Tag Archives for Friday mystery object

Friday mystery object #527 answer

Last week I gave you this skeleton from the stores of the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

The comments came flooding in, with some slightly off and some very much on target.

The robust skeleton and stocky build of this animal, combined with some interesting bony processes – especially in the pelvic region – offered up some pretty good indicators of the type of critter we’re looking at.

The forward-facing processes of the pelvis were initially mistaken for a baculum, but on a closer look their dual nature becomes more apparent:

These are epipubic bones, which aren’t found in Placental mammals – but this is definitely a mammal – so this is either a Marsupial or Monotreme.

The lack of a skull makes it a little harder to immediately figure out what this might be, but the feet are useful – very useful in fact:

These look like the feet of a digger with those big, robust, triangular claws – but not just a burrowing digger like a Wombat – more like an ant and termite specialist whocan break open their nests. That offers a key clue.

This is the skeleton of a species of spiny anteater – one of the four species of Echidna. The feet actually offer a further diagnostic clue to the species, since most species have five claws, while just one has three – the Three-toed or Western Long-beaked Echidna Zaglossus bruijnii (Peters & Doria, 1876).

This particular specimen was originally on display in the Dead Zoo under its old name Pro-echidna Bruijnii:

Photo of Three-toed Echidna skeleton NMINH:1883.285.1 at the National Museum of Ireland – Natural History taken by Illustratedjc, 2015.

The specimen has been taken off display along with everything else in the building over the last year or so, in preparation for a big refurbishment project.

When it was decanted, along with skull, the fragile right-hand-side rear limb was removed. In the photo above you can see where a claw is detaching – possibly as a result of incorrect foot positioning on the mount (Echidna feet point sideways and backwards, which seems to have confused some mounters). In other places, cotton tape was used to stabilise some of the more wobbly robust elements.

Being able to work through items like this while they’re in storage will be helpful, since it will allow us a chance to remove the worst of the dust from what may have been 140 years of display, and to make some small repairs to things like the detaching claw so it doesn’t get lost. Changing the foot position may be a bigger job, but it’s something to consider.

So while the Dead Zoo may be closed, we’re keeping busy checking the condition of the other 10,000 object we had on display, and working out what we need to do to put them back!

Friday mystery object #526 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object that I found dead in the street when visiting Copenhagen earlier this year:

Clearly this is a species of insect in the Order Odonata, which are the dragonflies and damselflies. Damselflies are much slimmer than this, and their wings fold back along their body at rest, so this one is a dragonfly.

Everyone who commented had worked out the species, since the metallic green-bronze body and fuzzy body are quite distinctive.

This is an example of a Downy Emerald Cordulia aenea (Linnaeus, 1758) which is a species that is fairly widespread across northern Europe. While this species does occurs in Ireland, it has only been recorded from a few localities.

We only have one example of this species in the collections of the Dead Zoo, collected in 1978 from County Cork. I was a little surprised that it wasn’t collected by Madame Dragonfly herself, Cynthia Longfield (1896-1991), since she lived in Cork in the 1970s and was a hugely experienced and prolific expert on dragonflies.

Longfield was an adventurous and trailblazing female scientist – the first woman to be a member of the Royal Entomological Society, with expeditions in the 1920s to the Andes, Amazon, Galapagos, Egypt and a host of other localities that she undertook as part of a team from London Zoo, collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum in London, where she later became a voluntary cataloguer and was credited with saving the Museum from fire following bombing during WWII thanks to her actions as part of the Auxillary Fire Service.

Most of Longfield’s collections are held in the NHM, London, but we do have specimens collected by her in the National Museum of Ireland, donated after her retirement and move from South Kensington to Cloyne in County Cork. The Downy Emerald is not one of the specimens we received, but her specimens include new records for Ireland and a number of Paratypes of African species that she collected on her adventures both near and far.

Friday mystery object #525 answer

Last week I gave you these specimens that are new to the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:


Image taken by Jamie Maxwell, 2025

These are specimens that were lodged in the collection as part of research identifying them as a new invasive alien species to Ireland.

Adam Yates and Chris Jervis both worked out which invasive this happens to be, and it’s a bad one. These are examples of the Demon Shrimp Dikerogammarus haemobaphes (Sowinsky, 1894).

This species is a real problem, as it’s predatory and voracious – able to predate species much larger than themselves. They are very difficult to differentiate from other amphipods, although they do have some distinguishing features that can provide an identification.

There’s some very useful information about the species on the National Biodiversity Data Centre’s Invasives.ie page, which highlights some of the features for identification and details the risk posed by the species in Ireland.

Invasive species like this can have a huge environmental impact – altering food chains, introducing diseases that related taxa may be less able to cope with, and ultimately disrupting ecosystems that are already under pressure from multiple other impacts.

