I thought that it might prove a difficult one, but it seems I should have had more faith in the identification skills of my readers (you talented bunch), since the correct answer was delivered with little ado.
The long legs suggested that it was a wading bird to curatorialtrainee and Harry then tentatively suggested what turned out to be the correct answer, which was consolidated by the observations of henstridgesj and the input of David. Jake also spotted what bird this was by comparing the skull to the images on the very useful skullsite.comContinue reading →
I was a bit taken aback by the response to the second anniversary mystery object last Friday. There were a huge number of comments and unfortunately I was tied up all day and was unable to respond – my sincere apologies!
To give you a change from the usual mammal skulls I gave you this bird to identify:
It’s quite a characteristic bird, so I decided to make it more of a challenge by leaving out the usual scale bar – if you’re interested the head of this specimen is about 10cm long.
Obviously the comparatively large head and massive bill were key features that were picked up on, giving the following answers:
I’m pleased to say that the vast majority of you managed to get the correct identification; it is indeed the skeleton of a Kookaburra, more specifically the Laughing Kookaburra Dacelo novaeguineae (Hermann, 1783).
Laughing Kookaburra perched in a eucalypt tree. Taken in December 2008 in Victoria, Australia by Fir0002
These large antipodean kingfishers have a very distinctive call, which sounds to me like the laugh of a clown from a nightmare. In fact, I expect these birds are a bit of a nightmare for any small critters that live in their vicinity. That big robust bill is powerful and they use it to eat a wide range of animals including worms, snakes, rats and even some fairly decent sized birds.
They aren’t subtle about their hunting either. They simply grab their prey in their bill and smash it on the ground, on a branch or on a rock then swallow it whole. Often they keep smashing it for quite a while – after all, swallowing a live snake or rat probably isn’t a great idea.
If you look at the skull you might notice a deep groove around the back and a deep indentation on the lower jaw or mandible:
These are muscle scars and it’s quite unusual to find such impressive areas for muscle attachment in bird skulls, but then most birds don’t rely quite as much on brute force to catch and subdue their prey. Kookaburras mean business.
On Friday I gave you this Anthropological object and asked what is it, where is it from and what is it made from:
As some of you spotted, this object is not made of hair, but of feathers that look like hair. This indicates that the feathers are from a flightless bird – and given their length it would be a big bird. That narrows it down to a ratite (also known as a Struthioniform).
There are large ratites in Africa (Ostriches), South America (Rheas), Australia (Emus and Cassowaries) and New Guinea (Cassowaries), so this object must come from one of these places.
Given the shape and size it seems fairly clear that the object is a headdress, so the easy way to identify what this object is made from (and therefore the area of the world from which it originated) is to do an image search for ‘*type of ratite* headdress’, after all, there are only 4 options. Sneaky but effective.
To save you the trouble I will tell you that it is in fact made from Cassowary feathers – probably Northern Cassowary Casuarius unappendiculatus (Blyth, 1860) and it’s from New Guinea, which David Craven successfully identified – well done!
As promised, here’s a quick answer to last Friday’s mystery object:
The big nuchal crest (ridge running along the back of the skull that meets the sagittal crest) points to this being a carnivore.
The large auditory bullae (the bulbous bits on the underside of the skull which relate to hearing) and very rounded notch in the occipital condyles (the bit of the skull that attaches to the atlas vertebra of the neck) suggest a cat, since dogs have a more V shaped notch and smaller bullae.
Friday was the 100th mystery object and I am considering making it the last one, since I’m finding it hard to come up with new objects every week. Moreover, I find that I don’t have time to keep up with all the other things I want/need to do.
However, I may keep FMO running for a bit longer with a slightly different format for the answer (since they’re what take the most time to write). So here’s the quick answer to Friday’s object, or should I say objects.
So congratulations to everyone who had a stab at identifying these mandibles – since all of you got some of them right.
