Strange bones #2

This is about another bone that confused me for a while until we worked out what it was.



We were walking through a wood about two miles from my house, looking for bones. The wood was narrow and ran alongside a quiet country road. A few months before, in the same wood, we had found the skeleton of a baby roe deer that had been hit by a car.

Putting a fox skeleton back together

Important: Are you looking for a step-by-step guide on how to put a fox skeleton back together ? If so, I wrote this guide in January 2013 which is more help than this page.

I used to think that if I found an animal skeleton all the bones would be in the right order. But in most of the skeletons I've found the bones are all jumbled up, and often bones are missing. That means that if we want to know more about the animal, we have to try to put the pieces back together. Here are bones of a fox that I collected. When I put names to my skeletons, I called this one Harry. I found the skull first of all, then we looked harder, and we found some other bones which were buried beside it.



Here are the bones we found. You can see they were all jumbled up when we brought them home. Different types of bones have different shapes, so then we begin sorting them out. Even though we this was the first fox skeleton we brought back, we could see that a lot of the bones were just the same as a deer or a rabbit. We began by sorting them into different piles.

A new sheep skull !

Six weeks ago I found a dead sheep on a moor while exploring old farmhouses with Daddy. It was already being eaten by foxes when we were there - we scared away one. That was on the 13th July, and we thought it had maybe been there a month. We went back this evening, and it was already rotted down to the bones. The bones were spread over a really wide area - we found one of the legs about ten metres from the rest of the body. We found the skull, but only one of the horns, and only one of the lower mandibles, so it's not perfect, but it's still the best one of the four sheep skulls I have. While we there, there was a storm, so we stopped searching and came back off the moor. I'll clean it up, and write about it here later.

Amazing skulls from the University of Dundee

On Thursday, Daddy and me went to the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee. It's normally open to everyone on a Friday afternoon during the summer holidays, but we arranged a special visit because we couldn't make it on a Friday.

The museum was small, but it was good. Here are the top ten things that I liked there.



10. Warthog skull



A warthog is a kind of wild pig that lives in Africa. It has tusks, just like an elephant.

My trip to Auchingarrich Wildlife Centre

(Somehow most of this post got deleted after I wrote it. It used to me much longer ! I have written another post about Auchingarrich here)

This is me today at Auchingarrich Wildlife Centre which is not far from my house. I saw roe deer and red deer and fallow deer and there were supposed to be Chinese water deer, but I couldn't see those. There was also a cow skull and a goat skull. The cow skull was massive. I would really like one of those.

A great walk and an interesting antler

Yesterday, me and my Dad went on a walk to explore a red deer wood near our house. It was a nice day and a really good walk. I'm getting much better at spotting deer, and learning to walk quietly so we can watch the deer without frightening them. We found two red deer skulls,both of which were very old, and one of which was smashed so we didn't bring them back. We also saw six red deer and a fox, but the best bit was finding this antler.



This is a very unusual antler. It is unusual because it seems to have three branches at the bottom. We haven't seen any other antlers shaped like this. Normally, deer antlers have two branches at the bottom. Here's the new antler next to an old, four-point antler in my collection.

My first roe deer skull

This is still one of my favourite skulls, even though I now have lots of other roe deer skulls. I found this roe deer skeleton while out walking with my dad in the Pheasant Woods near my house, and we discovered it after I saw my first ever roe deer for real.