Managing the introduction and spread of species like this requires vigilence – the Check Clean Dry campaign offers some useful advice on how to help stop the spread:

Well done to everyone who worked out this demonic little mystery – I hope you can avoid finding these in your area!

Friday mystery object #524 answer

Last week I gave you this skull from the collections of the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

Bird skull identification can take a bit of work, until you get your eye in on things like the bill morphology (especially without the clues provided by the keratin sheath). Resources like the excellent Skullsite.com certainly help a lot, by providing a huge range of images of different species for comparison, and with tools to help narrow down options based on skull size and bill morphology.

As it turns out, Adam Yates certainly had his eye in, and he was first to comment with a correct identification for this specimen. It’s a Common or European Crane Grus grus (Linnaeus, 1758).

I chose this specimen as it’s one that we recently put on display in the Dead Zoo Lab as part of a community curated project called Our Irish Natural History. Eight community groups involved with iCAN (the Irish Community Archive Network) contributed to the work, which was coordinated by Adriana Ballinger – a fantastic postgraduate humanities researcher who has been working with us for the past year on a project with a focus on the wider cultural context surrounding natural history collections. The community groups involved each explored a different areas of interest, illustrating and exploring some of the connections between objects and local communities.

The Common Crane offered a fascinating topic explored by the Woodlawn Heritage Group and Galway Community Archaeology, who delved into the past history of the Crane in Ireland, and its importance to Bronze Age people, also touching on their recent return, with a pair of these fantastic birds recently recorded nesting in rewetted boglands. There’s too much information for me to cover it all here, so I recommend taking a look at the work for yourself on the Galway Community Archaeology web resource about the project.

These sorts of projects, that connect our ostensibly scientific objects back into local communities through a cultural link are a fantastic way to broaden the relevance and interest in our collections. As a scientist it can be easy to focus on one aspect of an object – but every item we look after can be viewed from multiple perspectives – all of which add value and relevance.

I look forward to working on similar projects in the future, while hopefully taking the opportunity to share more of the collection here, for those of you with an interest in identification!

Friday mystery object #523 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery mandible to help me identify:

It was found in a box of mixed shells and bony fragments, with no label, and nothing to offer a clue to its origin. This is very unusual, since these sorts of boxes of miscellany were mainly addressed years ago, but this one was well tucked away and somehow escaped being dealt with.

It’s fairly easy to recognise this as being the right mandible of some kind of cat. The Felidae have a reduced tooth count, with those hyper-carnivorous bladed premolars forming a meat-shearing carnassial row that’s very distinctive. So that’s the easy bit done.

The hard bit comes next, since the cats all share this same dental configuration, making the specific kitty in question a bit harder to narrow down. However, the size is a useful clue. This is much too big to be something like a Domestic Cat, Serval or Ocelot, but it’s also too small to be one of the big Big Cats – like the Lion or Tiger:

Tiger skulls facing off – the scale of these skulls is much greater than the mystery mandible

This leaves some of the medium-large Big Cats and perhaps a very large Small Cat (i.e. the Cheetah). Let’s start by ruling out that last one – the size is still a bit on the big side, but also the Cheetah has a more gracile coronoid process that curves, and a relatively shorter toothrow. Pumas also have a more rounded coronoid process.

The Jaguar also has a more rounded coronoid process, and has a more robust mandible, that’s just built thicker to deal with the high bite forces these cats generate:

That leaves us with the Snow Leopard and the not-snow-Leopard, both of which have the more pointed coroid process that we see in the mystery object. However, the Snow Leopard has downwards inflected angular process, that’sI suspect may relate to the increased gape needed to use the excessively long canine teeth in this species:

The answer to last week's mystery mandible
Snow Leopard skull, showing the hypertrophied canines normal in this species.

So, by a process of elimination, we’re left with Leopard Pathera pardus (Linneaus, 1758). This species varies significantly in size and the morphology can be quite variable, since the species has a wide distribution, from Eastern Russia to as far West as Senegal.

This actually reminds me of a very similar mystery object from the Grant Museum of Zoology that I shared 10 years ago, so I’ hope that provided something useful for reference so I’m glad I trawled through some of my past posts to help solve this one. My thanks to everyone who offered their thoughts on this one – it’s great to see so many of you come to the same conclusion!

Friday mystery object #522 answer

Last week I presented this mystery bone from the Words on the Wave exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street:

The bone is over a thousand years old, so it’s unsurprising that a few of the processes that could be useful for identification have been worn down a little:

That said, there was plenty of information remaining to allow several of you to identify the animal, bone type and side of the animal this is from. Adam Yates was first to the comments and he also left a very helpful Toot on Mastodon, detailing the diagnostic features:

@mike @PaoloViscardi The prominent third trochanter and really well-developed supracondylar fossa on the lateral caudal surface at the distal end of the shaft should get you there. You won't have to look beyond familiar farmyard beasts to find it.

