The three skeleton mystery

This week's post is about age indicators on bones. Telling an animal's age can be easy when they are young, because there are lots of indicators with teeth (like my one), bone size and unfused bones, but the exact age of adult skeletons can be very difficult to say exactly. Even for deer, where I have lots of comparative skulls, teeth wear at different rates whether the deer eats grass or heather, so generally you can only say whether a deer is "very young", "juvenile", "adult" or "old" rather than a precise age.

But this week's post is a mystery too, and I'm hoping some experts have some ideas. If you're in a rush, just go down to the very end of the post, where I put the question I would like ideas about !

Five cool mysteries from yesterday's walk

I'm in the last few weeks of my school holiday (Scottish schools go back earlier than English schools), and yesterday I had planned to explore a new wood high on the moors which needed to start with a steep climb up the hill. But as I set off I could see the rain coming in over the hills, and I knew it was going to be a long, exposed walk to the wood, so instead I decided to go back to Suicides Graves, which is a large red deer wood I've explored many times before.

So dad and I went looking for deer and bones and we took a loop through the wood, starting with the south east edge, moving along the south, then cutting back through the middle of the wood to look for frogs. ( I found loads !) On the walk we found five pretty cool mysteries: can you solve them ? (Click on "Click to see the answer" under each one to reveal what it was !)

12 facts I've learned from "Secrets of Bones"

The amazing "Secrets of Bones" with Ben Garrod has just this minute finished its final episode on BBC4 just now.  It's been absolutely amazing, and the best series on bones I have seen, and each episode seemed to go so quickly. The level of it has been pitched just right. There was loads I didn't know, but there was nothing that I didn't understand.

I had been looking forward to it since last July when Ben told me it was going to happen (it didn't even have a title then). I really enjoyed doing my interview with Ben a few weeks ago as well. So what were the best facts in it ? Here were my favourites:

How I rearticulated my badger skeleton, part two

As promised, here is part two of how I rearticulated my badger skeleton. By the time I'd got to the stage which was the end of last weeks post, the skeleton did not look good, but I knew from before that if everything is in roughly the right place it would all come together.

So in his week's post I will go through the final stages to finish it off and tidy it up so it looks nice. This week I am going to show you how I rearticulated the front legs, back legs, feet, the tail and the carpals, tarsals and phlanges. (If you want a step-by-step guide, see the one I wrote last year about my fox skeleton Vulpy)

"I've found a bone...but what is it ?"

I currently get about 750 emails a year and I try to respond to every single one of them. A lot of the emails I get are people asking "I've found a bone, but what is it ?", asking me to identify bones that they have found but they can't work out what they are from. Sometimes the bones are actually quite simple, but you have to look at them in a certain way to work out what they are.

Over the summer I've been photographing common bones that I find on walks, the sort of thing that I don't look at for long any more because I have others at home, or because I find so many of them. I hope this helps others trying to identify bones they have found !

Buzzard skeletons (and bird skeletons in general)

I don't really write much about bird skeletons because complete ones are so hard to find. Bird bones are smaller, lighter, easier to break (and eat) and more likely to get scattered about, and often the way the birds get killed destroys some of the bones. Every single time I go to the pheasant woods near my village I find bones from pheasants killed by foxes but I hardly ever find the skulls.

That's why I was so excited when dad came back from a walk (my leg is still to weak to do proper walks)  and said he had found a buzzard skeleton. Buzzards are medium-sized birds of prey, bigger than most raptors like sparrowhawks, but still only small when compared to golden or white-tailed eagles. But not only had he found a buzzard skeleton - he had got all the major bones !

How to re-articulate a fox skeleton: part one

This is going to a big post about how I put my fox skeleton Vulpy back together. I started on 22nd December and took photographs at every stage, and I finished it on the 6th January after a LOT of hard work. I took photographs at every stage and while I had some help there were some bits I didn't get right first time.

Last week I wrote about it when it was finished, but here is the first of two big big posts about I did it. There may be better ways or different ways to do it, but this is how I did it....

My finished rearticulated fox skeleton !

My big project for the Christmas holidays was rearticulating (putting back together) my fox skeleton Vulpy. I finally got round to finishing it two nights ago and it took AGES but now it looks amazing.

When I first got Vulpy she was a present from a local gamekeeper who had shot her when she was killing lambs. So she started as a fresh body, then I buried her, left her for months, then dug her up when she was all clean. She's has been in one of my storage boxes since then but I thought she would be good to practice rearticulation on because I have almost every single bone from her.

Next week I'm write about every stage of how I did it (here it is now !), but this week I am going to show you how she looks now she is finished.

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:

The six things I learned from Pharoah's post-mortem

Last week I wrote about how I rotted down the mummified body of Pharoah (I name my skeletons in alphabetical order) which was a canid that I brought back from Northern Ireland. It took me ages to rot down but when I did I discovered something interesting: it was not a dog which I had thought for two years, but a fox !

How did I know it was a fox and not a dog ? Foxes and dogs are both from the canid family, and they are the only two types of canids you find in the wild in the UK. In other places you can find other canids like wolves, coyotes and jackals. Here are the signs I looked for to tell a fox and dog apart:

The archeological bones, part 1: the puzzles

This is a story that is too big to say in one blog post so I'm going to spread it over three weeks. It all began when I got an email from a bone collector called Jen who lives in Dundee not far from me. She said that she was moving to Africa and she had some old archeological bones and asked if I wanted them because none of the universities did. I said yes, definitely, and about two weeks ago she came round to my house to drop them off before she moved and meet me and see my bone collection.

(This is one of two big sets of bones I was given this summer. The other came from Ric and I am still working through them but I am going to write about them too.)

I have never had archeological bones before and I asked some questions about the bones but probably not enough. She said some of the bones were 1,000 years old. She brought them in a big box and inside the big box there were sandwich bags of different groups of bones.

Strange bones #10: the zigzag bone

On Friday, Dad was out walking in the wood where I found the mortar bomb to check whether it had been blown up where it was (it hadn't, but it was gone). As he was walking back through some fallen trees he spotted something lying on top of the ground that he had never seen before.

He picked it up and brought it back and this week I am going to write about it.