This week I have a fragmentary bit of critter for you to identify:
Any idea what this might be?
You can leave your suggestions, observations and questions below and I’ll do my best to reply. Good luck!
Tag Archives for skull
Friday mystery object #155 answer
On Friday I gave you this mystery skull to identify:
It’s not particularly complete, but the bill is very distinctive so most of you got the correct identification. Well done to Ric Morris, Barbara Powell, Jake, biologycurator, henstridgesj and Robin for spotting that this is the skull of a Continue reading
Friday mystery object #155
Today I have this bird skull for you to identify from the Horniman’s collections:
I think it’s a pretty characteristic one, but it’s not very complete, so let’s see how you do.
You can put your suggestions, comments and questions below and I’ll do my best to answer. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #154 answer
On Friday I gave you this very distinctive object to identify:
As I suspected, everyone correctly worked out it was a half mandible from a Sirenian – probably a Manatee. So well done to Barbara Powell, henstridgesj, Robin, Ric Morris, Rhea, rachel, Jake, Andrea and Jamie Revell for getting the main identification.
Of course, it got a bit more difficult when it came to making a species level identification, as is often the case. There are three well recognised species of Manatee – the West African, West Indian and Amazonian. There is also the Dwarf Manatee, which is a potential species in its own right or perhaps subspecies of the Amazonian Manatee.
Several people plumped for the Amazonian species or the Dwarf Manatee based on the fact that the jaw doesn’t look robust enough for the other species. However, this mandible is from a juvenile, so that was a bit misleading. Based on the hook of the coronoid process (the highest bit of the lower jaw where the temporalis muscle attaches) and the angle of the mandibular symphyseal region (the bit where the two halves of the lower jaw would have joined together) I think this is most likely to be what Barbara Powell first suggested, the Continue reading
Friday mystery object #154
This week I have a specimen that is pretty distinctive for you to have a go at identifying, so it should prove pretty straightforward for anyone who has seen one of these before:
Of course, if you haven’t seen one of these before it may be a bit more of a challenge!
You can put your suggestions, observations and questions below and I’ll do my best to reply. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #153 answer
On Friday I gave you this fragment of an object to identify:
Many of the key features we look for when making an identification of a skull are in the facial region. The teeth are the most useful feature, but the relative proportions of the rostrum (muzzle) in the context of the whole skull and the particulars of the various elements that interconnect to make a skull all contain useful information.
It’s rather similar to recognising a person in fact – it’s much easier when you can see their face than it is when all you can see is the back of their head.
So how did everyone do? Well, there were various suggestions as to what it might be, but it was basically a guessing game, relying mainly on scale, gross morphology and the shape of the auditory bullae (aka the bulbous bit containing the ear bones). Most guesses focussed on the carnivores although there were some large rodents suggested.
I thought henstridgesj might have worked it out when he asked ‘Are the bullae double-chambered? Possibly, I can’t really tell, but if they are then it’s in the suborder Feliformia‘ and I answered in the affirmative, but the most obvious answer was somehow missed.
This object is almost certainly the rear part of the skull of a Continue reading
Friday mystery object #153
This week I am delving into a box of bits to provide a genuine mystery object. I expect I will be doing a few items from this box in the coming weeks, since I am reaching the end of my curatorial review of the Horniman’s mammal osteology collections and I have been left with just a few boxes of random odds and ends that have been on display or have been cut up and the other part put on display.
These items have no information with them at all, so each is a genuine mystery that I hope to solve – a process that starts with identification. Any idea what this might be?
As usual you can put your thoughts, suggestions and observations below and I’ll do my best to reply. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #152 answer
Apologies for the late posting today – I’m on holiday and haven’t had a chance to post until now.
On Friday I gave you this object to identify:
It was immediately recognised as a primate by everyone, which is unsurprising, given the very characteristic enclosed bony orbits and set of four incisors in the premaxilla and mandible. The teeth were also commented upon by henstridgesj, who recognised that this is an Old World Monkey (Cercopithecidae), with two premolars on each side in both the maxilla and mandible.
Some people might argue with the classification of this specimen as a member of the Cercopithecidae, since the lack of a tail suggests that it’s an Ape of some sort, but the Hominoidea form a smaller clade within the wider Cercopithecidae clade, which means that this is both an Ape and an Old World Monkey.
The kind of Ape is a more tricky question, although the shape of the teeth and the size of the braincase in relation to the facial region rules out any adult Great Apes (Hominidae) – it could be a juvenile, but the degree of fusion of the bones says not. That leaves the ‘Lesser Apes’ (Hylobatidae) or Continue reading
Friday mystery object #152
This week I’ve got something that will probably be way too easy, but it’s a great specimen from the Horniman Museum:
Any idea what this cheeky looking chap might be?
