Tag Archives for mystery object

Friday mystery object #446

Earlier this week I had a chance to look through some specimens that were recently donated to the Dead Zoo. Most were well identified and labelled by the gifted naturalist who collected them, the late Dr Don Cotton, but this specimen was lacking a label:

Do you have any thoughts about what it might be from? As usual you can leave your observations, questions and suggestions in the comments box below. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #445 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object, which was hanging on the wall in a cocktail bar in Granada:

This is clearly a Testudine (AKA a tortoise or turtle), but there are over 350 species, so there’s a bit of work still to do. However, this one has some pretty distinctive features in the three well-defined keels on the carapace and well developed serrations on its rear margin.

There are a few species that have some similarities in their carapace, including the Alligator Snapping Turtle – as suggested by E on Twitter – but the finer details of the scutes and carapace keel shapes suggest it’s something else.

The fairly steep convergence of the external keels towards the midline at the front of the carapace is quite distinctive and the relatively smooth overlapping scutes in the forward section, but more jagged scutes to the rear ring a bell for me.

I think this is the carapace of a Keeled Box Turtle AKA Jagged Shelled-turtle AKA Mouhot’s Turtle Cuora mouhotii Gray, 1862. Several other people (like Chris, Allen Hazen, the SMG Collections Team and Colin McCarthy) seem to have agreed, both in the comments on the blog and on Twitter.

This species is from Southeast Asia and, due to a variety of pressures from the pet trade, collecting for food and habitat loss it’s now endangered, particularly in Vietnam. I’m not sure how this specimen managed to end up on the wall of a Spanish cocktail bar, but my guess would be that it either came in as a holiday souveneir from a visit to Southeast Asia or from an animal that came into the country via the pet trade.

Friday mystery object #444 answer

Last week I gave you a couple of skulls from the collections in the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

It’s pretty obvious that they are rodents, based on those paired incisors. But there are a lot of rodent species out there…

These are small and, based on the size, we can immediately rule out all anything bigger than a Brown Rat. The anterior portion of zygomatic process, where it meets the maxilla (the front parts of the cheek bones) are broad and triangular, narrowing to very fine arches where it meets the temporal porocess (the rear part of the arch of the cheek bone). This is something I associate with voles.

The teeth are also distinctively ‘voley’ with their zig-zagging cusps.

There are still a lot of vole species out there, but if you’re familiar with identifying specimens from owl pellets in the UK you’ll probably recognise that the specimen on the left has a very distinctive second molar, with a small fifth cusp. This is a tell-tale indicator of the Short-tailed Field Vole Microtus agrestis (Linnaeus, 1761), while the more rounded cusps of the specimen on the right are more in keeping with a Bank Vole Myodes glareolus (Schreber, 1780).

So congratulations to Chris Jarvis in the comments, and to the Scarborough Museum and Galleries Collections Team on Twitter, who managed to leave sufficiently clear but cryptic clues to the identity of these skulls:

I hope you enjoyed these smol skulls and the pointers provided to separate them.

Friday mystery object #444

This week I finally had a chance to look at some skulls in the Dead Zoo collections, and I thought I’d share the joy of that with you here:

Do you have any idea which two species these skulls might be from?

As ever you can leave your thoughts, questions and suggestions in comments box below. If you find this too easy, maybe make your answer cryptic, to give other people a chance to work it out for themselves. Enjoy!

Friday mystery object #443 answer

Last week I gave you this cute little fuzzball to have a go at identifying:

Everyone spotted that this is one of the New World porcupines (AKA the Erethizontidae), but there are 18 species to choose from. Some have quite short hairs between their quills, giving a spiky appearance, but this specimen has definite floof. The tail is quite short and the body is small – as several people noticed in the comments.

With a relatively small number of species, and with a few distinctive features to look for, you might expect that scanning through images of the various different species could help get an identification. It turns out that this method worked a bit too well, since this very specimen happens to be used for the image used to depict the species on Wikipedia – as spotted by Allen Hazen.

