We’re heading towards the end of the cats this week – any idea what this slightly battered looking feline might be?
Suggestions gratefully received in the comments section below!
Tag Archives for Natural history
Friday mystery object #224 answer
Last Friday I gave you this felid skull to have a go at identifying:
The size was larger than the previous cat skulls I’ve shown you, which helped reduce the possibilities a bit – after all, there are more smaller cats than bigger ones.
As it turns out, Sam Misan and henstridgesj both managed to work out that this is the skull of a Serval Leptailurus serval (Schreber, 1776).
A Serval cat at Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, by Bob, 2007
These long-legged cats have a relatively small head, but huge ears – and the large external auditory meatus (ear hole) with a very pronounced ridge above for attachment of the muscles of the pinna (the fleshy part of the ear) helps reflect that.
The long legs and the big ears are key to the Serval’s hunting technique in the long grasses of the African savannah, where they listen for the movement of rodents which they dramatically leap on. Probably easier to appreciate this method by seeing it:
Friday mystery object #224
For the last few weeks I’ve been using cat skulls as mystery objects, because they are really hard to tell apart and I was hoping that some useful distinguishing features might get spotted when you try to identify them.
I certainly feel like I’ve learned something, but I’m pleased to say that there aren’t too many more skulls to go, because it’s really difficult. This next one should hopefully be a bit easier than some of the recent cats:
Any idea what fine felid this skull comes from?
As usual I would really appreciate your thoughts in the comments section below – let’s see if we can crack this!
Friday mystery object #223 answer
Last Friday I gave you this fine feline to have a go at identifying:
I was a little suspicious of the identification attached to the specimen, but Al Klein suggested the same species – the Jaguarundi Puma yagouaroundi (É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1803) [link opens pdf].
My reasons for suspicion were the nature of the post-orbital constriction (the narrowing of the braincase behind the eyes), the nature of the zygomaticotemporal suture between the temporal process of the zygomatic and the zygomatic process of the temporal bone (the bit where two bones meet to make the arch of the cheek) and the shape of the nasal bones where they meet the frontals (the V shaped bones above the nose area).
The observation by henstridgesj that the skull was similar to the previous mystery object (Leopardus tigrinus) was a good one, so I decided to research the genus Leopardus in a bit more detail, to see if there was a better match.
It turns out that the skull I found that matched this one most closely – especially with regard to the relative lack of a post-orbital constriction and the nasal-frontal junction – was the highly arboreal Margay Leopardus wiedii (Schinz, 1821) [link opens pdf].
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I’m always a bit reticent to re-identify specimens that have original labels from the supplier attached as this one does, but this comes from suppliers (Dr.s Schlüter & Mass) that I know have seriously misidentified or mislabelled specimens in the past (e.g. labelling a African Lappet-faced Vulture as an Andean Condor from Bolivia).
Of course, the real identification may be even more complicated, since the South American cats have a bit of a track record for hybridising to the point of masking distinct species, so any identification I make will be laden with disclaimers and caveats. The joy of real-world animals when contrasted against nice simple biological concepts…
Friday mystery object #223
I hope you’re not all fed up with cats yet, because here’s another:
I have concerns about the identification attached to this one, so let’s see if your thoughts agree with what I have written on the label.
As always, you can put your thoughts below and they will be very welcome!
The Mermaid
As you may already know, I’ve been doing a lot of work on a mermaid specimen in the collections of the Horniman Museum & Gardens over the last few years.
The upshot of all that activity is that I have a paper written in a journal that will be hitting the bookshelves any day now. As you may have heard me say before, the specimen is not made of a monkey attached to a fish – I know that after undertaking painstaking examination of the specimen using CT scanning equipment and DNA sampling and good old fashioned anatomical investigation.
Instead it appears to be a real creature of uncertain taxonomic affiliation. The teeth suggest a link to the Wrasse family, the tail to the Carp and the torso to no known living group, so I have designated this specimen as the type for its species and have named it Pseudosiren paradoxoides. Full details can be found in the paper which is due out next week in the Journal of Museum Ethnography – I’m so excited!
#MuseumSelfie
Today is #MuseumSelfie day as part of #MuseumWeek, so here are few selfies of me trying to recreate the look of specimens from the Horniman’s natural history gallery.
Utterly ridiculous, but fun nonetheless. If you have some similar selfies why not link to them below in the comments section? After all, I don’t want to be the only one looking silly!
Friday mystery object #222 answer
Last Friday I gave you this fabulous feline skull to have a go at identifying:
No one got quite the right species, but several people (Crispin, manwhohunts, Maxine and Alex Klein) managed to narrow it down to the correct genus.
