The roe buck with the odd missing teeth

Last weekend I went out walking in Quoiggs wood as a present for someone called Darren. He was from Malaysia and he had emailed me asking if I would like a tree shrew skull as a present, then he sent through a whole load of amazing stuff that I'm going to write about later.  To say thanks I offered to send him a roe deer but when I looked in my spares box there wasn't one there, so I went out specially to Quoiggs Wood where I knew there were a few roe deer skeletons.

There were two roe skeletons, but the one I picked had both lower jaws. It was lying with the spine almost as it died, with its head lying at the edge of a stream. The legs were scattered a little bit further apart having been pulled apart by foxes:

Lisa, my old red deer hind skeleton

Lisa is one of the first skeletons I ever saw. Me my dad and my friend Innes were walking in Dougal's Cairn in April 2009 and we had found a fantastic amount of skulls from a gamekeepers pit, including my first red deer stag and my first fox skeleton. 

At the south edge of Dougal's Cairn wood there is a deer fence which you can cross into the valley at the north end of Suicides Graves, and from the other side of the fence I could see the white bones and the spine. Here is a photograph - see how young I look four years ago !

Four animal skulls that were shot in the head

This week's post is about four skulls that I have had in my collection for a while. Two of them - the Chinese water deer (bottom left) and the badger (top right) were gifts, the dog (top left) was bought and the partial fox skull I found myself. 

What all of these have in common is that they have holes or damage to their head that showed that they were killed by being shot.  It is rare to find bullet holes in skulls, since for most hunted species like deer, the hunter aims for the chest and ribs (although I found this red deer stag which I found in 2010 was shot in the head). Here's what the damage showed me:

The Prehistoric Autopsy exhibition in Edinburgh

At the end of November last year I had a VERY IMPORTANT MEETING which I can't tell you about yet which was at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. It was a school day and so I had permission to go off school to go to this meeting, and Dad and I took the train and arrived early. 

We looked around the museum (which is brilliant, I wrote about it before) and there was a special exhibition based on a programme on BBC2 called Prehistoric Autopsy. I didn't see the programme when it was on but it was about doing autopsies on skeletons from human ancestors from millions of years ago. This is what the exhibition was like: