Six common myths about bone collectors

A friend of mine on Twitter who is my age and who also collects bones mentioned she was getting abuse at school because of her hobby. That got me thinking about a post about the myths and stereotypes about bone collecting, and putting them right.

So here are six of the questions I have been asked most often, and my answers to what my hobby is about to help some people understand what I do a bit better. (Tip: check out the chapter "Seven Golden Rules" in my book to find out how I believe bone collecting should be).

21 ways how I would create an amazing museum

I have been to a LOT of museums. Some have been massive, and have loads of money, like the Natural History Museum (that's where the first picture is from). Others have been tiny, like the D'Arcy Thompson museum in Dundee. I once even went to a museum that was two rooms in a man's house. All of them have been cool in their own way. I even wrote about two very different museums in London earlier this year, and why I preferred the much smaller one, although both were brilliant.

So if I could make my own museum, and control everything, what would I do ? These are the 21 ways I would make my museum absolutely fantastic for everyone, especially kids.

Comparing bones: scapulas (shoulder blades)

This is my first ever post about comparing the same bone from lots of different animals from my collection. It's different to my normal blog posts because I had to do a lot of research, but interesting because I got to look at how each animal has adapted to where they live and what they do.

Everything about scapulas I have found on the internet is very complex and scientific. I try not to write my blog like that, and I only try to use words I understand myself to make my posts easy to understand. I've picked the scapula for my first one of these posts because it is a relatively big bone that varied quite a lot between each animal type. I've tried to look at each animal and how it lives to understand why its scapula ended up that way, so some of what I have written is guesswork, and some is from reading books and the internet. So here it is.

Did I get it wrong about the injuries to Pharoah ?

For the last few weeks I have been writing about a fox skeleton I found in Northern Ireland which had some unusual pathology (which means features) on the bones. My first post was about cleaning them up, my second post was looking at the whole skeleton, and the third post was about some damage to the shoulder blade which I thought was a bite mark, and that I thought the suspect was another fox (who I put in jail at the end of the last post !)

After I wrote these, Ben Garrod of Ben's Bones sent me a message on my Facebook fan page saying that he he disagreed with me and he had different ideas about what happened. This happens a lot in science and good scientists always show how they came up with theories or ideas so other scientists can agree or disagree with them. So this last post on Pharoah is about what he what he thinks and what I think so you can make up your own mind in the comments at the end:

Strange bones #12: the mystery metacarpal

This bone might not like a mystery at all if you know a bit about bones. But there are two big mysteries:  what animal is it from, and how did it get there ?

Dad found it two weeks ago when walking in Suicides Graves wood. It was in the south-west corner, maybe quarter a mile away from where I found the red deer calf bones, and it was well inside the wood itself, away from the fields. It is easy to see it is either a metatarsal or metacarpal (which is a lower leg bone) from an animal like a sheep or deer but that doesn't solve the mystery.

Where can you find animal bones ?

This is one of the things that I have been meaning to do for ages. The question I am most often asked in emails is where do I find all my animal bones ? I don't really have any big secrets. I am lucky where I live because there are lots of animals, and I do lots of walks. Sometimes on the walks I find lots of bones and sometimes I find none. But here are ways to find bones for some of the animals in the UK.

The puzzle of the three-legged deer

This might look like a boring collection of bones to you, but it shows something quite strange. These are bones I have known about for a while. I first wrote about the red deer body in May 2010 (the picture is the big one under "the three dead red deer") and it wasn't until a year later that I noticed something strange about the bones and collected them. I called this collection "Yvette" because it was the 25th set of bones and I name them alphabetically.

The ancient horse jaw

Near the end of last year I went on a walk up to The Pheasant Woods which are on the other side of the river to the village. The Pheasant Woods are a collection of six or seven small woods and four lakes which used to be part of a big country estate. The country house was knocked down years ago but the ice houses and some other buildings are still there. It's a great place to find bones and watch roe deer and buzzards but I've explored it so much I don't often go there any more.

This time I went up in the afternoon and I was walking around and then I found this on the ground. It was very well camouflaged that I thought it was a big bit of tree bark. When I picked it up I realised it was a big jaw and I thought it was off a cow. I spent about two hours searching for the rest of the skull and skeleton but never found them.

The law and my amazing mystery skull

I promised that I was going to write this weekend about the extra skull that came in the biscuit tin of bones, and I am still going to but I'm going to write about it tomorrow. First of all I am going to write about what I had to do to work out whether I could keep it.

I'm not going to tell you yet what it is but as soon as I saw it I knew it could have only come from one of two animals and both of them are very rare and special indeed. I was very excited when I saw it, but I was worried that I wouldn't be allowed to keep it. I had to do lots of work to find out whether I could.

