My muntjac deer skull

There are six types of deer in the UK: roe deer, red deer, fallow, sika, Chinese water deer and muntjac. There are lots of deer around my village, but they are all red and roe deer, so it is hard for me to find a skull of the other types. I was lucky that I got my fallow buck skull from the gamekeeper in my village, but I didn't know how to get sika, Chinese water deer or muntjac.

Then in April I got a message through my Facebook fan page from Miss Bowen Hill who lives in Essex in England. She said her dog had found a muntjac skull and was I interested ? I said yes, definitely and she kindly sent it to me !

Stop the cull: sign the petition to save the badgers

This is a short post but it's about something I feel strongly about and I want you to support it too.

This week the Badger Trust lost a court case to stop the government killing badgers. The government want to shoot wild badgers to stop the spread of a disease called bovine tuberculosis, which means thousands of cows every year have to be killed.

I don't have a problem with animals being shot to protect the countryside, and it happens to foxes, rabbits and deer. But there is absolutely no scientific evidence that shooting badgers will protect cows from bovine TB, and it might even make things worse. Shooting badgers for no reason is just stupid.

It would happen only in England. In Wales they are planning to vaccinate (give a medical injection to) badgers. It won't affect anything in Scotland, where I live. That doesn't mean I shouldn't care about it.

There is a very good piece about it on the Huffington Post. You can read more about it at the RSPCA website, and also at the Just Do Something website, and also here and here.

You can show your support by signing this petition (over 15,500 signatures so far) or the one at 38 degrees (over 62,000 !), or email your MP and the Prime Minister about it at the RSPCA website. Do it now !

Researching Ardoch House at RCAHMS

Two weeks ago I wrote about Ardoch House, which was an old country house in my village which was built over 200 years ago but which vanished in the mid 1980s. A man called Mr Forbes from Canada had emailed me telling me about the house, how he explored it in the 1980s and how an old ancestor of his used to work there.

I did a lot of research online, and one of the websites I used was the Canmore database which is run by RCAHMS who are the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historial Monuments  of Scotland. They keep all the records of old buildings, some of which you can see online but some of which you have to  go to their offices in Edinburgh to see.  About a month ago, during the summer holidays, I went with dad to see the photos they had of Ardoch House.

The archeological bones, part 2: the teeth

Two weeks ago I started writing about a box of archeological bones I had been given as a present by someone who was moving to another country. This week I am going to write about the teeth in the box.   There were more teeth in the box than any other type of bone, perhaps because teeth last longer than bone. Some were still in fragments of jaw, and others were just loose by themselves.

You can tell a lot from teeth. They can tell you what type of things it ate, how big it was, how old it was, and sometimes what animal it was. I am really good with red and roe deer teeth because I have absolutely tons of them, but this was more of a puzzle because there were lots of different teeth some of which I had never seen before. It was also harder because when teeth are in a jaw it's easier to tell whether they are molars or pre-molars which are the two types of cheek teeth in animals.

Where did Ardoch House go ?

This is the story not about bones but about looking for an old historical building near my village.

It began with an email I got in April. It was from a man called David Forbes who lives in Canada but who used to have relatives in Braco which is the village where I live. He emailed me because he found my blog post about the ice houses on the Ardoch Estate. He told me that he used to have a relative who was a housemaid at Ardoch House over 100 years ago, and that when he came to Scotland in 1984 he visited the old Ardoch House which was now derelict. But he visited again in 1989 and it wasn't there any more !

This is the photograph he took in 1984:

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.

Ben's theory about the golden eagle

This week's post is different because it's about someone else's work, not mine. When I wrote about my golden eagle skull a few months ago, I wrote that it had two sets of injuries, one on the back of the head and one on underneath the skull. At the time I thought the first injury was caused by a blow, and the second one underneath was caused a different time by a shotgun pellet.

Ben Garrod, who is a zoologist and skeleton articulator wrote on my Facebook fan page that he had a different theory. This post is about his theory and how I tested it.

The mystery cross, a fox, a kestrel and a castle

This is a story about a walk a had a few weeks ago which I went to check out something strange near my house I'd seen on the satellite pictures on Google Maps. But it was such a great walk that I saw tons more so I'm going to write about all of it.

I use Google Maps a lot on the iPad to look at new places to walk and explore near my house. I wrote about it here. Google Maps is good for finding new woods and old buildings, but it doesn't have contour lines so you need a map as well. Here is what I found and wanted to explore.

My top ten tips for other child bloggers

This is an unusual post for me because it's about blogging, not about bones. It was because I was thinking about the Times article which was yesterday, and thinking about what I would say to another kid about starting a blog.

These are just my tips. The other bloggers in the Times article might do things differently, but these are the ten things that really help me write my blog:

I'm in The Times today (with a video) !

This weekend is a special weekend because I'm in The Times Weekend supplement today ! Today I'm going to write about what it was like to be photographed (together with a video of it !) and tomorrow morning I'm going to write about another post my advice to other kids that want to start blogging.

It all began when I got an email from the journalist Anna Moore who said she wanted to write a piece about child bloggers. She phoned about a week later and did an interview and asked me questions about when did I start and why did I start. Then the next week a photographer came to take the photographs. Here's a timelapse video of the whole photoshoot from start to finish: