Two weekends ago when I found the young roe buck skull, I also found this fox skull nearby. It's not in great condition, but I kept it because I don't have that many fox skulls, just five. I still don't have a perfect fox skull, with lower jaws and all the teeth, but I should have one when the fox I buried last year rots down.
It doesn't have very many teeth left in, just five of the molars. Foxes have six incisors at the front, two big canines at top and bottom, then three premolars and three molars on each side. (Fox teeth are a lot like dog teeth, which helped me work out that this week's Friday Mystery Object on Paolo's website was a dog.)
The skull is missing everything behind the eyes, which is mostly the braincase. It almost looks like the other half of this fox skull I found. The other odd thing is the two holes in the skull between the eyes. The holes could have been made by animal claws or shotgun pellets.
There are two other fox skulls which I have which I haven't written about yet. They were found by my dad when I was away on holiday. He sent a picture to my mum's phone and I instantly knew what they were when I saw them.
The best one is the one he is holding in the picture because it has both canines, and all the back teeth apart from the first pre-molar.
The second one he found nearby, and that has a broken nose, and it is split down the roof of the mouth. It only has the molar teeth in.
Dad found them on the edge of a wood next to a sheep field, and he thought that maybe a farmer had shot them both and left them there. He searched around but he only found two other bones, a shin bone bone from a back leg, and a shoulderblade.
We've seen foxes over the winter because they are easy to spot against the white snow. We don't find many bodies, though, because gamekeepers take them away after shooting them. So far the only fox skeleton I have isn't that great, so I'm hoping the dead fox the gamekeeper gave me last September will rot down soon !
Here's another fox I saw hunting down by the Secret Lake last year. I hope I see more foxes and find more fox bones !
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2 comments :
its emmy again! i found a dead raccoon!!!! my ears get hot whenever a carcass is near by.
i found lots of raccoon paws.
the front paws look like human hands.i found it in a pool of water
by a big tree. he must of died from falling out of his tree.
my dad pulled it out with a stick.
he said it was 1ooooo pounds. the raccoons tongue was sticking out.
it looked funny. so i have a skeleton for you now.
i did want the fox skull with the two canines but i also want the cat skull. its up to you.
i want you to tell me what ya think.
Hi Emmy,
That's cool ! The next stage will be to rot it down. The best way is to leave it above ground, but sometimes they can get moved and pulled apart by other animals and you lose the bones. What you can do is put it in a cage or a container where flies and air can get in, but the bones won't get lost.
It depends how warm it is, but it can take months and months for a body to rot down to just bones.
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