Tag Archives for skull

Friday mystery object #456 answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday mystery object #456

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

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

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

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

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

Friday mystery object #455 answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday mystery object #455

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

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

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

Friday mystery object #454 answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday mystery object #454

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

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

Friday mystery object #452 answer

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

Image by Yijie Cheng, 2023

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

Skull of a Striped Ground Squirrel

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

Image of mystery bones by Yijie Cheng, 2023
Image by Yijie Cheng, 2023
Skull of a Loggerhead Turtle

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

Image by Yijie Cheng, 2023

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

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

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

Mute swan skulls “Cygnus olor”. Technique of bone maceration on display at the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy, FMVZ USP.

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

It is an anseriform for sure the large oval basipterygoid articulations are a give away. With that profile, i’d lose my voice while trying to say the name of a certain Western Australian River.

Adam Yates: January 20, 2023 at 8:45 am Edit

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

Friday mystery object #450 answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday mystery object #450

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

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

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

Have an enjoyable festive season!

Friday mystery object #447 answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 #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 #436 answer

Last week I was in the lovely city of Edinburgh, catching up with many of my wonderful natural history colleagues from around the world at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) conference. While I was there, I spotted this object and thought it might pose an interesting mystery object:

Interesting perhaps, but clearly not very challenging, since I think everyone managed to figure out what it is, despite the unusual viewing angle. Well done to Wouter van Gestel for being the first to comment.

Here’s an image of the same object from a couple of different (and somewhat more common) angles:

The large size and that very distinctive lower jaw, where the two halves of the mandible meet and run parallel for over half the length of the jaw, are unmistakeable (as noticed by Adam Yates). This is the skull of a Sperm Whale Physeter macrocephalus Linnaeus, 1758.

Nearby, I noticed a much smaller version of this specimen, housed in a much smaller version of the National Museums Scotland, which definitely deserves a mention:

The teeth of a Lego whale are probably not as efficient at keeping hold of a squid as the robust curved teeth of the real animal, and the skull is a bit less impressively huge, but it certainly has charm.

If you get a chance to visit Edinburgh I definitely recommend a trip to National Museums Scotland – not just for the Sperm Whale and the Lego, but also for one of the most impressive taxidermy dioramas I’ve ever seen. Here’s a small section to give you an idea:

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 #432 answer

Last week I gave you a mystery object from the Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL, with this old photo from my time as the Curator there:

This is one of those species that I have a bit of a soft spot for, due to the general weirdness of the skull. That does however make it quite recognisable as a specimen, even in a photo that hasn’t been taken for the purposes of identification – like this one.

Everyone who commented recognised that this is some sort of turtle, and thanks to that very flat skull with all the features towards the very front end, most people worked out that it’s a from a Mata-mata Chelus sp. Duméril, 1806.

Illustration of Chelus fimbriatus, by R. Mintern, 1885

Back in 2016, when I took the photo of the specimen, that would have been enough for a species identification (which would have been Chelus fimbriata), but today it’s simply not good enough, since molecular taxonomists determined a species level split in populations from the Amazon and Orinoco basins in 2020. Darn.

Fortunately, morphological differences between Mata-mata from different basins have been recognised for a while (link opens a pdf of ), reflecting the molecular split between species. Unfortunately, the main area of morphological difference is in the carapace, which isn’t in the photo I provided (if only I’d known that the species was going to split back in 2016…).

But fear not – back in 2018 Hannah Cornish did a Specimen of the Week blogpost about this very specimen, with some more useful images. The overall outline of the Grant specimen seems more rectangular than oval, which may indicate that it is an Amazon Mata-mata, making the original identification of Chelus fimbriata (Schneider, 1783) still correct – although a proper examination of the specimen would be needed to confirm that.

So a hearty congratulations to everyone who figured out what this was – and I would suggest taking a look through the comments from the mystery object, as there are some very interesting observations and discussions about that strange skull which are well worth a read. That’s the kind of thing that I love most about running this blog!

Friday mystery object #431 answer

Last week we had a genuine mystery object to identify from the Andalusian coast, which was found and photographed by Paula Burdiel:

Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022

When Paula contacted me, she also provided links to some useful resources, including the Fishbase list of all the marine fish found in Spain (which is fantastic for narrowing down the list of likely suspects) and the #ScanAllFish digitisation project, which has the ambitious and laudable aim of scanning all fish species (although unfortunately it looks like they haven’t got around to this species just yet).

Any extra information is useful when trying to identify fish, since there are so many species, but sometimes a bit of familiarity is what you really need to start narrowing down options, which makes the Zygoma community a helpful resource when dealing with an identification like this. And you did not disappoint!

Tony Irwin, jennifermacaire and Wouter van Gestel all came through with excellent observations on the species. This object is a neurocranium (we’ve talked about these before) with a very pronounced supraoccipital crest (the big fin-like crest on top), which combined with the overall shape of the neurocranium suggests it’s a member of the Sparidae (the family containing the Porgies and Seabreams).

Knowing this, and having the Fishbase list, makes it much easier to narrow down the likely species. Unfortunately, there is no single resource to make comparison easy, but a lot of trawling through a variety of images of skulls and neurocrania will yield results (Flickr has some useful images for example).

Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022

From my searches, the shape of the supraoccipital, vomer/prevomer (the beaky-looking bit) and that impressive set of supraorbital crests (those frills of bone above the eye sockets) suggest that this mystery object is probably the species suggested by Tony Irwin – the Gilt-head Seabream Sparus aurata Linnaeus, 1758. I’m not 100% sure of this identification, but it’s the best fit I can find.

Thanks to Paula for sharing this object and thanks to eveyone for your thoughts on this specimen – it’s always valuable to get your input!

Friday mystery object #431

This week I have another guest mystery object for you to have a go at identifying, this time it’s from Paula Burdiel, who found the specimen in summer 2020 while beachcombing in Islantilla, Huelva (Spain):

Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022
Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022
Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022
Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022
Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022
Image by Paula Burdiel, 2022

With this fantastic array of images and clear locality information, I’m hoping that we can figure out which species we have here. Let’s hear what you think it might be in the comments below – between us I think we can identify this fishy mystery object!