The bomb story is in the newspapers ! (Updated)

The story about the world war II bomb was in the newspapers this morning. You can read it in the Scottish Sun, the Scottish Daily Mail and on the Sun website ! Thanks to journalist George !

UPDATE: It was also in the Perthshire Advertiser ! See the newspaper pieces below.

Today I found a bomb from WWII !

Today Dad and I had a walk planned up on the moors to explore a new wood that was difficult to get to. I had planned the route last night, but when I got up this morning I could see those hills were covered in low cloud, so we decided to do a different route.

The wood we decided to walk in was Dougal's Cairn, which is a private deer forest which I have collected loads of great bones from. Dad suggested we search the south-east corner because we hadn't been there before, so we headed down the tracks that way.

A new book about bone collecting

There is a bone collector in Scotland with even more skulls than me. His name is Michael Fox and he has 1,000 skulls from all around the world ! He has been very kind to me and he gave me my first badger skull, a barn owl skull and a cool monkfish skull I haven't written about yet.

He has written a book called "The Beginners Guide to Skull Collecting" which you can buy at Blurb. Some books about skulls can be difficult for kids to read, but this is easy to read, and he has written 266 pages about his own skull collection, and how to find, prepare and identify skulls.

It has a very interesting book because it has photographs of lots of skulls I haven't seen before including a giraffe skull ! The Blurb page has a preview where you can see some of them.

The Beauly to Denny Power Line

Last week and today me and Dad went on a walk to a wood where there is going to be new huge power lines. The power lines are massive and will take power from renewable energy at the north of Scotland to the rest of Scotland. The route of the power lines means they go over a huge moor where I do a lot of exploring and bone collecting, past my village, past the castle near the village, over a big valley, through one of my favourite woods called Titus Well on the other side, over a moor and over a bit of another wood that I like called Dougal's Cairn.

Finding out a young deer's age by its teeth

When I find new deer skulls, or when I write about them here, I try to work out the age of them. Sometimes you can tell by the size, sometimes you can tell by whether the plates of the skull are fused, and sometimes the pedicles and antlers help. But the most useful way is to look at the teeth. The problem is that there is no proper guide which really helps, and the teeth of red and roe deer change at different types. There are guides like this one which don't go into enough detail and other guides like this which are okay but they are boring and written by scientists. So here is a guide I have written myself based on the red and roe deer skulls I have found.

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.

Lots of birds, and a mysterious find by the river

This week I have been away skiing in the Cairngorms, so the walk Dad and I planned today was fairly easy. We decided to walk along one of three rivers in my village, which is mostly straight, but we knew that sometimes there were otters down there. We didn't see any otters but we did find something else which we didn't expect !

It was sunny but cold and the ground was frozen. The river isn't very wide, but it was moving fast. It runs alongside a train track and I saw loads of trains which we were out.

A waterfall, a watermill and a brand new wood

Around my house there are about a dozen woods that I have explored already, and this year I want to find new woods to explore. Last Saturday night Dad looked on a map and found a new wood that he thought would be good to explore. We had a good time exploring it last Sunday and found three new skulls and then on Sunday night Dad heard out about something amazing that would be worth exploring, so we went back again today. This post is about those two walks and what we found.

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.

Strange bones #9: a horribly broken bone

There is a wood on a moor near my house which I started exploring last year. It is difficult to get to, because you need to cross a field, go down into a steep valley cross a stream and up the other side. The wood is on a steep hill, and some of the ground is very wet and soggy making it difficult to get through.  The good thing about this wood is that it has lots and lots of bones in it, no-one goes there apart from me and dad, and it is where I saw my first crossbill.

This week I am going to write about a bone that dad found there last year. It is very weird, and unlike any other bone I have seen.