For me, the supracondylar fossa on the lateral caudal surface is the instant give-away. For those who don’t speak anatomese, that’s the bit that flares out from the side of the shaft of the bone (which is actually missing a bit in this example).

This is a feature I always associate with the Perissodactyla (the tapirs, rhinos and horses), and this one is nowhere near robust enough for anything other than one of the horses. It’s also fairly small (although the lack of a scale bar doesn’t make this obvious).

This a left femur that I suspect is from a Horse Equus ferus caballus Linnaeus, 1758, but it could also be from a Donkey Equus africanus asinus Linnaeus, 1758. It can be tricky to tell these species apart, especially when the bone is a little worn down and you only have a few photos to work from – so best to err on the side of caution and leave it at an identification of Equus sp.

If you’re in Ireland and wanted to take a look at this object – and a selection of remarkable mediaeval manuscripts from the Abbey of St Gall, Switzerland, some of which are returning to Ireland for the first time in 1000 years – you have until the 24th of this month, I’d definitely recommend it!

Friday mystery object #522

This week I have another bony mystery object for you:

This one is currently on display in the beautiful Words on the Wave exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street, but the focus is on the inscription on the bone, rather than the species the bone came from:

So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what this is? Have fun with it!

Friday mystery object #521 answer

Last week I had a genuine mystery object for you to identify that was freshly dug out of the ground:

While there were a few suggestions of baked goods on social media, plenty of you spotted what it actually is – with a nod to Adam Yates who was first with the correct identification.

The side view is probably the most useful for setting context, as it shows the smooth curve of the head of an articular surface, with an adjacent tuberosity (or sticky-up-bit, if you prefer):

This is what you expect to see at the proximal end of a humerus (that’s bit that works with the shoulder). It’s pretty big – the scale bar is 8cm and the head of this humerus is a good bit wider across, so that also tells us something.

Another key observation comes from the underside of the humerus head:

You can just make out a rugose pattern on the underside of this piece of bone, which tells us that this is an unfused epiphysis that has become detached from the rest of the humerus. That means the animal that this piece of bone came from was young enough to still be growing, as the bones hadn’t fused.

All of that information leads us to the conclusion that the animal this piece of humerus came from was large, but still young. For me, that says that this humerus is from a Cow Bos taurus Linnaeus, 1758.

I suspect this mystery object represents the remains of a Victorian meal, based on where it was found – just under the floor of the Dead Zoo. It came to light during the investigation works on the building, which are currently underway. The building work started in 1856, so that gives us a good idea of when this beef shoulder was probably eaten.

Friday mystery object #520 answer

Last week I gave you this colourful chap to have a go at identifying:

As I mentioned in the previous mystery object answer, parrots can be hard to identify due to the large number of species globally. However, this time the specimen posed no problems for people to identify – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its importance.

Chris Jarvis was first in the door with the correct answer – a nice cryptic clue using the Seminole name for the species:

What a Puzz ila!

Other clues came thick and fast, but they all pointed to this yellow-headed, orange-faced bird being the now extinct Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis (Linnaeus, 1758).

This colourful small parrot weighed in at around 100g and hung around in large flocks of up to 300 birds. Until the middle of the 19th Century they were commonplace in swampy forest habitats in parts of North America. The main resident population was in Florida although their range spread northwards along the marshes of the East coast (into the Carolinas) and westwards along the Gulf of Mexico just into Louisana.

A subspecies of the Carolina Parakeet (C. c. ludovicianus) also occurred in much of the Midwest and as far south as the top of Texas and as far north as the bottom of New York state. This subspecies had bodies that were more blue, but they disappeared alongside their greener sibling subspecies by the beginning of the 20th Century.

Conuropsis carolinensis ludovicianus by John James Audubon, 1811

It seems likely that the usual culprits played a role in the extinction of North America’s only endemic parrot – habitat loss and overhunting. Swamps were drained and forests cleared to make way for agricultural land, the birds were then shot for feeding on crops, and their beautiful plumage made the birds a target to supply the feather-forward fashions of the time.

While most of the shooting stopped before the birds went extinct, as people started to recognise the risk of extinction (especially in the context of the Passenger Pigeon that was being eradicated at around the same time), the last small wild population was vulnerable and it has been suggested that they were finally wiped out by an avian disease.

