Friday mystery object #456 answer

Last week I gave you this rugged skull, from a rugged place, to have a go at identifying:

As everyone spotted, this is a whale of some sort (what else has a skull that weird-looking?), but the question is, which species?

The location led to a few suggestions of Arctic / sub-Arctic species like Narwhal or Beluga, but they have a much flatter top section of the skull. In fact, those huge vertical lobes of the maxillae seen here is pretty unusual and quite distinctive (even if it is a ittle weathered and broken):

This reminded me of a specimen in the collections of the Dead Zoo and which I had to check, just to be sure of my identification:

As spotted immediately by Chris and not too long afterwards by Adam Yates and Wouter van Gestel, this is the skull of a Northern Bottlenose Whale Hyperoodon ampullatus (Forster, 1770).

This sub-Arctic species has a distribution across much of the North Atlantic. They tend to stick to quite deep water, which makes sense in the case of the specimen I shared from Iceland, since the Reynisfjara beach is infamously dangerous because it shelves off very steeply into very deep water, making the waves that break along the beach behave in an unusual (and frankly terrifying) way.

Occasionally this species will come into shallower waters, in one (somewhat tragic) case a female Bottlenose Whale swam up the Thames (and is now in NHM, London). Our specimen came from an animal stranded on the Irish coast and there are theories that maritime sound pollution is connected to them being driven into shallower waters.

Well done to everyone who worked out which species this skull is from – hope you’re ready for another mystery next week!

Friday mystery object #456

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Iceland, to witness some of it’s remarkable landscapes.

One location we visited was the infamously dangerous Reynisfjara black sand beach, with it’s “sneaker waves”, which regularly drag people out into the freezing waters.

Something else met its fate on those sands and it’s skull now sits outside the visitor centre. Any idea what it might be?

Worth noting there’s a footprint next to the skull, that gives a hint about the scale.

As always, you can add your questions, observations and suggestions in the comments box below. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #455 answer

Last week I gave you a challenge to get your teeth into:

As I suspected, everyone managed to figure out what type of animal this is, since these teeth are quite distinctive (as mammal teeth often are).

To start with, there are canines and incisors in the premaxilla (the top jaw). These are missing from things like cows, sheep and deer. So it’s not one of them. The premolars are adapted to grinding rather than cutting, so it’s not some kind of pig or carnivore.

The molar teeth are low-crowned, unlike the teeth of grazers like horses which are high crowned, to cope with the wear and tear of silica-toughened grasses. This suggests an animal that browses on softer vegetation. Also, the lophs (those ridges of enamel that join the tooth cusps) are well defined and quite distinctive in their shape. That rules out most other herbivores, including the camels and their relatives.

It turns out that this is a species that I’ve featured on the blog before (although it was almost 11 years ago!) Not a Baird’s Tapir as most people thought, but a Malayan Tapir Tapirus indicus Desmarest, 1819.

I think it’s understandable that nobody got the correct species, since the specimen is a subadult (check out the molar in the jaw that’s still developing) which will somewhat alter the proportions compared to an an adult – especially considering the photos I gave you were restricted to the teeth and missed all the useful features of the rest of the skull.

So well done to everyone who worked out that the teeth belonged to a tapir!

Friday mystery object #455

At the Dead Zoo we get quite a lot of enquiries asking for identifications, and many of these requests are for teeth. Mammal teeth are usually quite distinctive – for instance, tooth morphology underpins a lot of small mammal palaeontology as teeth preserve well and can be identified to genus/species with reasonable accuracy. Additionally, they can often give a good indication of diet.

With that in mind, I took a photo of some teeth that I found in the collections, to see if you can work out which species they belong to:

For the mammal fans among you this is probably way too easy, so please try to keep your answers a little bit cryptic, just so that everyone has a chance to figure it out for themselves. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #454 answer

Last week I gave you this nice robust skull to have a go at identifying:

It proved a little bit more of a challenge than I originally expected, at least in terms of getting a species level identification.

So despite a somewhat ursine (bear-like) overall appearance, that may have confused a few people at first, this has all the features you’d expect to see in a male sea lion. In that it’s big, craggy, has huge open sinuses opening into the orbital region (nobody wants their eyes to be overly pressurised when they’re diving) and the teeth are relatively undifferentiated in the back part of the mouth, but they’re well adapted for fighting up front.

However, it turns out that there aren’t a huge number of resources online to see and compare the skulls of these beasties (and the ones that do exist aren’t necessarily the easiest to navigate). So while almost everyone figured out the sea lion bit, the species choice went a bit off track.

Most people plumped for the Steller’s Sea Lion, which (it must be admitted) looks very similar. But this is actually the skull of a Southern Sea Lion Otaria flavescens (Shaw, 1800).

I talked about this species before on Zygoma (many years ago now), with a specimen from the Horniman Museum, where I provided some links to the Marine Species Identification Portal. Sadly, that resource has been retired, but fortunately Naturalis Biodiversity Centre rescued the content and has kept it available online. It provides drawings of the skulls of both Steller’s and Southern Sea Lions and if you take a look at few key features you’ll spot the differences.

One major indication is the length and shape of the palate. The Southern Sea Lion has a very long palate, which terminates almost in line with the mandibular articulation, whereas the Steller’s terminates further forward. There are a few other features, but that one is the most immediately obvious.

So, a hearty congratulations to a variety of folks on Twitter who spotted that this was the Southern Sea Lion, but there’s no shame in not getting the correct species if you picked Steller’s, given how few resources there are that allow a really good comparison. I hope you enjoyed the challenge!

Friday mystery object #454

This week I’m back onto skulls for the mystery object – it’s been a while! Any idea what this handsome fellow from the Dead Zoo might be?

I’m sure that this won’t pose too much of a challenge for the more seasoned bone geeks among you, so why not try to keep the answers cryptic, so everyone can have a go at working it out. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #453 answer

Last week I gave you this LBJ (Little Brown Job) to have a go at identifying:

This is one of those birds that can be hard to identify in the field when it’s alive, but it can be even harder after spending over 100 years on display in a Museum.

I’ve mentioned this before – when dealing with taxidermy, damage to the pigments in fur and feathers caused by light exposure can significantly alter the colour of a specimen. This it will often happen preferentially – so you might find that black and red is affected more noticeably than brown for example, creating misleading colour combinations. This fading also happens on bills and claws, sometimes changing them to a light brown or yellow.

Another common issue with specimens is that on death the colour of skin can rapidly fade. This means that some common colour features that may be used in identification (e.g. yellow legs) may cease to be reliable. Some taxidermists paint these colour features back in, but some don’t.

All of this adds to the challenge, but when you have an inkling that you’re dealing with a faded specimen you can make some mental adjustments about how to interpret the appearance. This usually means putting greater emphasis on size, shape and pattern of features rather than on colour.

In the case of this specimen, most people narrowed it down to a member of the genus Linaria, but the issue with fading meant that the species that almost everyone opted for was the Twite, whereas the specimen is actually a male Common Linnet Linaria cannabina (Linnaeus, 1758), which I assume is in its winter plumage, unless the fading is REALLY bad (in the summer the males have quite a lot of red on the head and breast). The specimen was collected in Dublin and given to the Dead Zoo in 1915.

A useful feature for distinguishing between the species without relying on colour is the bill, which in the Twite is relatively small. Twites also have heavy streaking of the plumage, which should be somewhat apparent even in a faded specimen. Neither of these are apparent in this specimen.

There is a useful video guide made by the British Trust for Ornithology for distinguishing between Linnets and Twites in the field. It doesn’t extend to museum specimens, but it’s an excellent place to start!

