I have been selling some of my extra skulls on eBay recently. The ones I have been selling have been roe deer, red deer and sheep. With the money I have earned I have bought more skulls that I didn't have before, and I have been looking through eBay to see if there are any interesting new skulls to buy.
One evening I was looking through all the skulls on eBay and I found a cow skull ! It was the first cow skull I'd seen on eBay and as soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to bid on it.
I waited until the last minute to put a bid on. With 30 seconds to go the top bid was £7.50, and I bid £11. Then five seconds later someone bid £12.50. Finally, I put in a new maximum bid of £20, but you only pay a little bit more than the next highest bidder, so I ended up paying £12.50 and £8 postage. That was a fantastic bargain !
You don't normally find cow skulls in fields because farmers check their fields for poorly cows, and move them if they die. Sheep are different because sheep here graze on high moors where it is harder to find them.
It arrived in a massive parcel. The skull is massive, 46cm long and 21cm wide, and it's much much bigger than the biggest skull I had before that (Roger the red deer stag). It feels really heavy and strong. It looks a bit like a big female red deer, but the forehead and the nose don't slope down. At the back of the skull, above where the jaw hinges is a ridge which makes the top of the head look wider.
Cows have teeth like deer or sheep: they have six cheek teeth (three pre-molars and three molars) and they only have lower incisors at the front. This skull has some teeth missing and the teeth that are left feel smooth and worn down, which I think means it was old.
The sides of the teeth are very dirty with a hard covering of something. You can see where some of this has flaked off.
The incisors were missing, and the jaws hadn't been glued so I have held them together with an elastic band. I think they are so big and heavy it might be difficult to glue them. The jaws and skull and stained with muck and fat from when the cow rotted down. I keep meaning to clean it in biological washing powder but I haven't go round to it yet.
The back of the skull doesn't slope down like a red deer, and it has a lump of bone at the back at the top. The bone round the braincase feels very thick.
This skull was a brilliant bargain, especially as there aren't many cow skulls to be found. A cow skull was one of the skulls I wanted to get in 2011, but I thought I would have to get a whole head from an abattoir and rot it down. I am really proud of this skull.
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