I probably won’t get a chance to respond to comments today, although I will try. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #150 answer
Normally Monday mornings are the time that the answer to the mystery object is posted on my blog, but this weekend I’ve been involved in the Enlightenment Cafe, which has meant I’ve been too busy to write the usual full answer. Here are a couple of images of me doing my bit in the show (photo on stage courtesy of @sillypunk):
But excuses for tardiness aside, here is the mystery object I would have been writing a proper answer for if I wasn’t on a stage talking to a room full of people:
You all spotted that it was a type of canid (dog) straight away, but the species was a little bit more tricky. Many went for a fox of some kind, as it is quite a small specimen, but Barbara Powell, Jamie Revell and Ethan plumped for the correct answer of Continue reading
Friday mystery object #150
Apologies for the slight late running of this, my sesquicentennial Friday mystery object – I was giving a talk about mermaids last night that went on until quite late (and which had an exciting special guest), but more about that later.
I’ve been waiting to do this object for a while – it’s a favourite of mine, which is good, since it is part of my own personal collection. Any idea what it is?
As usual you can put your questions, comments and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to respond. I will also add that I will have this specimen, along with the others in my collection, at the Enlightenment Cafe this Saturday and Sunday at the Old Vic Tunnels. There may also be the special guest who appeared at my talk last night, but that is a story for later… Good luck!
Friday mystery object #149 answer
On Friday I gave you a bit of a spot-the-difference with these two skulls, wanting to know if they were two individuals from the same species or if they were from two different species:
I must say that it was a bit of a tricky identification without the added complexity of a between specimen comparison, yet you all did remarkably well.
As usual Jake was the first to comment, correctly identifying that the specimens are both rodents and squirrels at that. He also recognised that both were adult animals, although one was probably older than the other when it died, based on the degree of wear on the teeth (assuming the diet was similar). The squirrel identification was also supported by Will, henstridgesj, Dave Godfrey, Jamie Revell and Barbara Powell.
Barbara also picked up on the feature that made me consider that these specimens may have been from different species – the sutures between the premaxilla, maxilla, nasals and frontal bones that make up the rostrum (the nosey bit). This is something that Lena and Jamie Revell also commented upon.
The position of the sutures (or junctions) between the various bones that make up the rostrum can certainly be useful in diagnosing differences between species – it’s a handy one for distinguishing between Lions and Tigers for example:
However, in this case I don’t think that the differences between the sutures are all that diagnostic, I think the differences may simply be down to either sexual dimorphism (that’s where males and females of the same species develop differently) or differences between the ages of the individuals. In fact, given that the specimen with the more heavily worn teeth is smaller and less robust than the other specimen I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an older female and younger male of the same species that are being compared.
One of the reasons I don’t think the sutures are diagnostic comes down to timing of their fusion. According to Wilson & Sánchez-Villagra, 2009 the pattern of closure of the cranial sutures in rodents follows a fairly standard pattern, with the rostral elements being amongst the last to fuse. This suggests that those sutures are more likely to vary between animals of different ages and between animals with different life histories. That said, there are geographical variations in this species, so these specimens may represent individuals of different subspecies from different parts of the range – something I can’t check because there is no locality information with them (at least not that I’ve found yet).
With the spot-the-difference dealt with, I will leave you with the correct species identification as made by henstridgesj, these are the skulls of Continue reading
Friday mystery object #149
This Friday I have a pair of skulls (top and underside) for you to have a go at identifying. Do you think they are from the same species, or do you think they represent two different species? (N.B. You can click the image for a bigger version)
As usual you can put your questions, comments and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to reply. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #147 answer
On Friday I gave you this object to identify:
I chose this object because it gave me a chance to take a photo using my new phone camera and a hand lens (inspired by an article by Nigel Larkin in the latest NatSCA News). I thought it might be a bit of a challenge, but I was proven wrong once again, as Jake tentatively identified the part of the skeleton this bone is from straight away – it is indeed a baculum or os penis (that’s the Latin for penis bone).
The species was a bit more difficult, but Barbara Powell was quick to identify that it came from a Mustelid and then there was a bit of disagreement between Barbara, Ric Morris and Dawn about whether it was from a Continue reading
Friday mystery object #146
This week I haven’t had a chance to photograph a new mystery object, so here’s an old image I took of a specimen from a while back:
Any idea what this skull might belong to? I’ve deliberately omitted the scale bar to make it a bit harder, but if you want to see the scale just click on the image.
As usual you can leave your questions, comments and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to respond. Good luck!
Friday mystery object #145 answer
Apologies for the somewhat tardy answer to the mystery object that I gave you on Friday. Not only is it tardy, it’s not really an answer, as I still haven’t ruled out all of the possible options as to what this skull is from:
Now I’m quite happy to say it’s from a member of the crow family or corvid of some sort, but there are quite a lot of corvids out there. My first thought was Jackdaw Corvus monedula (Linnaeus, 1758), which is also what Jake thought. However, when compared to the Jackdaw on the Skullsite the bone between the eyes looks too narrow.
Barbara Powell very helpfully provided some measurements from Jackdaws in her collection, that make me think that this may still be a Jackdaw, but I have reservations, since there are several other corvids with skulls in the same size range as this specimen (6.9 cm long). The Magpie Pica pica (Linnaeus, 1758) is one that was suggested by several people (biologycurator and Leigh) and henstridgesj suggested it could be one of the North American Jays.
The big problem here is that there aren’t many features of the skull of the corvids that help distinguish them from each other, apart from the size and the bill shape. However, Magpies and Jackdaws are a bit too similar in these features. Other characters may be able to help, such as the shape of the bones of the palate (which I think favours the Magpie), but without a large sample size for comparison it is hard to tell what variation is due to species differences and what is due to individual differences.
Given that this specimen is from the King’s or Chelsea College collection, which contains material from around the World, we can’t even rule out species from other countries. All of this makes identification a bit too uncertain, so for now I will simply keep the identification to ‘corvid’ and make a note of the various species it is most likely to be. Better to be uncertain than to be wrong.
Thanks for your help!
Friday mystery object #145
Once again I have a genuine mystery object for you to identify this Friday. I have been going through some of the material from the old King’s College Collection in an effort to identify some material with no data that would be suitable for the Horniman’s handling collection.
I found this bird skull that I think would be ideal – I think I know what it is, but I need to make sure that I’m not mistaken and that it isn’t an important or rare species. I will check the identification myself and I will see if you all come to the same conclusions as me about what this is:
Please leave your comments and suggestions below and let’s see what we come up with!
Friday mystery object #143 answer
On Friday I gave you another skull to identify from a box of unlabelled material dating from 1974:
At first glance it looks quite similar to the skull of a small dog or fox, but the muzzle area seems a bit short, the braincase too small and the teeth aren’t quite right for a canid – in fact the teeth look more like those of a mustelid (as Jake pointed out). However, mustelids tend to have quite broad and blocky skulls and this one seems a bit elongate and gracile.
Clare P made a very good suggestion when she suggested the Asian Palm Civet Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, although this animal is somewhat smaller than the species that this specimen came from. Size aside, the dentition matches pretty well (if you can work out which tooth sockets belong to each tooth):
So it looks like this is the skull of a viverrid. There are still lots of candidates out there and location could help narrow down possible species, but without any labels it can be hard to work out locality information. However, last week’s object was from the same collection and it was an African species, suggesting that Africa would be a good place to start looking for a species match.
Jamie Revell did just that when he suggested the Giant Forest Genet Genetta victoriae, which is a viverrid of about the right size from Africa. Although I already thought I knew what the specimen was, I took Jamie’s suggestion very seriously, as I hadn’t considered that particular species and it fit with most of the features of the specimen.
In the end an online French viverrid identification resource I’d not seen before provided me with the information I needed to exclude the Giant Forest Genet. Mainly it came down to whether the premaxillary bones made contact with the frontal bones – they do in the Giant Forest Genet, but they don’t in this specimen. Also, the area where the temporalis muscle attached is too narrow in this specimen.
In light of these observations and with reference to specimens in the Horniman’s collections (including one that I used as a mystery object a year ago) I am fairly confident in identifying this as Continue reading
Friday mystery object #143
This week I have another mystery skull for you to identify from a box of miscellaneous bones:
Any idea what animal this came from?
As usual you can put your observations, questions and suggestions below and I’ll do my best to respond. Happy identifying!
Friday mystery object #142 answer
On Friday I gave you this unidentified object from the Horniman’s collections and asked for your help in identifying it:
Suggestions ranged from the Easter Bunny (topical) to Dangermouse (fantastic), but there was a remarkably fast convergence of opinion on what this is.
Jamie Revell, Barbara Powell, henstridgesj and Jake all came to the conclusion that this is the skull of a Continue reading
