I was working my way through a box of large ratite bone the other day and stumbled across this out-of-place object: 
Any ideas on what it might have come from and why it might have been in a box of Ostrich bits? As usual, you can put your questions, thoughts and suggestions below – if you think it’s easy then maybe try using a clue to give other people a chance of working it out for themselves. Have fun!
Friday mystery object #255 answer
Last Friday I gave you this rather interesting looking object to identify, preferably using a rhyme:
Believe it or not the photographs show either side of the same object – on one side it just looks like a rugose lump and on the other it shows a rather nice natural spiral.
Aside from some great humorous comments by 4utu and Henrik Nielsen, there were some of you who worked out that this is the operculum from a marine snail and even managed to explain that in rhyme – so very well done to Barbara, Chris and especially Lee Post who upped the ante by writing a full verse:
oh purr Q lum from foreign shores
possibly from a near ites door
side door -back door does not exist
main door -strong door , built to resist
Flick Baker went a step further (taxonomically) by identifying that this operculum is from a snail in the genus Turbo with the rhyme: “Gives your engine serious puff, even when she’s running rough“.
Green Turban Shell (Turbo marmoratus) showing aperture closed by the operculum
More specifically, this operculum is from the South African Turban Shell Turbo sarmaticus Linnaeus, 1758.
The operculum is a part of many snails that is often forgotten about – it forms a protective trapdoor that the snail closes behind itself when it retreats inside its shell (‘operculum’ means ‘cover’ or ‘lid’ in Latin). This trapdoor helps prevent desiccation in land snails and helps protect against predators in marine snails.
When the animal dies the operculum will often fall off as the body of the animal decays or is eaten, so often it won’t find its way into a museum collection with the rest of the shell. However, opercula can be quite distinctive and are sometimes more useful for identifying a species than the rest of the shell – a handy point to remember.
Friday mystery object #255
This Friday I have a slightly odd looking object for you to identify:
It’s quite distinctive for those who’ve seen this sort of thing before, so to keep it fun for those who aren’t familiar please try to be a bit creative with your suggestions in the comments box below. Bonus points for anything that rhymes… have fun!
Friday mystery object #254 answer
Last Friday I gave you this odd bit of bone (or should I say bones) from a box of mixed objects to identify:
As Ellen Going immediately recognised, it’s a scapula and clavicle – which in itself tells us that it can’t be from a Carnivore or Ungulate, since they lack a well-developed clavicle.
The open articulation with large acromial and coracoid processes and the symmetrical, blade-like scapula body suggest that this is an animal with a lot of movement in the shoulder, and reciprocal movement at that (hence the symmetry). This suggests a flapping animal, but without the extreme clavicle adaptation (i.e. the wishbone) seen in birds.
So as Flick Baker, Ric Morris and Joey Williams all realised, this is the shoulder and clavicle of a large fruit bat, in the family Pteropodidae. Good work!
Friday mystery object #254
This week I have a genuine mystery object that I found in a box that carried this somewhat unhelpful label:
Here it is – any idea what it is and what it might be from?
As always I’d appreciate your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below!
Friday mystery object #253 answer
Last Friday I gave you this lovely specimen from the King’s College Museum of Life Sciences to try your hand at identifying:
It wasn’t easy, since there were limited views, so the dentition wasn’t entirely visible and the bones of the palate are not shown. Also, there was no scale bar – something that Ric Morris gently reprimanded me for.
Despite these limitations, many of you correctly managed to work out that this is the skull of a Mongoose of some sort. So congratulations to bugblokenz, Flick Baker, henstridgesj, Michelle and Allen Hazen for recognising that this is a member of the Herpestidae.
Narrowing it down beyond that is more of a challenge and without better images it’s a bit unfair to expect a species level identification – but I’m going to have a go.
Scouring through Mongoose skulls in collections and various images online (especially using the fantastic Animal Diversity Web resource, the ever helpful Skulls Unlimited and the brilliant Mammals of Tanzania Skull Key), I came to realise that the teeth are visible enough to discount many Mongoose species. Also, the shape of the zygomatic region and facial profile was quite distinctive (most Mongooses have cheekbones that are flat under the eye sockets – but not this chap).
Excluding the options that didn’t quite fit, left me with a few that did – the Egyptian Mongoose Herpestes ichneumon, Slender Mongoose Herpestes sanguinea, and White-tailed Mongoose Ichneumia albicauda.
Not a clear-cut identification, but better than nothing, and it might be possible to refine it by looking at the specimen in the flesh… as it were.
