearly shows that the Labridae is definitely the right family for the mystery object and the Mexican Hogfish Bodianus diplotaenia (Gill, 1862) is a very close match.

So congratulations to Richard Lawrence who I think has it right, especially since the specimen was found within the range of this species. I hope you all enjoyed the challenge!