The flat frontals give the forehead a slope rather than the usual curve we’ve seen in previous cats of this size, making the cranium appear very domed in contrast. The post orbital processes are quite short and gracile (slender). The jaw is quite short while maxilla bone above the canines appears pinched in and the nasals are steep and protruding somewhat. These are features that appear in the genus Leopardus – the South and Central American small spotted cats.
How to distinguish between different species of Leopadus is more of a problem. Daniel Jones picked up on the incredibly robust bone margin of the foramen magnum (the hole the spinal chord goes into), which may be distinctive, but so far I’ve not seen the underside of other small Leopardus species skulls, so I can’t be sure.
All I know is that this is the skull of an Oncilla Leopardus tigrinus (Schreber, 1775), a small and mainly ground-hunting South American forest cat. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, cats are so difficult to identify!
11 questions to a museum blogger for #museumweek
Twitter has provided some great opportunities for sharing blogs, photos and other interesting content relating to museums. If you’re interested in museums, from either a personal or professional perspective, you should definitely try using twitter.
This week is #MuseumWeek, which provides me with an excellent and relevant excuse for being tardy in responding to Jack Shoulder’s 11 questions to me, which he shared last week on #MuseumBlogs day.
1. Who are you and what do you like about blogging?
I’m Paolo Viscardi, curator, bonegeek and staunch advocate of museums and science. Blogging for me is something that I don’t really enjoy doing, but I really enjoy the outcomes, when I feel like I’ve shared information, ideas and some of the good bits of my amazing job.
2. What is the most popular post on your blog?
Last year I published a post called Atacama ‘alien’ mystery is no mystery, which wasn’t directly about museums, although they do get a mention. It’s had around 45000 views so far, with almost 14000 of those on the day it was posted. There have been 136 comments, not counting the offensive or trolling ones I deleted. It was a controversial post in that it challenged some very odd ideas, that some conspiracy theorists seemed to take quite seriously, without applying much critical thought.
3. And which post on your blog did you have the most fun writing?
Back in 2011 there was a lot of hype about a prediction of the Rapture (the ascent to Heaven in advance of the end of the world) by evangelical Christian Harold Camping. I had a lot of fun writing the post Jesus disappointed by Rapture flop, which took the position that the Rapture had actually happened and only one person ascended, who wasn’t even a Christian. Since most of my posts are observational or factual it made a nice change of pace and gave me a chance to play with ideas.
4. If you could go behind the scenes of any museum, which one would it be and why?
Most of my museum experiences involve going behind the scenes. I rarely go to see exhibitions and I’m usually visiting other museums in order to meet other curators, or to do some research. I’ve not yet been to the West Coast of America, but if I ever make it over there I’d love to get behind the scenes at the Page Museum at Rancho La Brea to take a look at some of the amazing fossil mammal material they have in their collections.
Smilodon at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. Image by Dallas Krentzel
5. If you could interview anyone, anyone at all, for your blog, who would you talk to and what would be the first question you ask them?
I’m interested in observing the physical world and trying to understand it, so I’ve never considered doing interviews. I suppose I could interview other scientists, but I’m not really a natural people-person and I would struggle to know what to ask!
6. What is your earliest museum memory?
This is a question I’ve (sort of) answered for Meet a Museum Blogger on Museum Minute a while back, so I’ll repeat that here:
“Seeing the door into the Palaeontology department at the Natural History Museum in London (the one next to the Megatherium specimen) is one of the clearest memories from my childhood – it was at that point I realized there must be people working behind the scenes in museums and that I could be one of them.”
Megatherium at London NHM. Image by Ballista
7. What was the last museum you visited what did you see?
Apart from the Horniman, which I visit every week day for work, the last museum I visited was the Città della Scienza (Naples Science Centre) at the start of March. That was a scouting trip for a potential temporary Dinosaur exhibition for the Horniman. I was impressed by the museum’s tenacity in the face of outright criminal assault, following an arson attack a year ago to the day of my visit, that razed the main museum site to the ground.
8. Share a museum selfie?
I hate taking selfies, but since they’ve become so popular I was persuaded to take one with the Horniman Walrus – just awful…
Since then I’ve taken a lot of selfies, and thankfully I’ve managed to look a bit less smug in those…
9. If time and money were not an issue, which museum in the world would you most like to visit?
As someone with a soft spot for Smilodon it would have to be the Page Museum!
10. Which museum do you think more people should know about?
The Horniman is a pretty small museum that does some pretty big things, but I know that outside the museum sector we’re not as well known as we could be. That said, I love the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL and the Natural History Museum in Dublin – two of my favourite places that shockingly few people seem to know about!