#TwitteratiChallenge Museums Bolt-on = #MuseumTwitterati
I love social media. In particular I enjoy using Twitter because it provides me with a wonderful opportunity to engage in dialogue with interesting and knowledgeable people who have helped me develop in my profession, and I hope that I have been able to enrich other people’s experience in turn.
It was therefore a real pleasure to have been nominated by Katie Hobbs for the #TwitteratiChallenge, which was originally started by @TeacherToolkit to “recognise your most supportive colleagues in a simple blogpost shout-out. Whatever your reason, these 5 educators [museologists] should be your 5 go-to people in times of challenge and critique, or for verification and support“.
Note that I have slightly tweaked the focus of the challenge from the original – it’s such a nice idea that I think it’s worth borrowing (stealing?) for the museum sector. To help prevent the original intent of the challenge (i.e. finding helpful educators) from being diluted, I’m going to suggest that a new/additional hashtag be applied – so witness the birth of #MuseumTwitterati!
This is quite timely, as I recently attended the NatSCA conference, which was called Museums Unleashed and it focussed, in large part, on the role of social media in the museum profession.
As new tools are introduced, we need to be willing to give them a go, to see if they can be used to improve how we work. But Twitter is no longer a new tool. It has proved its worth as a way of communicating and I see it rapidly becoming as important for museum professionals to use as email (although there are still a few people in the museum sector who haven’t quite got to grips with email yet).
For colleagues who are just starting out on Twitter, the #MuseumTwitterati hashtag may provide a helpful trail for identifying good people to follow.
Subversive as always, I’ve tweaked the original #TwitteratiChallenge rules, and simplified the ‘What to do’ section:
Rules:
- You cannot knowingly include someone you work with in real life (ex-colleagues are fine, it’s a small sector and we’d run out of people in no time otherwise).
- You cannot list somebody that has already been named if you are already aware of them being listed on #TwitteratiChallenge or #MuseumTwitterati (sorry Jan Freedman)
- Copy and paste the ‘Rules’ and ‘What to do’ information into your own blog post and be sure to cite @TeacherToolkit since they came up with the idea.
What to do:
- Within 7 days of being nominated you must write your own blogpost identifying the top-5 museologists that you regularly go to for ideas, support and challenge. Share this on Twitter using the hashtag #MuseumTwitterati and tag them in – they are thus nominated.
- If you do not have your own blog, write your list by hand or on a computer, take a photo/screenshot and upload it to Twitter, tagging the people mentioned (yes, you can do that) and using the hashtag #MuseumTwitterati – they are thus nominated.
So here is my selection, which sadly omits a lot of fantastic people who I engage with regularly about my specialist interests, but who are not really museum professionals per se (people like Jake, Ric and Ben). There are also a lot of notable absences because I work with some excellent Twitterers (Tweeters? Tweeps? Whatever – check out this #TwitteratiChallenge post by Rupert Shepherd who is one of them, and he lists most of the others):
My #MuseumTwitterati
Mar Dixon (@MarDixon) – Doyenne of digital media for the museum sector. Trendsetter and maverick empowerer of the people, who has probably done more to unstarch the undies of the stiffest museum staff through the innovative Culture Themes than anyone could have imagined possible.
Erica McAlister (@flygirlNHM) – Doyenne of the Diptera, based at the Natural History Museum. Serious collections based science, serious about the benefits of Twitter and seriously good fun! Awesome.
Mark Carnall (@mark_carnall) – Incisive and provocative natural science curator, with a playful sense of humour and a passion for Lego.
Tincture Of Museum (@TinctureOfMuse) – Another Lego lover, museum volunteer and a passionate advocate for access in museums, with a special insight into autism.
Nicholas Poole (@NickPoole1) – Trend tracker, strategist and big picture thinker. Tweets to share nuggets of museum management gold.
Apologies to many of the other fantastic people I engage with on Twitter who didn’t make the list – nothing personal, since I used commun.it to help me decide; it’s a very useful tool for managing your online community!
Friday mystery object #253
This week I have a lovely specimen from the hidden gem that is the King’s College Museum of Life Sciences for you to try your hand at identifying:
Any idea what this specimen might be? As usual you can put your questions, observations and suggestions below – let’s see if we can work out what this is!
Friday mystery object #252 answer
Last Friday I gave you this object from the Horniman’s Anthropology collection and asked you to identify what it’s made from and what function it may have served:
The identification turned out to be the easiest question to answer, despite the modification of the bone. The shape of the end of the bone is a result of the epiphyses (the ends of the bone) detaching from the diaphysis (the midshaft of the bone), which tells us that the animal was a juvenile at time of death and that the bone is actually formed from two bones that have fused together down their length – which is why a similar pattern is repeated on the left and right side of the bone.