If you have any thoughts on the continuation of the Friday mystery object, please feel free to let me know in the comments section below. Perhaps I should do a monthly mystery object or have them in a more ad hoc way as I find interesting objects? Your input would be of great help.
On Friday I gave you this rather cool skull to identify:
There was no doubt that this was a carnivore of some sort, given the sharp canines and the massive carnassial teeth. Most of you spotted that it was the skull of a juvenile or subadult, given the partially emerged teeth and the unfused sutures. Most of you also spotted that it was a canid of some sort, given the overall shape and the tooth arrangement.
The correct identification was arrived at in short order by David Craven and many of you concurred with his neatly veiled answer of
Could I paint you a picture of this animal?
This answer is a reference to the name of an African carnivore, the Continue reading →
Everyone spotted that it was from a monkey, perhaps unsurprisingly since monkeys have a very characteristic appearance, with a globular braincase and forward-facing eyes. The orbit is enclosed by a solid bony ring and there is a post-orbital wall made up of the sphenoid and ethmoid bones, that produces a cup-shaped eye socket.
But there are a lot of different monkey species – around 286 if you include the Apes (as you should). We can see that this specimen belongs to the Catarrhini clade (the Old World Monkeys and Apes) since it only has 2 premolars instead of the 3 premolars you’d expect in a New World Monkey (N.B. some extinct Catarrhines known from fossils have 3 premolars, so this useful distinction doesn’t actually help define the clade).
The size of the skull and the the shape of the nose region and the mandible isn’t quite right for an Ape, or a typical Cheek-pouch Monkey (like Macaques or Baboons), leaving us with the Colobinae (which includes Colobus Monkeys, Doucs, Langurs, Leaf Monkeys, Proboscis Monkeys, Snub-nosed Monkeys and Surelis).
Once we get this far it becomes rather more tricky to identify what species we’re dealing with (and it doesn’t help that the names are applied somewhat inconsistently), so I must offer congratulations to Jake, jonpaulkaiser, curatorialtrainee, henstridgesj, carlos grau and Steven D. Garber, PhD – all of whom suggested perfectly possible candidates amongst the Langurs and Snub-nosed Monkeys.
Apologies for the lack of response to questions last Friday, I was travelling and had limited access to the internet.
Excuses aside, I was impressed by the overall accuracy of the answers received about what this skull belonged to:
Everyone spotted that it was a carnivore and most of you identified this as being the skull of a mustelid, but no-one seems to have got this identification spot-on (perhaps my stinking clue was a bit too vague). Suggestions ranged a fair bit and uncertainty was rife, as shown in this word cloud of the comments:
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the clue, Skunks were suggested quite a lot as were Civets and Polecats/Ferrets (which are indistinguishable from each other on the basis of the skull, since Ferrets are just domesticated Polecats).
This suggestion of Polecat is pretty much there, although the specimen is not the standard European Polecat Mustela putorius rather it is an African mustelid known as the Continue reading →
It’s from one of two boxes labelled NH.83.1, which between them contained twenty unidentified skulls from a variety of different animals, ranging from fish to birds and mammals – several of which have been used as mystery objects in the past.
These boxes have been in the Horniman collections since the 1930′s and there is very little information available about the specimens, so it falls to me to make identifications. The comments I receive when using these specimens as mystery objects is always useful – it makes me double check my identification in light of the suggestions that you make – a form of review that I find very valuable. So thanks to everyone who attempted an identification, your thoughts have proved really useful!
From the outset the suggestions made were along the same lines as I’d been thinking – Prancing Papio FCD suggested a Maxwell’s Duiker, which is of similar size but has a narrower skull, smaller braincase and horns set far back on the skull, rather than originating just above the orbit like this one. This difference in the horn position and the relative size of the braincase rules out all of the Duikers in fact.
Jake suggested Dik-dik using a cryptic clue that I totally misunderstood – but this skull is a fair bit bigger than that of a Dik-dik’s and it has much longer nasal bones (Dik-diks have a bizarrely truncated nasal region).
