Tag Archives for mystery object

Friday mystery object #466 answer

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

Image by Rohan Long, 2023

This specimen may have been collected by Frederic Wood Jones, a British comparative anatomist who headed up the Anatomy Department at the University of Melbourne in the 1930s. This may mean it could have come from almost anywhere, given Wood Jones’ links with other anatomists.

So all we really have to go on is the morphology of the object.

It’s clearly made from long section of quite highly vascularised bone:

It seems to be missing the smooth surface normally seen on bone, but that can be caused by a variety of factors, from disease and infection in the live animal to weathering after it’s been dead for a while.

The ends of the bone don’t have any indications of an articular surface:

The larger end has a bit of a hollow, but the smaller end appears to be broken and you can see a hollow core to the bone.

Overall, the shape is not really reminiscent of any long bone I can think of. It lacks a normal articular surface at the unbroken end and it has no crests or ridges that I would normally expect muscles to attach to. It tapers quite consistently and has a slight curve.

My first thought was shared by others in the comments, with Chris Jarvis getting in first with the simple but effective pun:

Oooh! Sick!

Chris Jarvis August 4, 2023 at 12:37 pm

This is of course a reference to Oosik, which is the name in Native Alaska Languages for the baculum or os penis of a Walrus Odobenus rosmarus (Linnaeus, 1758).

There are some differences between this specimen and some of the other Walrus bacula I’ve seen and which show up in an image search, but there are a variety of possible explanations for that.

One is simply that Walrus bacula are quite variable. They can vary significantly through the life of the animal as it develops, but it can also vary quite a lot between individuals. If you spend as long looking at Walrus penis bones on the internet as I have (what on Earth happened to my life?!) then you’ll notice that some have a strong double curve while others can be almost straight, others are thick and some are quite thin.

This variability is also seen in other pinnipeds with a high degree of sexual dimorphism, like Sealions and Elephant Seals.

So while it’s hard to be 100% certain of the identification, I think it is the most likely solution to this mystery.

I hope you had fun with this one!

Friday mystery object #466

This week I have a guest mystery object for you courtesy of Rohan Long, curator of the comparative anatomy collection of the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Melbourne. Here’s some context about the collection from Rohan, it may help with an identification:

Our comparative anatomy collections date from the earliest 20th century and are predominantly native Australian mammals and domestic animal species. However, the academics at the University have always had international networks, and there are species represented in the collection from all over the world. Many have been prepared in a lab for class specimens, many have been collected in the field. The latter are assumed to have been associated with Frederic Wood Jones, a British anatomist with a fondness for comparative anatomy and island collecting trips who was head of our Anatomy Department from 1930 to 1937.

Image by Rohan Long, 2023
Image by Rohan Long, 2023
Image by Rohan Long, 2023
Image by Rohan Long, 2023
Image by Rohan Long, 2023

Do you have any ideas what this might be? As ever, you can leave your questions, insights and suggestions in the comments box below. Have fun with this one!

Friday mystery object #465 answer

Last week I gave you an entomological mystery to solve, in the triangular(ish) shape of this moth:

For the real insect aficionados out there, this probably wasn’t too much of a challenge (I’m looking at you Tim), but for the rest of us it wasn’t quite so easy.

The overall appearance of this moth, with its size, shape (especially wing position), and fuzzy wing fringes is what you expect from a member of the family Noctuidae – the Owlet Moths. However, it’s a big family, with almost 12,000 species. A lot of the species also look similar to each other and some have a wide variety of different colour morphs – just to make things more complicated.

Context helps us out here, since although there are of lot of Noctuidae species in the world, there are far fewer found in Ireland and there are helpful resources that illustrate them.

Even with helpful visual resources, with good photos of the different Irish species, it can be hard to work out what the diagnostic features might be. For some species of moths you have to get into the fine detail of the genitals, but thankfully there are wing patterns that are distinctive in this instance.

In this case, the wing pattern of interest is the small triangular black mark on the lower portion of the leading edge of the upper wing.

That’s it.

The rest of the colour and pattern of the upper wing is very variable in this species, so you can’t rely on any of those features as a reliable indicator. Of course, if the specimen was alive and had its wings open, it would be a much easier identification:

This is, of course, a Large Yellow Underwing Noctua pronuba (Linnaeus, 1758), which is pretty obvious once the underwing is visible. So well done to everyone who worked it out from just the upper wings.

Friday mystery object #462 answer

Last week I gave you a mystery object that came wrapped in this intriguing box:

The discovery inside was this:

Definitely not a Poptart.

This is a discovery made by 10 year old Anna, who found it when digging in the garden with her Dad, and she’s keen to know what it’s from. In fact, she’s hoping it’s from a new species of dinosaur, so it can be give the excellent name Annasaurus (although I believe such a creature already exists in the world of Doctor Who).

While the bone is pretty big, unfortunately it’s not from a dinosaur, but a large mammal. The cut surface looks very neat and that suggests that it’s been passed through a band-saw, probably by a butcher:

This would suggest it comes from one of the commonly eaten species, such as Sheep, Pig or Cow – although It is possible that butchered bone would come from another animal, such as Goat, Horse or a species of deer.

However, the size immediately reduces the likely suspects down a lot. It’s bigger than any Sheep or Goat bone I’ve encountered, so the focus is on Horse and Cow, although Red Deer and Pig are worth a look too,

Normally my first question is “which bone is it?” and in this instance it’s actually a bit harder than usual because it’s both cut and from a young animal, so the articular surface from the top of the bone (or epiphysis) hadn’t fused yet and is missing.

This means we’re looking at the neck section of the bone (the metaphysis), which is harder to find good material to compare against. However, with common species there are at least some excellent online resources to see full bones from a variety of angles that can help build up a picture of what to look for.

In this case I used OsteoID, which has good coverage of skeletal elements for a lot of mammal species that commonly occur in North America. I already recognised that this was from around the knee area, so I first checked if we are dealing with the leg section above the knee (distal femur) or the bit below (proximal tibia). Wouter van Gestel suggested shin bone (tibia) in the comments and I came around to that interpretation, so that’s what I originally went with.

However, Christian Meyer later suggested it was more likely to be distal part of the femur, and after looking at the specimen in hand, I find myself in agreement.

On to the species! It’s a good bit broader than the Pig femur (especially considering that the epiphysis is the broadest section of the bone and that’s missing here).

The shape of the metaphysis is too robust for deer, who have a more sharply defined ridge that runs into the main shaft of the bone (or diaphysis):

But it’s not as robust and it tapers more in the metaphyseal area than you’d expect from a Horse..

So after a good bit of comparison, I’m fairly certain that this is the distal metaphysis from the femur of a Cow Bos taurus Linnaeus, 1758.

I will write back to Anna to let her know about her discovery and while it may not be a dinosaur, it’s still an interesting find, so I hope she’s not too disappointed!

Friday mystery object #462

This week I have a great mystery object for you – it came in one of the best bits of post I’ve had for ages:

Here is the discovery that was inside:

Any idea what it might be?

As ever, you can leave your answers in the comments box below – but I suspect that some of you might know exactly what this is, so please try to keep your answers cryptic, so everyone has a chance to work it out for themselves. Have fun with it!

Friday mystery object #461 answer

Last week I gave you a guest mystery object from Catherine McCarney, the manager of the Dissection Room at the UCD School of Veterinary Medicine:

The first question I normally try to answer when undertaking an identification is “what kind of bone is this?”, but in this instance it’s not immediately obvious.

There is a broad section with articulation points, a foramen (or at least something that looks like a hole, which might be a foramen) and a flattish section that looks like it probably butts up against something with a similar flat section. This would normally put me in mind of the ischium of a pelvis.

But it’s not a pelvis as the articulations are all wrong and the shape of the skinny piece of bone that projects off doesn’t fit any functional ilium shape that I’m aware of.

The pectoral girdle has a similar set of structural features and this object starts to make more sense with that in mind. Things like turtles and whales may have a structure like this, but there’s something to keep in mind: despite being fairly large, this object only weighed in at 26g.

Turtles and whales have dense bone that helps reduce buoyancy, to make remaining submerged less energetically demanding, but this bone must be full of air spaces – which offers a clue as to likely type of animal it came from. A bird – as Joe Vans noted in the comments.

Considering the size of this object there are very few possible candidates. Most birds are pretty small and this object is pretty big, so we just need to look at some of the Ratites.

The comparisons I managed to find have led me to the conclusion that this is most likely part of the pectoral girdle of an Ostrich Struthio camelus Linnaeus, 1758.

Pectoral girdle of an Ostrich by Uwe Gille, 2006.

More specifically, I think it’s the coracoid (#2 on image), clavicle (#3 on image), and scapula (#4 on image) from the left hand side of the pectoral girdle of an Ostrich.

I was delighted to see that Wouter van Gestel agreed with this assessment in the comments, since he knows more about bird bones than I could ever hope to learn!

Finally I’d like to thank the fatastic Catherine McCarney for sharing this mystery object from the depths of the Vet School’s collections. I hope you all enjoyed this challenge!

Friday mystery object #459 answer

Last week I gave you this guest mystery object from Andy Taylor:

Image by Andy Taylor, 2023

Those paired incisors and the large diastema (or gap) behind them are characteristic of a rodent, so that narrows down the possible options by not very much, since there are well over 2250 species.

However, this specimen also has a very large infraorbital canal (that big forward-facing hole in front of the eye socket), which is a feature of the hystricomorphs – the group containing capybaras, porcupines, chinchillas, guinea pigs, hutias and suchlike. The teeth are an additional give-away for the group, with their discrete little patterns on the grinding surfaces:

Image by Andy Taylor, 2023
Image by Andy Taylor, 2023

The scale of this specimen threw me a little at first, as I’m used to dealing with metric, but this scalebar has 16 subdivisions, so it muct be imperial. Which really helps, as it means this skull is quite large for a rodent – somewhere in the region of 5 inches or 12.7cm. That immediately narrows things down a lot more.

An additional clue is in the narrow skull profile:

Image by Andy Taylor, 2023

A lot of rodents have a lower and broader skull and this kind of shape is what I expect to see from a species that moves through dense undergrowth rather than climbing, digging or swimming. This, combined with all the other clues, led me to the agoutis.

There are 12 species of agouti, so we’re still not quite there with the identification. Most species that I can find comparative material for have a significantly longer rostrum than this specimen (relative to the rest of the skull), but there are some species I’ve not been able to find a really reliable reference skull to compare against.

There is one species where I couldn’t find a great skull comparison, but which appears in living individuals to have a relatively short snout and the skull image I could find also appears to be less nasally advantaged than most agoutis. That was the Brazilian or Red-rumped Agiouti Dasyprocta leporina (Linnaeus, 1758).

I’d be keen to take a further look with some good quality reference material, but I’m reasonably happy with this. The advantage of good comparative material is that it really helps make those detailed observations about particular shapes and sizes that can be hard to properly recognise from a photo.

In a strange, but very welcome cooincidence, I had the good fortune to meet up with Andy last Friday evening. I was at the NatSCA conference in the UK – which was held just a short journey from where Andy lives. It offered a great chance to chat with a fellow bone geek and natural history fanatic and I hope to have some more guest objects from Andy and his amazing collection in the future!

Friday mystery object #459

This week I am have a great guest mystery object from Andy Taylor for you to have a go at identifying:

Image by Andy Taylor, 2023
Image by Andy Taylor, 2023
Image by Andy Taylor, 2023
Image by Andy Taylor, 2023

Here’s what Andy says about the specimen:

On Sunday, myself and Sophie Bagshaw were working through specimens that were donated to me from a person who had been given them by a zoological park. The specimen in question was part of a huge shipment of almost 140 frozen specimens that were in various states of preparation and were mostly head specimens. … I have a large rodent skull that I’m struggling to ID

Andy and Sophie have been doing great stuff with osteology for educational purposes for a while now, so it was a real pleasure to get a question like this, and it seems like a perfect opportunity for the community here to add their thoughts.

So, what do you think it is? Let us know below!

Friday mystery object #458 answer

Last week I gave you this skull from the collections of the Dead Zoo, which had been misidentified and that came to light when Dr George Argyros was doing some research on the carnivore skeletons:

The label attached to this specimen indicated that this is the skull of a Leopard, which is clearly wrong. The label also identified the specimen as having been collected in East Africa by Major A.W.V. Plunkett.

Labels like this worry me. Not because they contain a misidentification, but because they may indicate that someone in the past has mixed up the specimen labels. This is a much bigger problem than a simple misidentification, as it can mean the real specimen has become dissociated from its information.

The huge, robust teeth of this specimen should make it fairly clear that it belongs to one of those specialist bone-crushers – the hyenas:

However, there are three species of hyena to choose from (I’m leaving the Aardwolf of this, since they don’t match this dental morphology even remotely).

My first thought was that this specimen is on the small side for a Spotted Hyena:

Striped Hyena on left, Spotted Hyena on right

Size is seldom a definitive feature, especially in species that display sexual dimorphism, but what is more useful is the detail of the tiny molar at the back of the maxillary toothrow. This is absent in Spotted Hyenas, but it occurs in both Striped and Brown Hyenas.

So you might ask, how do we distinguish between Striped and Brown Hyenas? This is a good question. For starters, it’s hard to find enough reliable good images of the Brown Hyena’s skull online that show the details needed to distinguish between the species.

However, a bit of searching highlighted that the Brown Hyena has a shorter and more robust angular process of the mandible than the Striped – and the mystery object.

Image of Brown Hyena skull by David J. Stang, 2005.

This long angular process was spotted by katedmonson, but Adam Yates was the first with the identification of Striped Hyena Hyaena hyaena (Linnaeus, 1758).

This one proved a little trickier than I thought at first, due to the similarities between the Brown and the Striped species. But I’m a little relieved that the consensus fell on Striped, both here on the blog, and between myself and George, since the Striped Hyena is found in East Africa, whereas the Brown is limited to South Africa.

This at least agrees with the locality on the label, so it may well have simply been misidentified when the specimen was acquired – especially since it looks like it was skeletonised naturally, so it may have been found dead and already defleshed, making it harder to identify.

I hope you enjoyed the challenge!

Friday mystery object #457 answer

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

This specimen came to light during some research being carried out on carnivore bones by Dr George Argyros, a Professor visiting us from Emory & Henry College, Virginia. It was identified as Vulpes on the label, but both George and myself were doubtful.

The specimen’s spurious identification can be tracked back to when it was named in the Museum’s register as Vulpes fulva argentata or Silver Fox. This identification was assigned to the specimen when it was given to the Royal Zoological Society by N.H.P. Vickers in March 1900 (see page 127 of the monthly Irish Naturalist covering March 1900):

The Museum bought the specimen in skeletal form from the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland in 1903 and the name Silver Fox was kept until a later review of the taxonomic hierarchy in our database, which ‘corrected’ the name to Red Fox Vulpes vulpes.

However, this name change was not based on the morphology of the specimen. The characteristic lyre-shaped sagittal crest1 immediately made both myself and George think Urocyon and the small size of the specimen made both of us converge on an identification of Island Fox Urocyon littoralis (Baird, 1857) after independent bouts of measuring.

Image of Urocyon littoralis (Island Fox) by Pacific Southwest Region USFWS, 2015.

For those of you interested in seeing the size range parameters for Island Fox skulls, this PDF of the Mammalian Species description of Urocyon littoralis is very helpful indeed.

So I offer a hearty congratulations to everyone who spotted that this skull is from the genus Urocyon, although I think most people were thinking of the Grey Fox, Urocyon cinereoargenteus.

Image of Urocyon cinereoargenteus (Grey Fox) by California Department of Water Resources, 1993.

1It probably shouldn’t really be referred to as that, since it isn’t actually sagittal, except perhaps where the two ridges meet at the very back of the skull – but you know what I mean.

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 #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 #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? 

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

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.