The last mystery object was a bit of bird bone that I personally found really interesting, and it’s inspired me to offer up the same bit of bone, but from a different bird:
Any idea of the species that this came from? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments box below!
Last week I gave you this bony structure to identify:
I didn’t think this one would prove too difficult, since I went with something that most people have probably encountered on their dinner table or thrown in their domestic waste at some point. I wasn’t wrong and Chris Jarvis was first to drop a hint, with reference to Elvis the Pelvis and a famous brand of fried foodstuff from Kentucky.
This is of course the pelvis of a Chicken Gallus gallus domesticus (Linnaeus, 1758).
Bird pelvises are interesting structures, that are a bit more extensive than the usual mammalian equivalent1 due to the extended and fused vertebrae around the sacrum – the sacrum being the area of fused vertebrae where the hip bones attach to the spine. This extended region of fused vertebrae along the midline of the pelvis is referred to as the synsacrum.
In birds the fusion of the pelvis can be very extensive, and provide large areas for muscle attachment. If you look at the bottom of the photo above you can see where there are two scooped-looking sections, and this is where the “oysters” would be found in a roast Chicken. Those “oysters” are more technically referred to as the iliotrochantericus caudalis muscles and they attach to the femur and help stabilise the bird while walking.
The highly sculpted form of a bird’s pelvis creates quite a distinctive locomotor unit that reflects the way in which the bird uses its legs to walk, perch, paddle, swim or whatever else it may get up to. This means that the pelvis of a bird will usually reflect function very well and it will also carry a strong taxonomic signal since birds that are closely related will often share similar locomotion habits, lay similar sized eggs (that have to pass through the pelvis) and so on.
To my mind, the synsacrum provides an evolutionary mechanism to allow effective bipedalism while maintaining a horizontal spine – as opposed to the upright stance used in primates, which seems to come with some issues if my back is anything to go by. My background is in biomechanics and anatomy, so for me this is a topic that I find very interesting. So interesting that I may see if I can find another bird pelvis from a species with different habits to test your skills next week – let me know what do you think of that idea in the comments!
This week I have bony mystery object for you.:
Do you have any idea of the species that this came from?
As ever, you can leave your questions, observations and suggestions in the comments section below. Have fun with it!
One type of enquiry we get in the museum relates to the identification of natural materials. Often these come from law enforcement or customs officials, who may need an expert eye cast over a material to check whether it’s been imported or sold illegally.
Here’s a worked piece of natural material – I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on what it might be:
As ever, you can leave your suggestions in the comments section below. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Last week I gave you this somewhat faded and oddly shaped fish to have a go at identifying as a New Year challenge:
It was a very big ask, as the image isn’t really detailed enough to allow a species identification, but it was great to hear your various thoughts.
Adam Yates got very close with the suggestion it could be one of the Loricariidae – a family containing the armoured suckermouth catfish, but while this is from the same Order (the Siluriformes) this particular catfish is from a different Family.
While it has an armoured appearance, and shares those ornamented pectoral fin spines that are found in many catfish, this one has a filamentous tail and dorsal fin (that you can only just make out). What you can’t really see are the eight pectoral fin rays and the seven barbels present on the head.
This long thin tail is a hint that this is one of the Banjo Catfish, and the details of the barbels and pectoral fin rays I mentioned above let us know that it’s the Sevenbarbed Banjo Aspredinichthys filamentosus (Valenciennes, 1840).
For some reason the name Banjo Catfish always makes me think of this scene from the film Deliverance:
Musical shenanigans aside, these South American fish are bottom feeders in brackish waters, and have the unusual reproductive trait of the female attaching her eggs to her underside, so they can be moved around in the muddy waters in order to keep them oxygenated during their development.
That was certainly a challenging mystery object to start 2026, so I may see if I can find a slightly easier, but hopefully no less interesting specimen for the next mystery object!
Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed seeing in 2026 and I wish you all a very healthy and enjoyable year ahead.
This Friday’s mystery object is a specimen from the spirit collections in the Dead Zoo:
Do you know what this mystery aquatic beastie might be?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below – I hope you enjoy the challenge!
I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas! Last week I gave you this chonky skull as a mystery object to have a go at identifying:
It wasn’t anything particularly challenging or unusual, but it’s a very cool skull that we recently put on display in the Dead Zoo Lab in Dublin, and it’s nice to have a chance to share it here.
While Caimans did get a mention, pretty much everyone worked out that this is the skull of an Alligator – although which of the two living species it might be sparked some conversation.
In the words of Adam Yates:
Clues include snout shape and length, divided nostrils and lack of a lateral notch for receiving the big fangs from the lower jaw.
Excellent advice, although the simplest way I use to tell the difference is to check how much of a U-shape the maxilla forms. In this case it’s very U-shaped, which says American Alligator Alligator mississippiensis (Daudin, 1802).