This sort of fusion is normally seen in the hand and foot bones of artiodactyls, which narrows down the possible species. Judging by the size and general proportions it would be from something the size of a Roe Deer, although a bit more chunky. The closest species I could find for comparison was the the Goat Capra aegagrus hircus (Linnaeus, 1758), although it may be from a close relative, the Serow:
A Serow (Capricornis sumatraensis) by Melanochromis, 2007
As for the function, there were some great suggestions (from weaving comb to needle-case), but apparently this is the key to a set of handcuffs!
The variety of anthropological uses of bone is huge, and it’s always exciting to find something outside of our expectations – which this object most definitely is for me!
Friday mystery object #252
This week I have an object for you that one of my colleagues in Anthropology asked me to check the identification of:
Any ideas what bone this is made from and, more of a challenge, what the function of this worked object might have been in its culture of origin?
As usual you can leave your questions, observations and suggestions in the comments box below. Have fun!
Friday mystery object #251 answer
Last week I gave you this object to have a go at identifying:
I thought it looked a bit like an Ewok’s weapon, but fairly obviously it’s a bit of some critter’s leg. The question is, which critter?
In comments by David M Watson, David Hone, taihaku and palfreyman1414 it was quickly recognised as being from a ratite (the group of flightless birds that include Emus, Cassowaries, Kiwis, Rheas and Ostriches – plus some extinct examples like Moas and Elephant Birds), but it was henstridgesj who narrowed it down to a tarsometatarsus (fused ankle and foot bones) of the correct ratite – the Ostrich Struthio camelus Linnaeus, 1758.
The size is a bit smaller than you’d expect for an adult Ostrich and the top of the bone (the bit on the left) is less well fused, so it appears to be from a subadult individual. The reason it can be distinguished from some of the other suggested ratites is all down to the number of trochlea (the rounded and grooved end bits that the toes attach to). Ostriches only have two toes, whereas the other ratites have three or four and this is reflected in those trochlea.
Ostrich foot showing the two toes. Image by Tony Wills (2007)
So well done to everyone who took part, especially henstridgesj who was spot on!
Friday mystery object #251
This week I have a specimen for you to have a go at identifying, that has come from a box of “mixed bones” that I’ve been working through:
It may look like some sort of Ewok weapon, but I’m pretty sure it’s also part of an animal. Any idea what critter this might be from?
As usual, you can leave your thoughts, comments and suggestions below. Have fun!
Friday mystery object #250 answer
For my 250th mystery object I gave you this object from the collections of the Horniman Museum & Gardens to identify:
It gave me a bit of a challenge, but eventually I managed to work it out – and it looks like something similar happened in the comments!
We went from ribs, to hind limbs to jaws, which is where it started getting close to the mark. The suggestion of “Part of the zygomatic arch of something large?” by henstridgesj was on the money.
Allen Hazen broke down the observation a bit further, with an astute observation about the components of the zygomatic arch that are present “The jugal and squamosal components of the zygomatic arch (I’d say its the squamosal that has been cut open here)“. Allen also speculated that it may be from a Dugong – which was my preferred identification for a while.
However, Crispin and henstridgesj worked out that it was from an Asian Elephant Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758 – the same species that I had also concluded that it belonged to.
By narrowing down the identification to species I was able to search through the museum’s collections management database to find out whether this sliced-off piece of bone might be part of another object. As it turns out, it was!
NH.27.66 Elephas maximus on display at the Horniman
So by being able to identify this piece of bone it could be reassociated with the specimen that it originally came from and now there is a record for it in our database, so that if the skull ever comes off display it can be reunited with its cheekbone.
It also made an apt object for my 250th mystery object for Zygoma!
Friday mystery object #250
This week I have a mystery object for you that had me stumped for a little while recently, after it didn’t match the comparative material I had to hand. I managed to work out what it is, but I thought that it might make for a fun challenge as the 250th Friday mystery object:
Any idea what this is and what species it comes from?
As usual you can leave your (preferably cryptic) observations, questions and suggestions in the comments section below. Have fun!
Friday mystery object #249 answer
Last Friday I gave you this exploded skull from the incredible Galerie d’anatomie comparée et de Paléontologie in Paris:
As I suspected, it was a bit of an easy one for many of you, but that provided the chance for some cryptic clue fun.