I do think that all museums deserve to be known about though, which is why I’ve been working hard with colleagues at the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA) and a variety of partner organisations (like the NHM and Linnean Society) to get a better idea of what museums are out there that hold natural science collections. At the moment the project is in its early days, but we’ve developed a crowdsourced map of UK natural history collections that you can see – and add to – on the NatSCA collections pages.
11. What’s the oddest search term that has led people to your blog?
“Rat poo”. It’s a surprisingly common search term too, with almost 400 people finding the site through some variation on that theme. I suppose that’s what happens if you show people pictures of rat poo though…
On that somewhat unsavoury note I will pass on the baton to some more museum bloggers:
Here are my questions for Jake, Claire and Russell:
1. Who are you and what do you blog about?
2. Why do you blog about museums?
3. And which post on your blog was the hardest to write?
4. Which is your favourite museum?
5. Do you think you’ll still be interested in museums in 20 years time?
6. What is your earliest museum memory?
7. What was the last museum you visited and what did you see?
8. Share a museum selfie?
9. If you could build a museum, what kind would it be?
10. What is the most popular post on your blog?
11. What’s the oddest search term that has led people to your blog?
And here’s what you have to do:
Answer the eleven questions – you can adapt them a little to fit your blog.
Include the BEST BLOG image in your post, and link back to the person who nominated you (that would be me, or this blog post).
Devise eleven new questions – or feel free to keep any of these ones here if you like them – and pass them on to how ever many bloggers you would like to.
Friday mystery object #222
Here’s the mystery Friday feline for this week:
As with the others I think it may prove hard to find good diagnostic characters, but hopefully something will come to light! Good luck!
Friday mystery object #221 answer
Last Friday I gave you this cat skull to identify:
It is about the same size as a Domestic Cat and is very similar in morphology. But it’s not a Domestic Cat.
The auditory bullae (the bulbs under the skull that hold the hearing apparatus) and the external auditory meatus (ear holes) are a bit bigger, the skull is a bit broader and the interpterygoid notch (the gap at the back of the palate that the airway emerges from) is squarer and has a slight ridge in front of it on the palate (and I’m not sure that ANY of these are particularly significant).
There were plenty of suggestions about what this skull might belong to, but only henstridgesj hit the nail on the head with a correct identification of Southern African Wildcat Felis silvestris cafra Desmarest, 1822. So well done Stephen!
Southern African Wildcat (Felis silvestris cafra) by Johann du Preez 2008
Friday mystery object #221
Here’s the Friday feline for this week:
Any idea what species this skull is from?
As usual you can put your questions, comments and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to respond. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #220 answer
Last week I gave you this lovely skull to identify:
As I suspected, everyone immediately recognised it as a type of cat. The characteristic two large blade-like premolars with a gap (diastema) behind the long canines and the straight incisor row were a dead give-away.
Then came the difficult bit. There are around 40 living cat species recognised in the world and because they didn’t diverge from a common ancestor until just 10 million years ago (or thereabouts), they all tend to look quite similar.
There were lots of suggestions, ranging from Lynx to Jungle Cat, but only Jake managed to recognise this short and highly domed skull (with impressively long canines) as belonging to a Marbled Cat Pardofelis marmorata (Martin, 1836).
The Marbled Cat is an tree-dwelling species from South and Southeast Asia that isn’t really very well known. They have a ridiculously long and chunky tail to help with their arboreal lifestyle and beautiful patterns on their coat, which gives them their name.
Since cats are so hard to tell apart do you think I should post a few more over the next few weeks? Between us we may be able to spot some useful distinguishing features…
Friday mystery object #220
This week I have a rather nice skull for you to identify:
I know what this skull comes from, but I wonder if you can work out the species just from the cranium. I should warn you though, it’s not quite as easy as it looks…
Enjoy the challenge!
Friday mystery object #219 answer
On Friday 7th Feb I gave you this mystery skull to identify:
The post got lots of activity from both regulars and biology students from the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which means there were lots of helpful comments!
The specimen was quite clearly from a rodent, due to the paired incisors, but there are a LOT of different rodents out there.
The type of rodent was narrowed down by bugblokenz who suggested the skull was from a squirrel of some sort and Jake pointed out how we know that is the case – the specimen has a spiky postorbital process:
The presence of a spiky postorbital process (see top skull) suggests that it was from a type of squirrel. Most other rodents either lack this process (see bottom skull), or the process is more stout and blunt.
Narrowing it down to a squirrel is helpful, but there are still around 285 different species to choose from and many squirrels have very similar skulls. This is where the real challenge lay, especially since it clearly wasn’t the British Red Squirrel Sciurus vulgaris or the more widespread Eastern Grey Sciurus carolinensis, as I showed you on Friday 14th. Other suggestions included the Southern Flying Squirrel Glaucomys volans (which is a bit on the small side) and Eastern Fox Squirrel Sciurus niger (which has a really interesting method you can use to identify it).
The relatively narrow zygomatic breadth, combined with a relatively wide breadth between the orbits suggests a ground squirrel of some sort, which many people recognised, leading to suggestions of Poliocitellus franklinii, Spermophilus sp., Otospermophilus sp. and Tamias sp. – for which this useful reference provides some great comparative specimens (huge thanks to Crispin for sharing this).
However, none of the North American ground squirrels quite matched up, with the closest suggestions of Otospermophilus variegatus or Poliocitellus franklinii still being different in a variety of ways, particularly in relation to the width of the skull, relative zygomatic breadth and shape of the postorbital process.
After much consideration it came to me that we may be looking on the wrong continent and it turns out that African ground squirrels are more similar to this specimen. Fortunately, there is a very useful resource providing images of specimens of African rodent species available through the Belgian Biodiversity Platform. This fantastic site has enabled me to make a reasonably confident identification of Striped Ground Squirrel Xerus erythropus (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1803).
Striped Ground Squirrel (Xerus erythropus) by BOISSEL Philippe
I’d still like to get my mystery skull to a comprehensive physical collection, just to make some fine detail checks (there are some issues with the shape of the posterior margin of the palate I’m not 100% happy about), but overall I’m happy with this – but please let me know if you think I’ve missed something!
Big thanks to everyone who has contributed their ideas on this specimen – let’s see what I can find for you to identify this coming Friday…
[Further information available in this species description PDF]
Friday mystery object #219 answer coming soon…
Apologies for not having the answer to last week’s mystery object posted yet – it’s been a busy week and I simply haven’t had a chance to prepare a decent answer.
However, I have an image of last week’s object alongside a Grey Squirrel (the lighter coloured specimen), to give you an idea of how they differ, so I hope that will prove of interest until I can get a proper post prepared:
Friday mystery object #219
This week I have an unidentified skull that I found in a box of random bits of bone:
Any idea what it might be from?
As usual you can pop your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to respond.
Happy identifying!
Friday mystery object #218 answer
Last Friday I gave you this skull to identify:
There was strong consensus on this being a mustelid – which is good, because that’s what it is. There was also good agreement on it being one of the Martens, which is where things become a bit more difficult.
After looking at a lot of different Marten skulls online without much success in finding a way of telling them apart, this diagram proved quite helpful.
Skulls in the sequence: M. zibellina, M. martes, M. foina
If you look at the skull in the middle of the top and centre rows, the auditory bullae (the rounded bones under the skull that house the anatomy used in hearing) have quite distinctive shapes in the three species pictured.
In addition, the the little nub of bone (called the mastoid process) that sticks out behind the ear hole (or external auditory meatus as it’s also known) is very differently developed in the three species. Looking at this character and checking back against other Marten skulls online the clues suggested that the mystery object is the skull of a Pine Marten Martes martes (Linnaeus, 1758).
So well done to everyone who commented – particularly Jake who got the ball rolling with a Martes identification from the start!
Friday mystery object #218
This week I have another skull from the Horniman’s collections for you to have a go at identifying:
Any ideas what this might be from? As usual you can leave your suggestions, thoughts and questions in the comments box below.
Enjoy!
Friday mystery object #217 answer
Last Friday I gave you this lovely skull to identify:
I chose it because it was being used for an interesting project by a student at UCL, involving 3D surface laser scanning of the specimen to identify landmark characters of the skeletal structure of the faces of this family of primates:
This is a specimen that we actually have a fair amount of information about. It’s a male Grey Gibbon Hylobates muelleri Martin, 1841 collected before 1909, from Melian on the Hanta River in North Borneo. So of all the suggestions, Crispin (@brainketchup) was the closest (with agreement from henstridgesj) when he suggested White-handed Gibbon.
It turns out that this skull also has a taxidermy skin associated with it (which Jake has mentioned before), which shows a common feature of taxidermy specimens where the skull has been prepared separately – it’s mouth is stitched shut:
This makes for slightly dodgy taxidermy, but at least it means the skull is available for future research, instead of being stuck in a specimen intended mainly for display.
The skin of this specimen has also seen recent use, but for art rather than science. Artist Paul Robinson has used it as the basis of this somewhat freaky, but striking piece of work:
GIBBON by Paul Robinson
It goes to show that specimens in museums can find themselves being used in all sorts of interesting ways. To my mind this is really what museum collections are for – being used by people.
Zygoma 