While a few stragglers likely remained living wild in the Florida swamps until the 1930s, the last known Carolina Parakeet (a male named Incas) died in Cincinati Zoo in 1918, just four years after Martha (the last Passenger Pigeon) died in the very same cage. A somewhat dismal end to colourful species.

Friday mystery object #519 answer

Last week I gave you a bit of tricky mystery object in the form of this colourful character:

Obviously it’s a parrot of some sort, but there are LOTS of parrots. With over 400 species to choose from, identifying one from a single image is not easy at all. Generally when it comes to parrot identification it’s very useful to know where it came from, and without that information this mystery is made even harder – but if I’d provided the locality it would have been way too easy!

I find a useful way to narrow down possible species when looking at parrots is to simply use a search engine and add descriptive terms of the colours of parts of the external anatomy. In this instance I searched for “parrot with emerald green wings, blue and purple chest” which offered up a few possible species, but it significantly narrowed down the options to work through. Of course, I did that with some awareness of colours likely being a little off.

This is a specimen that arrived in the Dead Zoo in 1902 and it’s been progressively fading due to light exposure over the last 120+ years. The purples here are muted and I suspect the blue visible on the breast is actually residual following preferential colour loss of red pigments (types of carotenoid) that would have interacted with the structural blue colour of the feather (structural colours being much more light-stable than pigments) to create a much more vivid and robust purple colour than we see today. With that in mind, it becomes much easier to work out what this species is.

This is the Dominican Amazon (or Imperial Amazon, or Sisserou) Amazona imperialis Richmond, 1899 – one of just three species of parrot from the Commonwealth of Dominica, an Island in the Carribean. Here’s an illustration of what it looks like when it’s not faded:

Amazona imperialis David William Mitchell, 1849

This species features on the flag of the Commonwealth of Dominica and sadly there are very few of these stunning birds remaining, with estimated numbers somewhere between 40 and 60 mature individuals – making it Critically Endangered.

While numbers had been declining due to habitat loss, hunting and the taking of wild birds for the pet trade, the population has been significantly impacted by severe hurricanes hitting the island – which are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change.

Hopefully, conservation efforts and the relatively inaccessible mountaious areas of the island in which the birds live will allow them a chance to recover, but they breed slowly and the threat from hurricanes remains.

Well done to everyone who had a go at this – it really was very difficult, so props to Katenockles who came close with a suggestion of the Blue-headed Parrot. Of course, there were lots of comments that referenced the infamous Norwegian Blue, which for younger readers might be unfamiliar, so here’s the source:

Just to note, while there are no parrots known from Norway, there are some fossil examples known from Denmark – so perhaps there is a chance the Norwegian Blue actually existed – albeit 55 million years ago,

Friday mystery object #518 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object to have a go at identifying:

This one is fairly straightforward to get to the superfamily level – it’s one of the Sea Turtles (the Chelonioidea). However, despite there only being seven species alive today, their skulls can take a bit of careful observation to distinguish the diagnostic features that offer the clues to a species level identification.

When attempting this kind of thing, it’s always helpful to have access to a good key or guide that illustrates and describes those diagnostic features, and for me a very useful resource is The Anatomy of Sea Turtles by Jeanette Wyneken. Alas this excellent reference only covers six of the seven species, so it’s worth also taking a look at the Chatterji, Hutchinson and Jones redescription of the skull of the Australian flatback sea turtle for the sake of completeness.

In the comments on the mystery object this became something of a mix, with a variety of options being proposed. The first, from Adam Yates was actually the correct identification, but he then second-guessed himself.

In a nutshell, you can tell that this is a Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas (Linnaeus, 1758) based on the broad U-shaped curve of the upper jaw (other Sea Turtles have a more pointed bill).

There are plenty of other features as well, such as the configuration of the bones of the palate, a pair of ridges in the maxilla – which are admitedly a little hard to make out, so I’ve indicated them in red below to help you spot where to look:

Another useful feature visible from the palate is the lack of pterygoid processes, which rules out the Australian Flatback Turtle.

I also happen to know that this specimen was collected from Ascencion Island, which is slap bang in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and is renowned as an important breeding site for Green Turtles.

So thanks to everyone for your thoughts on this one – I hope you had fun investigating, and I hope you find the references above useful if you stumble across more turtle skulls in need of identification.

I should probably add that I picked this specimen because I spotted it during the install of some displays in the new Dead Zoo Lab, which I’ve been working on intensively for the last few weeks. This is a space where we will be displaying some of our collections, and working with collaborators and our audiences on how we’ll be using our objects in the future redisplay of the Dead Zoo when the building has been refurbished.

The Dead Zoo Lab is now open to the public, so I’ll add a photo of the space below, and you can read more about it in this article in the Irish Independent in case you’re interested. I hope you get to visit sometime – and if you do, be sure to let me know!