Friday mystery object #453

This week I’ve decided to give you another LBJ from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

The last LBJ I gave you was harder than I expected, so I hope this one proves to offer a nice level of challenge! As ever, you can leave your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments box below. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #452 answer

Last week I gave you this guest mystery object from the comparative anatomy collection of the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Melbourne, courtesy of Rohan Long:

This is one of those specimens that it can take a while to get your head around, as most of the key features are entirely missing. From the top, the skull almost looks mammalian. Perhaps a little like a large rodent missing part of its zygomatic arches:

Even from the side there are some similarities, although it looks a bit more like a turtle:

Image of mystery bones by Yijie Cheng, 2023 — Image by Yijie Cheng, 2023

If you look closely at the underside of the skull, you’ll notice that it has a single occipital condyle, which is something you see in reptiles and birds, but that view of the underside also becomes clear that the front section of the mystery object doesn’t taper to create a bill, like you’d see in a turtle:

In fact, a bill is the most diagnostic feature that’s missing, and that’s because it’s fallen off.

Those cervical vertebrae are quite distinctively avian – and from a long-necked avian at that. Once you realise that this is the braincase of a fairly large long-necked bird, the next task thing is to look at birds with a bulbous and cleft region on the head, just at the base of the bill (most bird skulls taper down to the bill).

For me that indicates one species above all others – the Mute Swan Cygnus olor (Gmelin, JF, 1789).

I’d like to offer a hearty ‘bravo’ to Adam Yates, who was the first to comment and correctly identify this with a great cryptic clue:

It is an anseriform for sure the large oval basipterygoid articulations are a give away. With that profile, i’d lose my voice while trying to say the name of a certain Western Australian River.
Adam Yates: January 20, 2023 at 8:45 am Edit

This was backed up the ever-knowledgable Wouter van Gestel who runs SkullSite, which is the single most useful online resource I know of for bird skull identifications. Speaking of useful online resources, Rohan has been working on a project to make the collections of the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology available online – so be sure to check it out!

Friday mystery object #452

This week I have a guest mystery object for you to have a go at identifying, courtesy of Rohan Long:

Here’s another specimen from the comparative anatomy collection of the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Melbourne.

I have identified and documented almost the whole collection of almost 500 specimens, except for a few dozen that I have so far been unable to identify – the “box of shame”. These specimens mostly comprise fragmentary or isolated elements.

However, one of these problematic specimens comprises a partial skull articulated with four cervical vertebrae. Despite these particular skeletal elements usually enabling ready identification, this specimen has confounded me for months. I have had various hypotheses as to whom the skull could belong to, but nothing has been quite right.

I have googled images, I have visited our zoology museum, I have looked at books, and I have not been able to find the identity of this skull. Can you solve this osteological enigma?

By the way, we have a brand new online database where you can explore our comparative anatomy specimens, along with our other public collections. It’s the first time in about a century that this significant collection has been accessible to people outside of our Anatomy Department.

I think I may know what this is, but both myself and Rohan would love to hear your thoughts!

Friday mystery object #451 answer

Last week I gave you this bird specimen to have a go at identifying:

In the ornithological community, birds like this are sometimes referred to as an LBB / LBJ (Little Brown Bird / Job), because they are small, brown and hard to identify (especially in the field) due to the large number of similar looking species.

This specimen has a robust, conical bill and grey-streaked breast, which led some of you to think it could be a juvenile Crossbill or perhaps a female Grosbeak. However, as indicated by Wouter van Gestel in an excellent cryptic clue (and by Tim Dixon in a rather rude one), this is a Corn Bunting Emberiza calandra Linnaeus, 1758. It was collected in County Dublin and donated to the Dead Zoo in 1880.

These seed-eating passerines were widespread in arable farmland across Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, changing land use practices reduced the available habitat until they became locally extinct as a breeding species in the late 1990s – well within living memory for many people.

