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)

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....

Rebuilding the skull of Emily the badger

This is the fifth post that I have written about my badger skeleton, Emily, who I found as a roadkill near my village. I left to decompose in Mortuary wood, checked her again in August, then finally had to collect her in December after a bad storm blew down the wood where she was hidden, before cleaning her.  This week I am going to talk about the skull and putting it back together again.   

The big surprise when I collected Emily was that although her head looked intact when I found her. Her skull had been massively fractured, as if she was just hit on the chin by a car or lorry when she stepped out to cross the road. When I first found her, I wasn't even sure if I could ever repair her skull, but I've done the best I can, and even though it's not perfect, I'm quite proud of how she looks.

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 !

Rescuing the badger body after the storm

I ended last week's post by worrying about the big storm we had in the UK (100mph near us !) and whether it had damaged the wood where my trail camera was. That wood is on top of a great moor, and you can see for about 20 miles in three of the four directions, so it was quite exposed. It turned out that wood was hardly damaged at all, but another wood was damaged that was important to me !

I call that wood "The Mortuary Wood", and it is where I left the badger and the buzzard bodies to decompose.  It is for away enough away from houses so people cannot smell the decomposition smell  but is close enough to the road so it's easy to bring the bodies in and keep checking on them. I went up on Saturday morning to check on the bodies and I was shocked by what I found !