Mysteries from my inbox

Of the 1,214 emails I received last year, many of them are from people trying to identify bones. This can be tricky - especially as they can be from animals from other countries that I've rarely seen before !

Here are some of the recent ones I've had - many of which have me stumped ! Can you help me out or give me some clues ?

How I rearticulated my badger skeleton, part one

Right, this was going to be just one post, but it's so big I've split it into two. I did three big posts last year here, here and here about how I rearticulated my fox skeleton Vulpy, so I'm not going to do a step by step guide, but I will write about how I did each step. The big rush for this badger skeleton (called Emily) was that I had to take it up to the filming of BBC Winterwatch, and although I had about three week's notice, it was still a big rush. Rearticulating skeletons properly takes LOADS of time.

The picture at the top is a bit of a cheat. That's how I would really like it to look (it's been retouched). In reality it is VERY difficult to rearticulate a skeleton without any external wires or poles and while I'd love to do it that way, there are LOADS of problems.But I think the post is really good, even if I ended up at it by accident. Anyway, this is how I did it....

Cleaning the badger's skeleton

Last week I wrote about the road kill badger (I've named it Emily) that I had to collect right after the storm. I prefer to leave bodies for a long time until there is no soft tissue left, but I had to collect this one before it had fully decomposed because the spot I'd picked for it had been disturbed.

I cleaned the bones over four days. I've written about cleaning bones before (and wrote a big guide to it here) but I used slightly different methods for this one. This is how I did it !

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 !

How to rearticulate a fox skeleton: part two

Two weeks ago I posted about my finished rearticulated fox skeleton Vulpy, and last weekend I wrote about the first half of how I did it. In the first half of my guide I wrote about doing the spine, the back legs and front legs which may seem like a lot but it's still only half way there !

The final steps are the feet, the tail, the ribs and attaching the skull.

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.