The Irish name for the Corn Bunting is Gealóg bhuachair and an interesting fact about these birds is that their populations are remarkably sedentary, allowing them to develop unique dialects in their breeding area. This means that even if this species is reintroduced to Ireland – assuming farming practices become better suited to their survival – the landscape will never again ring with quite the same song that these birds would have sung in the past.

Friday mystery object #451

Happy New Year!

2023 has started off with a bit of a bang. The Dead Zoo has been given the go-ahead for the next phase of a major redevelopment project, and yesterday I signed an employment contract accepting the position of Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland, so it looks like I have a busy few years ahead!

But that has nothing much to do with the mystery object, so here’s the specimen I have for you to identify:

It’s probably a bit on the easy side for anyone with an interest in ornithology, so if you know what this is, please keep your answer cryptic to give everyone else a chance. If not, I hope you enjoy the challenge!

Friday mystery object #450 answer

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

Perhaps not the most festive of objects to consider over the Christmas weekend, but it’s a very interesting one that is on display in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid.

I had a pretty good idea of what this was likely to be as soon as I saw it, based on my memory of a badly pest damaged taxidermy specimen of this species I saw about 12 years ago. But, the skull shap alone is distinctive, and the fringe of feather stumps around the eyes makes this fairly staraightforward to work it out – and a lot of you did just that.

This is the partially mummified skeleton of a Barn Owl Tyto alba (Scopoli, 1769).

That fringe around the orbits is made up of the nibbled down rachides (the stiff central vane of the feather is called a rachis and rachides is plural) of the feathers that created the facial disc. This structure acts a bit like a radar dish to help channel sound into the auditory openings (AKA earholes), and it’s what gives owls that distinctive flat-looking face, belying the shape of the underlying skull. The skull itself is particularly long and low for an owl, which is what screams Barn Owl to me, as other owls have a higher domed skull and relatively shorter bill.

You may have seen images of a similar looking specimen in the last couple of years, as a photo of a specimen on display as part of a special exhibition in Museum Natur und Mensch (Museum of nature and man) in Freiburg, Germany did the rounds on Twitter. Unfortunately I missed that exhibiton, but Markus Bühler did visit and wrote about it on his blog, which I strongly recommend taking a look at.

I hope you enjoyed the Christmas mystery object this year – let’s see what I can find for you in 2023. Have a very happy New Year!

Friday mystery object #450

This festive-feeling Friday, I have a mystery object for you that I spotted in Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid earlier this year:

This specimen is part of an exhibition showing some of the historical cabinet type displays from the early formation of the Museum. I couldn’t find a species identification, but I think I know what it is. The question for today is, do you?

Let me know what you think in the comments below – I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts.

Have an enjoyable festive season!

Friday mystery object #449 answer

Last week I gave you this fairly distinctive mystery object to identify:

It’s a vertebra, it’s big and it’s very long. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that made it a fairly easy mystery to solve and most people correctly identified the species, although James Bryant went one better and recognised this as the sixth cervical vertebra of a Giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis Linnaeus, 1758. James also went on to share an interesting paper comparing the cervical vertebrae of the Giraffe and its closest living relative, the Okapi.

I found this specimen quite interesting beyond the extreme elongation, as it demonstrates quite a lot of asymmetry, which is a little unusual for vertebrae:

My guess is that this reflects a degree of “handedness” when fighting – and if you’re not familiar with what that looks like, you can see what I’m talking about here:

As it turns out, a preference for a particular side when fighting in Giraffes has been observed and was reported in a paper published by Granweiler et al. in 2021, so this asymmetry may indeed have a functional cause (perhaps testing this could be a nice student research project for someone?)

This ability of collections to inspire and help answer new questions, that help us better understand our natural world, is a huge part of why I love working in museums. It’s also why I enjoy sharing some of these objects with you here, so I get a chance to hear your thoughts – it means I learn something new every time. Thanks!