My pile of spare bones in the kitchen

Whenever I come back from a walk, the first room I come into is the kitchen, and this is where the small bones that I bring back end up. The pile grows and grows and grows until Mum goes off on one and I have to tidy them up. At the moment the pile is quite big, so as it's my school holidays at the moment, I went through them to see what I could find. Here is what is there at the moment:

My pig skull

When I met Mrs Powell at the Scottish Seabird Centre last year, we swapped some skulls. (I have written about one of the skulls I swapped her here, and wrote about the seal and puffin skulls she gave me back). The other main skull that she gave me was this pig skull. I had wanted a pig skull for a while, and it was one of the skulls I said I wanted to get in 2011. When I wrote that I wanted one, I thought I would have to get a pig head from a butchers, but I was pleased when Mrs Powell said she had one.

How not to identify bones

About three weeks ago Kristina Kilgrove wrote on her blog about a human skeleton that had ben laid out wrong with the legs swapped over and back to front. It was a fun post to try and spot all the mistakes.

On Friday Dad showed me a load of photographs he has spotted on a stock library called Shutterstock. When you sell photographs it is important to always say what the photographs are of, but this photographer called "Wallenrock" seems to know nothing about bones and had made some huge mistakes. In the picture above they said it was a "Composition with butterfly at hook, skull and umbrella", but the bone they showed wasn't even a skull: it was a vertebra (neck bone) from an animal like a sheep or a deer.

When I looked further I found lots of other mistakes as well.

My hooked-nosed sea pig skull

This is a post I have been meaning to write for ages. It is about a skull I swapped with my friend Mrs Powell when we met at the Scottish Seabird Centre in October. I meant to write about it the next week, but then all sorts of things happened, and then I wrote posts about being on Autumnwatch so I haven't had chance to write about it until now.

If you were just looking at this skull you might thing it was from some kind of savage animal like a bear  or a big cat (although the teeth are wrong for those). It is about 25cm long, which makes it one of the biggest skulls I have (apart from my cow, my red deer and my fallow deer). It feels chunky, rough and solid, and a bit frightening, so it can be a big surprise that it is actually from....

Why swan sternums are strange bones

Last week me and dad were on a walk up to the geese lakes to hopefully see the greylag geese that come here over the winter. We didn't see any of the greylags, so on the way back we decided to walk along the Rhynd lochs which I wrote about here. We walked along the very edge of the Upper Rhynd looking for bones, when dad saw a strange bone buried in the ground. It was a type of bone I have seen loads of but I have never seen one this big or as interesting.

When I wrote about the Autumnwatch mystery bone last week that was a sternum of a mammal. This was a type of sternum too, but from a bird. It was so big that could only have come from one bird: a swan.

Finding great bones in old ice houses

I was going to write about something else this week, but I had a really good walk yesterday and found some great new bones.

In the village where I live there used to be a big country mansion called Ardoch House in the woods which I call the Pheasant Woods which was built in the early 1700s. It was knocked down about 30 years ago but you can still walk round where it used to be. The house was built before there was electricity or freezers so they used ice houses to keep ice in. Ice house are built near lakes or lochs, and in winter ice was taken from the lake and stored.

Yesterday me and dad were walking through the old estate and we decided to explore the old icehouses and I made some amazing finds.

Half term trips: The National Museum of Scotland

Last week me mum, dad, Harry and Sam all went to the new National Museum of Scotland which is in Edinburgh. It isn't really a new museum but they closed it for years to move things about. It reopened about two months ago and now it's even better.

The picture above is of the big natural history gallery. They have moved all the animals around and mixed them all up. Here are some of the things that I saw when I visited.

Four different corvid skulls

Corvids are a family of birds that include all the big black ugly ones, like ravens, crows, jackdaws and rooks, as well as some prettier birds like magpies and jays. These are big powerful birds that can knock buzzards out the sky and kill them, and I heard about a sparrowhawk that was killed by a crow.

There are over 120 species of corvids, but only eight live in the UK. They eat whatever they can find, even meat, but they don't have a hooked beak to rip animals over, so they have to wait until the carcasses are opened up before they can eat. That is why you see so many on motorways to eat the roadkill.

I have five corvid skulls, but two are from the same bird, and this week I am going to write about them.

The cow skull I bought on eBay

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.

Xavier, the grey squirrel skeleton

Last September, a gamekeeper in my village gave me a fox and a grey squirrel he had killed. I wrapped them in mesh, and buried them in a wood, and I dug them both up a few months ago. I have already written about the fox skeleton, so this post is all about the grey squirrel.

Vulpy, the fox skeleton

This week I'm going to write about my fox skeleton which I've called Vulpy. (All my skeletons have alphabetical names and I'm up to Y so far). This fox was given to me by a gamekeeper in my village, and last September I buried it by the Secret Lake. Last month I dug it up, brought it home and left the bones to clean in biological washing powder.