This mystery object is a Brown Hairy Dwarf Porcupine Coendou vestitus, Thomas, 1899. The reason our specimen has been used to depict the species is probably because there are very few other images of this animal dead or alive – which suggests that it’s probably rather rare (apparently nobody recorded seeing one for over 75 years).

This specimen has a few question marks for me – in particular the collection locality, which is listed as Chiriqui, Central America. This doesn’t sound right, considering the species is considered endemic to the Eastern Cordillera in the Colombian Andes – over 1,000km away. It’s probably down to a data mix up, but if not, it raises some interesting questions.

Friday mystery object #442

This week I have an object that was found in Ireland, in a field, near a river. I was asked to identify it, since the same location had yielded some interesting archaeological finds and this object’s surprisingly light weight made it clear it wasn’t just an ordinary pebble:

Detail of small hole in surface of the object

Any idea what this could be?

As ever you can leave your thoughts, questions and suggestions in the comments box below – I hope you have fun with this one!

Friday mystery object #440 answer

Last week I gave you this piece of bone to have a go at identifying:

It was a particularly difficult challenge and I’m still not 100% sure of what it is, but I was very interested to hear your thoughts.

There was a general leaning towards one of the (many) bones of the skull – although since there’s a suture running through the middle of this, it must consist of at least two different bones that have fused.

This feels right to me, since there aren’t many other parts of the skeleton consisting of fused bony plates containing foramina. But as to which bones of the skull and which animal, that’s a much more difficult identification prospect.

Unfortunately this kind of identification usually depends on a combination of familiarity with a range of skulls and comparative collections to figure it out and, I’m sad to say, that I’ve had very little opportunity to immerse myself in cranial collections for several years now and I rarely get a chance to work on comparative material these days.

The best I could come up with is this being a section from the upper internal portion of the orbit of a Sheep Ovis aries Linnaeus, 1758 (or something quite similar).

I’m thinking this partly due to the V-shaped notch in the margin of the bone, which can be hard to spot in the initial photos, so here it is from the side:

This notch is something I think of as being present in some (but by no means all) Sheep specimens (e.g. take a look at the dorsal view in Mike Taylor’s fantatsic SV-POW! blogpost featuring a very helpful Sheep skull multiview). When I checked with a couple of my own specimens, I think I can just make out where this mystery section might sit – but it’s very hard to be sure since the region is quite variable between individuals (or perhaps breed) by the looks of my specimens:

I hope that wasn’t too disappointing as a challenge, and I apologise for not offering a definitive answer, but if I manage to track down some old specimen that is missing this exact section of bone, I’ll be sure to share it here!

In the meantime, please feel free to offer more suggestions and, if you have comparative material of your own, maybe see what you think? Thanks everyone!

Friday mystery object #440

This week I have some news to accompany the mystery object.

After two years of hard work we have reopened the Dead Zoo. As part of that process, we came across this small piece of bone, which was caught in the historic furniture for several decades before jolting loose during some of the moves that have happened recently in the Museum:

A top tier challenge for a seasoned bone geek by the looks of it. So do you have any thoughts on what it might be from?

Oh, and in case you’re in Ireland (or have a VPN) you might be interested in this documentary that was aired on Monday, which follows the work I did on our whale specimens back in 2020. There’s a trailer for it here:

I hope you enjoy!

Friday mystery object #439 answer

Last week I gave you this little crab to have a go at identifying:

I wasn’t sure if it would be an impossible task based on just this image, but I thought I’d see how you fared. There weren’t many comments on the blog, but Twitter yielded some very astute observations, with Pete Liptrot getting the correct Family and Tim identifying it to species:

Most impressive!

I picked this Floating Crab Planes minutus (Linnaeus, 1758) because I spotted it whilst working in the Irish Room of the Dead Zoo and I didn’t recognise it myself. The specimen was collected from Dingle Bay on the 2nd July 1974, where it was found with stalked barnacles on drifting float.