Friday mystery object #449

This week I have a postcranial mystery object for you to have a go at identifying:

I suspect that this will be an easy one for some of you, so please keep your answers cryptic if you know what it is. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #448 answer

Last week I gave you these bones to have a go at identifying:

These are of course three toe bones (AKA phalanges) from a large artiodactyly. The staining of the bone suggests that it’s a fossil and the fact that I work at the Dead Zoo in Dublin might have offered a contextual clue…

Three Giant Deer (female and two males) at the entrance to the Dead Zoo Irish Room gallery.

This is of course the proximal, medial and distal phalanx (the distal phalanx also being known as the ungual) from the outer side of the right hind leg of an Irish Giant Deer Megaloceros giganteus (Blumenbach, 1799). Well done to all of you who worked that out (to any degree of accuracy!)

We have quite a lot of Giant Deer in the collections of the Dead Zoo, with over 600 records on our database, ranging from individual bones to complete skeletons. This offers an unusually large sample for researchers and artists wanting to work on these huge, extinct cervids.

This toe came from the female skeleton on display in the Irish Room of the Museum. The wire armature running through holes drilled through the bones that held it in place failed. This is likely due to a combination of factors, since the skeletons were mounted well over a century ago, and the armature is made of iron, which will have been gradually corroding over time.

I suspect there may also have been an element of ‘messing’ by a member of the public, since the skeletons are on open display and these toes were well within reach of young children or even in the bashing zone of a backpack if some decided to sit on the specimen’s plinth. Obviously we try to discourage this sort of thing, but on a busy day it can be hard to keep track of everyone in the space.

It’s a shame this happened recently, as we undertook an overhaul of the Giant Deer on display before we reopened the Museum earlier this year. Fossil preparator and conservator Remmert Schouten worked with me to build new sections of armature to remount a skull, he cleaned the specimens, and undertook a variety of small repairs (including replacement of an ungual on one of the other specimens) to get all of the Giant Deer looking their best.

I’ll leave you with some of the photos and a couple of videos, one with Remmert talking about the work and one with me setting the context and overview of the project. It was an intense week of work onsite, but very satisfying to see the transformation of the specimens!

Specimens in stillages, waiting to be conserved.

Friday mystery object #448

This week I have a bony mystery object for you to have a go at identifying:

Do you have any ideas what is?

As ever, you can leave your observations, questions and suggestions in the comments box below, and I’ll do my best to respond. Of course, if you think this is easy, take the time to come up with a cryptic answer, to keep the game fresh for other people – not everyone is a bonegeek!

Friday mystery object #447 answer

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

I didn’t think it would pose as much of a challenge as it did, but as I hinted when setting the question, this specimen is on the chunky side and I think the robustness threw some of you off the scent.

Allen Hazen offered a suite of great observations and considerations (which is well worth a read), but katedmonson and Adam Yates were on the right track from the get-go in the comments and the Twitterati twigged pretty quickly. This skull is from a Raccoon Procyon lotor (Linnaeus, 1758).

Most Raccoon skulls I’ve seen have been smaller and a lot more gracile than this chunkster, so when I first spotted this specimen it took me a moment to recognise the species. In particular, this specimen has very well-developed muscle scars around the zygomatic arches (cheekbones) and sagittal crest (the ridge along the midline of the braincase) compared to the younger specimens that I tend to see, such as this one from my handling collection:

This robustness in the mystery object changes the profile of the skull to some extent, making it more rounded on top and wider across the cheeks. The canines are also larger and the various suture lines are more fully fused, making it seem to be from a more formidable animal than a Raccoon – like a Wolverine or Honey-badger (both of which were suggested on Twitter).

This sort of cranial variation within a species is always interesting to me, since it reflects the biomechanical forces acting on the bone during the animal’s life. It will be influenced by the sex and age of the animal as well, so it illustrates why it’s important for collections to hold several examples of any species, with different sexes and developmental stages represented.

Thanks to everyone for their comments on this – it’s always interesting to get an insight into your thought processes!