So my thanks to Agata Stachowiak, Chris, Allen Hazen, henstridgesj, Claire Miles and witcharachne who all hinted at an identification of Sloth, more specifically a Two-toed Sloth, I think of the species Choloepus hoffmanni Peters, 1858 as opposed to C. didactylus Linnaeus, 1758, which appears to have a smaller angular process on the mandible and a less broad zygomatic region.
_crop.jpg)
A two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni) at La Selva Biological Station, Sarapiqui, Costa Rica. By Geoff Gallice
The teeth of Sloths are fascinating, due to their fairly simple rooting and their impressively sharp premolars that look like canines.
These Sloths have an interesting feature of their hair, which has a groove to help support algae, which help keep the Sloth camouflaged. This is pretty handy given the Sloth’s notorious lack of speed with which to escape predators. This may help explain the need for those sharp premolars as well!
Friday mystery object #249
This week I have another mystery object for you from the wonderful Galerie d’anatomie comparée et de Paléontologie in Paris:
Any idea what species this exploded skull is from?
It’s probably a bit on the easy side for some of you, so please try to give your answers a cryptic spin, to keep the game fresh for everyone. Enjoy!
Friday mystery object #248 answer
Last Friday I gave you this mysterious leg to identify:
It had me stumped for some time and I was hoping that your suggestions might lead me to an identification.
As it turns out, I did indeed get inspiration from your ideas and I think that I may have worked out which species this leg came from.
The first suggestion came from Barbara, who suggested that it might be from a Wombat. This was a great suggestion, since I hadn’t properly considered any marsupials and the robust nature of the leg suggests a heavyset digger. However, the calcaneus (or heel bone) in Wombats is shorter than we see in this specimen and the ungals (the bits at the very end of the toes, where the claws would attach) are longer and more spade-like in the Wombat – an adaptation for digging.
Carlos and Lee Post made some useful observations about the patella (kneecap) and general proportions of the hind limb elements and how they relate to those of other animals – ruling out anything from North America.
Finally, henstridgesj made the interesting suggestion of Capybara, although it appears that the fibula on the mystery object is far too robust to belong to a Capybara. However, I hadn’t thought too much of rodents, so that got me thinking of another possibility:
The Crested Porcupin Hystrix cristata Linnaeus, 1758 is the third largest rodent after the Capybara and Beaver, and it appears to have similar general proportions of the hind limbs. I’ll need to check against a specimen, but it seems I have a useful direction for investigation – so many thanks to everyone for your suggestions!
————————–
Update March 27, 2015 9:41am
I have now checked the mystery specimen against a Crested Porcupine and they are indeed a match!
Friday mystery object #248
This week I have another perplexing mystery object for you, that I’ve found harder to identify than expected:
I’ve compared it to several specimens in a similar size range and it hasn’t matched any of them well enough to make a confident attempt at identification. Whatever it is, I don’t have a skeleton of anything comparable in the stores at the Horniman, and it’s a chunky critter with much more robust hind limbs than a Eurasian Badger Meles meles.
Any suggestions on what this might be from would be greatly appreciated!
Friday mystery object #247 answer
Last Friday I gave you this unidentified object to get your opinions on:
This specimen has puzzled me quite a bit. The internal structure is a dense honeycomb, that seems too tightly compacted to belong to a bird – plus it’s so big that the only birds it could possibly belong to would be a Moa, Elephant Bird or maybe Ostrich at a push, and I compared this against two of these three possibilities:
So, it’s mammalian and large. It’s also clearly a metatarsal or metacarpal, based on the shape of the articular surfaces.
It’s not shaped quite right for a one or two toed animal so the it seems that the variety of suggestions along those lines of Hippopotamus, Rhinoceros and Elephant are most likely to be in the right area.
I did compare this to Hippo feet and an Elephant hindfoot and drew a blank, so that leaves an Elephant forefoot or a Rhinoceros foot. My best guess would be the 4th metacarpal of a Rhino, although Elephant is still a contender – I will try to find some comparative material to confirm.
A massive ‘thank you’ to everyone who contributed ideas – it’s great to have some fresh perspectives and new directions to explore when you’re stumped!
Friday mystery object #247
This week I have a complete mystery for you to identify. I’ve checked this specimen against all sorts of species and have drawn a blank. So, I’m opening it up to you, to see if you have some inspiration to help me solve what this is:
As usual, you can put your thoughts, questions and suggestions in the comments box below. I look forward to hearing your ideas!
Zygoma 