These crabs are pelagic hitchhikers, relying on floating substrates (e.g. seaweed, turtles, ocean rubbish) to rest on between short forays to catch food, such as krill and very small fish. They are present in the North Atlantic, occasionally turning up along the west coast of Ireland and southwestern Britain.

So well done to Tim for that impressive identification. I’m afraid that I haven’t had a chance to figure out the diagnostic characteristics for this small, but well formed crab to share, because I’ve been too busy trying to get the Dead Zoo ready to reopen. If you want to see some of what’s been going on as part of that, check out the #DeadZooDiary.

More exciting news to come, but that can wait 😉

Friday mystery object #438 answer

Last week I gave you this closeup of a mystery object from the Dead Zoo:

I thought it might be a bit too easy, so I asked for cryptic clues – and I was neither wrong, nor disappointed.

There were a variety of comments both here on the blog and on Twitter, and it was fairly clear that some key ideas emerged. Termites and ants were mentioned a lot (in relation to diet), but it was one of the seven deadly sins that was most often referenced. Clearly this sin is Sloth, but the animal is also clearly not a Sloth, since it has five claws and not just two or three. Plus, Sloths eat leaves rather than invertebrates.

However, there is of course a termite hunting critter with five toes and “Sloth” in its name – the Sloth Bear Melursus ursinus (Shaw, 1791).

Like their cousin the Giant Panda, the Sloth Bear has veered off the quite generalist diet of most bear species and focused on something locally abundant and easy to access – assuming you have the right equipment. In this case the equipment is a set of absolutely MASSIVE claws, long lips and tongue and no teeth in their upper jaw.

Sloth Bears are somewhat lanky looking compared to their similarly-sized Black Bear cousins and while they are less carnivorous, they can be quite formidable when faced with another predator thanks to a their large canine teeth and those impressive claws.

This particular specimen has been displaced from its usual location thanks to building works taking place in the Dead Zoo. Unfortunately, the wild living population is also being displaced due to habitat loss and degradation.

My thanks to everyone who commented on the mystery object – there were some great cryptic answers and while I’m a bit put out because so many of you figured it out, I’m happy that so many of you clearly know about these somewhat odd – but in my opinion, very interesting – members of the bear family.

Friday mystery object #436

This week I have been in the beautiful city of Edinburgh at the conference of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA) hosted wonderfully by National Museums Scotland (NMS).

It’s been a fantastic opportunity to catch up with natural history colleagues from around the world and to learn what everyone has been busy doing over the last few years. I also got to see some fantastic specimens held by NMS and I thought I’d set one of them as this week’s mystery object:

Do you have any idea what this might be?

As ever, you can leave your thoughts in the comments box below. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #435 answer

Last week I tried something a bit different for the Friday mystery object. Instead of giving you a few different views of a skull or whole animal, I offered just a small detail:

I hope the challenge proved fun for everyone who tried to figure this out. There were quite a few correct answers, although I think it was quite a challenge.

In fact, it was a challenge issued to the 5th class of St. Laurence’s National School by the Sallins Biodiversity Group in their excellent #MapOfLife2022 project.

Here’s what Gavin Brangan has to say about it:

For many children, the Dead Zoo is their first experience of being struck by the wonder of nature up close and in person.

In #MapOfLife2022 wanted to bring as many facets of that experience to the school and local community. On Wednesday, 5th Class in St Laurence’s had a video tour and workshop given by the education department of National Museum of Ireland – Go Extinct!

Joanne Murray, a local artist, based her art workshops with Senior Infants and 3rd class in the school on the specimen drawers containing insects. To cap it all, we’ve invited the children to find Paolo’s mystery object on the ground floor of the virtual tour of the museum.

https://mapoflife2022.wordpress.com/2022/06/02/challenge-3-mystery-object/

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that one of the reasons I’ve kept it going for so long (this is its 13th year!) is the community that has developed here and the opportunities the blog offers to help people engage with objects from the natural world and the stories they can tell.