I’m keeping this answer brief for this mystery object, since I’m sitting at a dinner table with family after a fantastic – and very large – meal, so I’m struggling to be creative with all my blood rushing to my stomach rather than my brain.
I hope you had a great Christmas, and I look forward to sharing more mystery objects for you in 2026!
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:
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!
This week I have a bony mystery object for you to have a go at identifying:
This is one that may be very easy, or it may prove quite tricky, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes!
I hope you have fun with this one.
This week I have a mystery object I spotted when I was visiting Copenhagen earlier this year:
I’d love to hear your thoughts on which species this big specimen could be. I hop you have fun with it!
N.B. if you click the images, they should open in a larger size.
Last week I gave you these specimens that are new to the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:
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!
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!
For this week’s mystery object, I have a skull from the collections of the Dead Zoo to test your identification skills:
I look forward to hearing what you think it might be. Have fun with it!
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!
The last mystery object proved to be quite difficult, but I gave some pointers on helping with parrot identification, and I thought it might be fun to try another Psittaciform this week:
I suspect this might prove to be a bit of an easier bird to identify, so I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on what it might be. Have fun!
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:
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,
Last week I gave you a close up of a specimen from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:
I don’t think this proved too much of a challenge, since Chris Jarvis responded with a correct identification within the hour:
This one’s sent me into a spiral, kudyu show a bit more,. bucky?
chrisjarvise8da89e10d says: July 18, 2025 at 8:44 am
In case you missed the cryptic clues here (after all, I suspect that not everyone is as much of an antelope aficionado as Chris), this is a male Greater Kudu Tragelaphus strepsiceros (Pallas, 1766).
These handsome, large, spiral-horned antelopes have a distinctive white chevron that runs between their eyes – presumably the clue that Chris spotted to identify this specimen so quickly.
There are other species in the Genus Tragelaphus that look similar to the Greater Kudu, but they have different colouration and subtly different patterns on their faces.
I had the photo of this specimen because I’ve been working with my colleagues in the National Museum of Ireland team on getting objects ready for display at another of our Dublin sites called Collins Barracks. Obviously this is one of those objects.
The Dead Zoo has been closed since last September, while we’ve been emptying the space of collections for a major and much needed refurbishment. Of course, we want to make some of the collection available to the public while the Dead Zoo is closed, hence the work we’re doing now.
However, the display we’re working on is a bit weird – but it’s not intended to be an exhibition. I want it to be more of an iterative experiment for myself and my team to work out how we’re going to deal with redisplaying and interpreting the collections when the refurbishment works are done and we reopen the main Dead Zoo building on Merrion Street.
We’re calling the temporary display the “Dead Zoo Lab”, because of the experimental approach we plan to take. We want to involve the public in a conversation about how what we’re doing works for our audiences. I’m excited to see how we can build dialogue in this space to help inform our work over the next few years.
I am getting a bit ahead of myself though, as we still need to finish installing objects over the next week or so, before we can open the doors to the public. Once we get to that stage I’ll be sure to share some photos of the space for the Zygoma community – and I’ll be excited to hear your thoughts!
Last week I gave you a close-up of an object that caught my attention when visiting a friend who works at the Natural History Museum, Denmark:
The original image I had gave a bit too much information to make this a challenge, so I have to admit to doing some judicious cropping, and I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an easy or difficult one,
It turns out I made just difficult enough for most people to get in wrong, but there was one correct answer, from Katenockles on Mastodon:
Here’s my original photo:
As you can see, this is part of the antler of a Reindeer Rangifer tarandus (Linnaeus, 1758) that still bears the velvet, which is the hairy outer layer of skin covering various layers of tissue. These include the perichondrium and periosteum, which surround and protect the cartilage and bone being grown by highly vascularised mesenchyme tissue and specialised cells such as chondrocytes and osteoblasts. These cells create a scaffold of cartilage that becomes mineralised to form the bone that makes up the antler.
This mechanism for antler growth is really impressive, since it allows these strong and sometimes very large bony structures to develop in around 6 months – sometimes growing over 7cm a week when good nutrition is available.
This specimen was of particular interest for me, as I’ve never had the opportunity to see an example of the velvet up close. Normally my interactions with antlers involve historic museum specimens taken as trophies during the hunting season, or fossil examples – like this impressive specimen from the Pleistocene of Ireland:
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions – I can certainly see why kangaroos and camels were suggested, and I’m a bit surprised that nobody suggested Platypus, as that was my immediate thought. Finally, very well done to Katenockles for working it out!
This week’s mystery object is a close-up of something I found interesting and thought it would be fun to share:
Any idea what this might be? I’m not sure if it’s really easy or really difficult, so I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Have fun with it!
This week I have a fuzzy mystery object for you to identify:
Any idea what this colourful little critter could be? I look forward to hearing your thoughts, questions and suggestions in the comments section below. Have fun!
Zygoma 