Stephen J Henstridge suggested Steenbok, which is what I had originally thought it might be, since it’s almost identical, but a few little details of the palate, the horn orientation and the post-orbital process make me think that Stephen’s follow up suggestion of Continue reading →
Since Friday was the 13th I gave you a mystery object inspired by the theme of superstition (at the suggestion of the @museumgeekgirls). I asked you to identify what this specimen was, where it was from and what powers were attributed to it:
As it turns out you all did a great job of identifying what these severed feet belonged to and there were some fantastic suggestions about the possible uses of these rather macabre charms.
On Friday I gave you this skull to identify from the Balcony in the Natural History Gallery at the Horniman Museum:
I must say that I was very impressed with the response – diet was quickly identified by Rosa Rubicondior, Will Chapman and Carlos Grau then Stephen J Henstridge spotted that this was the skull of Bandicoot and Jack Ashby, cromercrox and Jamie Revell all dropped hints (or blatantly stated) that this was the skull of a Continue reading →
On Good Friday I gave you this object and asked ‘Any idea what this skull belongs to?‘
Given the levels of pedantism on the Internet, I’m surprised that no-one said ‘the Horniman Museum‘, which would have been a correct answer to the question, since this specimen was bought in 1936 from the German natural history supply company Schlüter and Mass and it therefore belongs to the Museum.
However, you all clearly knew I meant belonged, since you did a great job of working out which species this skull came from.
Jake immediately ruled out the large British native carnivores (Fox and Badger) and several questions later had Jamie Revell hot on the trail, only to be pipped to the post by David Craven. Kudos also goes to Carlos Grau and Gina who both came very close.
I must apologise in advance for the somewhat short answer to the mystery object this week. Partly it’s because I don’t know much about musical instruments and partly because I’ve been busy pulling together a guest post for GrrlScientist over at Punctuated Equilibrium on the Guardian science blogging network (not sure when it will go live[EDIT it’s live now]). Excuses aside – on with the answer!
Last Friday I gave you this object to identify:
I was impressed that everyone immediately spotted that it was a musical instrument, but I was even more impressed that so many of you identified which continent it was from (Africa) and the general type of instrument. Historically in the West this has been referred to as a ‘thumb piano’ which is a very Eurocentric interpretation. A more accurate generic name is lamellophone (or lamellaphone).
There are lots of different sorts of lamellopone from different regions in Africa, including the mbira, the sanza, the kalimba and lukembe. This particular example differs from all of these other forms in the way in which the lamellae are secured:
This particular type has tangs on the lamellae that are driven directly into the wooden resonator, rather than having a fretboard like an mbira:
This means that the instrument is not tunable, unlike the mbira.
This unusual characteristic identifies this mystery object is an Continue reading →
On Friday I gave you this archaeological mystery object from Surrey to identify:
Jake immediately spotted that it was the mandible of a carnivore and ruled out a Cat because the teeth were wrong. General consensus leaned towards this being from a mustelid of some kind – which David Craven confirmed with the correct identification of Continue reading →
I’d like to begin by apologising for providing misleading information about Friday’s mystery object – I omitted a scale bar and then described the skull as being 4cm long. It goes to show how even a small amount of time can addle one’s memory, since this skull is in fact 7cm long:
I thought it would prove an easy one to identify, since it’s from a very well known species that I have talked about before – but the identification was made more difficult because it is a very young individual. This fact is clear from the lack of fusion of the bones and the lack of teeth. CopilasDenis and David Craven both spotted this and they also picked up on the fact that this skull is from a carnivore – as did ObenedO.
As to what species this skull comes from, no-one really came very close. In fact I was surprised when Jake said:
It doesn’t look catty or doggy or sheepy or deery.
On Friday the mystery object was provided by Mark Carnall, the curator of the newly reopened Grant Museum of Zoology:
It’s not been an easy one to work out – I thought it was part of a fish skull when I first saw it and comments have ranged from a squashed frog to Yoda’s foot.
Zygoma 