A surprise box from Alaska

It has been extremely wintery here in Scotland for the last few days. Earlier in the week we had six inches of snow overnight: then the next day, we had double that, followed by a storm Even the pine marten's nest was destroyed in a storm last week (luckily the pine marten is okay though, here's a video of it yesterday !).

Many animals are really adapted for living in cold climates, and it doesn't get much colder than Alaska, one of the US states which is up besides Canada. A very kind man called Mr McDonough who works for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game contacted me last summer, asking me if I was interested in any skulls from his area. All of the skulls he suggested were amazing, like a moose and a coyote, but there were practical (and legal !) difficulties with such a big gift. Then this box arrived - read on to see what was inside !

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.