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.





9. Leopard Seal skull



This looks more like a lion or a jaguar skull, because of all the sharp teeth. But it's a leopard seal skull. It eats fish and sometimes eats penguins.



8. Saltwater crocodile skull



This skull looks almost exactly like the head of the crocodile. The top is very rough. Some of the teeth were missing, but it still looked like a scary animal. I wouldn't like one to bite me !



7. Camel skull



The top of this skull looks a little bit like a female red deer. Like the red deer, it only seems to have bottom incisors, but they are much, much bigger. And it has big canine teeth, not like the ones of a red deer, which are small.



6. Chamois skull



Chamois are a type of goat that live in mountains in Eastern Europe. I like how the horns go straight up.



5. Lion skull



This was smaller than I thought it would be, so maybe it was a baby lion. I really like the big canine teeth which it uses to kill animals. The teeth at the back were like the ones on my fox skull.



4. Elephant skull



My favourite part about the elephant skull was its tusks, definitely. I think it was from a baby elephant. The shape is very unusual. The tusks are for fighting with other animals. The tusks can be valuable. Some people kill elephants just to take the tusks.



3. Hippopotamus skull



This is one of the first skulls you see when you go in, and is the coolest skull. I never knew it would be this shape. The skull is big but the braincase is tiny.



2. Japanese spider crab



This wasn't in the museum, but was round the corner, and Matthew the curator showed us it on our way out. I never knew you could get crabs that big. This isn't even one of the biggest ones. Some are twice as big as this.



1. Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus fossil



This was a fossil of an animal that doesn't exist any more, because they've all died out. They lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, and were about three metres long. It has a really long neck. A lot of the bones look like bones I have, like the spine, and the pelvis, and the bones in the flippers look a bit like hands. I like bones, and I really like fossils. It's amazing to think that this animal was alive almost 200 million years ago.(Maybe mummy saw it when she was a girl).

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