This week I have a nice little skull for you to identify. Any idea what this is?
As usual, you can put your suggestions, comments and questions below and I will do my best to answer – although it may take me a while as I have a NatSCA meeting for most of the day. Good luck!
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.
This is the back of the skull of a Leopard Panthera pardus (Linnaeus, 1758), in fact it is part of the same specimen as mandible F from last week.
Although last week I hinted that I may stop the mystery object, I’ve decide to try out a different system. Rather than give an extended answer on Monday (a time-consuming business) I will simply provide a very brief answer. Hopefully this will free up some time to do other things.
This week I present you with another partial piece of skull that I recently reunited with the rest of the specimen it came from. There’s no scale bar to keep it challenging!
Any idea what this is?
As usual, you can put your suggestions, comments and questions below and I will do my best to answer. Good luck!
It’s the one hundredth mystery object and I’ve decided to give you a challenge that I had to deal with at work this week.
I found a box of mandibles with no data, I identified them and checked them against their respective specimen types in the Horniman collections (that I’ve worked hard to organise for such a purpose).
The whole process took me half a morning and 5 of the 6 specimens were successfully reunited with the skulls they were separated from over 70 years ago – a satisfying outcome for a curator (our fun is cheap).
Now it’s your turn to identify the mystery mandibles (click image for bigger version):
From top to bottom: A, B, C, D, E, F
Put your suggestions and questions in the (newly organised) comments section below and I’ll do my best to respond.
Best of luck!
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
This week I have something pretty cool for you to identify:
Any idea what it is?
As usual you can put your comments, questions and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to answer. Good luck!
This week’s mystery object may be a bit harder than usual, but I’m sure that someone will get what it is:
As usual, you can put your questions, comments and suggestions below and I’ll respond as best I can – hopefully better than I managed last week, when I was in Ireland without ready access to the internet…
Good luck!
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
This week I have an object from the mysterious box NH.83.1 for you to identify:
What do you think this skull belonged to?
As usual you can put your comments, questions and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to answer.
Good luck!
This week I’m going to give you an object that’s on display at the Horniman Museum. Whenever I see this specimen I’m reminded of the diversity of life that is out there in the wider world, that we never consider normally. Any idea what this skeleton belongs to?
As usual, I will do my best to reply to your questions, observations and suggestions in the comments section below.
Good luck!
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
This week I’m going to give you something to identify from an archaeological excavation near Coulsdon in Surrey. It was associated with human remains and some clay pipes that suggest an approximate date between 1600-1850AD. Any idea what this section of mandible belonged to?
After getting the scale wrong last week I have made sure that there are scale bars in the image this time!
As usual you can put your questions, observations and suggestions in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to respond. Good luck!
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.
since this is actually the skull of a Continue reading
After last week’s fiendishly tricky mystery object I’ve decided to give you a much easier one. Any idea what this is?
As usual I will do my best to answer your questions and provide guidance – good luck!
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.
The closest suggestions came from Jamie Revell, Steven D. Garber, PhD and Helen (sort of…), this is the Continue reading
This Friday we have a guest mystery object from the newly reopened (and rather fantastic) Grant Museum of Zoology:
I got this one wrong when I first saw it – I hope you manage to do better!
I’ll do my best to give clues and answers to questions during the day, but hopefully Mark and Jack from the Grant will be able to provide some guidance as well. More about the awesome new Grant Museum on Monday with the answer. Good luck!
On Friday I was at the Natural Science Collections Association conference in Newcastle, which was a very enjoyable couple of days spent with other natural scientists discussing issues relating to natural history collections. The downside was that I wasn’t really able to respond to comments particularly well.
However, it turns out that you didn’t really need my input, since there were some great clues by other commentators, that helped with the identification of this object:
Jake spotted that it was the nasal cavities and teeth (the premaxilla and part of the maxilla) of a marine mammal and Jonpaulkaiser identified that it belonged to a Continue reading
This week I have a really tough one for you. It’s a specimen I found in our collections with a tentative identification that I was unconvinced by. I followed my instincts and they led me not only to a more accurate identification, but also to the rest of the specimen, from which it had been separated before they even arrived at the Horniman. Can you work out what it is?
Please feel free to ask questions and make observations or suggestions in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to respond. Good luck!
I apologise in advance for providing a slightly short answer to this week’s mystery object – I found myself a bit strapped for time between responding to Intelligent Design types trolling my blog here and at Scientopia, writing a talk for Skeptics In the Pub tomorrow evening and trying to sort out my laptop power lead after it broke (now fixed thanks to the helpful staff at Maplins who gave me the parts I needed to make repairs).
On Friday I gave you this object to identify, thinking that it might be a fun challenge:
As it turns out it seems to have been a good one, since most of you managed to work out what it’s from. There were some great hints dropped and I think that the comments proved to be a useful resource for those who weren’t sure, but they didn’t detract too much from the fun of working it out. Thanks to everyone for being awesome!
The first to correctly identify both the type of bone and the species it came from was Cromercrox, who gave a great rationale for his suggestion: Continue reading
This Friday I’ve decided to give you a challenge in the form of one of my favourite interesting animal bits. This mystery object is one that a few people in the know will identify immediately, because it is so distinctive, but anyone who hasn’t seen one before is likely to struggle a bit.
Do you have any idea what type of bone this is and which species it came from? (N.B. it’s the same bone photographed from different sides.)
For those few that are in the know perhaps you could drop hints rather than blurting out the answer and for the rest of you, please feel free to ask for clues – I will do my best to offer guidance throughout the day.
Good luck!
Zygoma 