In this case, I thought sharing this beautiful feather pattern would help me tell the story of an extremely rare visitor to Ireland – the Great Bustard Otis tarda Linnaeus, 1758.

This particular bird is a female that somehow ended up in Castletown, Berehaven, Co. Cork in the winter of 1925. At this point in time the Great Bustard had been extinct in Britain for over 90 years and was not to be seen again until they were reintroduced to Salisbury Plain around 2007, so it couldn’t have come from Ireland’s closest neighbour.

It’s more likely to have come from France, Spain or Portugal, meaning it was off course by over 1,000km. I haven’t found any records of particularly big storms in the winter of 1925, but often it will be something like that which brings a migrating bird so far off track.

These birds like dry open grassland, with plenty of insects to feed on. Ireland is probably too wet for them to become established, although with a changing world climate that could possibly change in the future.

This is the interesting thing about nature – it changes constantly. What we think of as being normal is actually just what we’re used to seeing in the span of our lives. This is why it is so important to understand biodiversity over time – to see how it’s changing and to work out why it’s changing.

Museums like the Dead Zoo have specimens collected by people over the last 250 years and the activities of community groups doing projects like #MapOfLife2022 can help feed into that preserved knowledge and add a new level of understanding of the natural world today.

I think it’s especially important for young people to have an opportunity to get involved with this sort of thing, since they will be our future naturalists, life scientists and museum curators. This is why the efforts of people like Gavin, and teachers like Ms Hennessy and Ms Scott are incredibly important and deserve recognition.

To wrap up, I recommend taking a look at the photo journal of the #MapOfLife2022 events to see the young and old of Sallins getting involved in Biodiversity and natural history.

Friday mystery object #435

This week I’m going for a slightly different approach to the mystery object. Normally I give you as much information as I have available to let you figure out what you’re looking at, but today I thought I’d give you a snippet from a specimen that I think you’ll find distinctive, but which might offer a bit of a challenge.

All of that being said, here’s this week’s mystery object:

Any idea which animal this pretty pattern might belong to?

As ever, you can leave your observations, questions and suggestions in the comments section below. Happy hunting!

Friday mystery object #434 answer

Last week I gave you a Blaschka glass model from the Dead Zoo to have a go at identifying:

As you are probably aware from some of my previous posts on these rather fascinating objects, there can be quite a big difference between what the specimen was sold as in the Blaschka catalogue and what we might call the species today. In fact, this is a fairly common theme with many of the mystery objects, given the relentless progress being made in taxonomy since many museum collections were established.

In the case of Blaschka models this can cause a lot of confusion, since in some collections the names have been updated to match modern taxonomy, whereas in others the original name is still used. Most confusing is where the taxonomy was updated historically (and badly) so it no longer bears much relation to either the original name or the current name. That’s why the ordering numbers used by Ward are so useful, as it allows specimens to be tracked back to the catalogue (as long as the original number has survived).

Another way to figure out which species your Blaschka model might be is to look through the illustrations that the Blaschka’s used as the basis of their models. In the case of sea anemones that usually means checking the plates in Actinologia britannica. A history of the British sea-anemones and corals. by Philip Henry Gosse, 1860.

In this case Plate VIII has the goods:

As identified on Twitter by Ann Lingard and in the comments by Cam, the mystery object is of course Gosse’s Stomphia Churchiae or more recently Stomphia coccinea (Müller, 1776).

This is one of those times when it’s a real shame that the species has been synonymised, since Gosse named the species Churchiae in honour of Miss Anne Church, who had sent him a written description and figures of the species after recovering a specimen from a turbot net in Loch Long, Scotland. Thanks to Ann Lingard for sharing a link to an interesting blogpost on “The anemonizers of Scotland” touching on this (see also p.233 of Actinologia britannica).

Finally, with the original name, the number from the Ward catalogue comes easily, which in this instance is Nr.108.

I hope you enjoyed this diversion into the world of the Blaschkas – no doubt there will be more to come in future as I’ll be talking about them at a glass conference in a month’s time.