My African Grey Parrot skull

My village in Scotland doesn't have many parrots, so I had to buy this skull off ebay. I bought it at the end of last year but didn't get round to writing about it until now, when I can't go on walks because of my stupid broken leg.

If you are at all interested in bird skulls, parrot skulls are particularly interesting. All bird skulls show how that particular type of bird gets food, like the thin long beak of an oystercatcher, or the curved short bills of raptors, or the very specialised beaks of crossbills. Parrots have evolved over time to specialise in eating hard seeds, but they look completely different to, say, finches which also eat seeds.

The plane, the house, the mystery, and the fox cub

I'm not able to go on bone-collecting walks for at least another five weeks since I broke my leg, but this post is about the last walk I did before I broke my leg. It was on a weekday after school, and in the Haggis Woods (where we did this post last year). The Haggis Woods are a long strip of woods which slope uphill with the A9 road at the bottom of them.

I hadn't been there since last year, but I knew there would be roe deer there. Apart from that, I didn't know what we were going to find, but the end we found somewhere interesting to explore, found a mystery, and got a big shock !

I'm featured in the Telegraph magazine today

I did an interview in January for the Telegraph Magazine as part of an article on child bloggers and it's finally been published today. It is a lot like the piece I was featured in for The Times in August. I am one of five bloggers featured. You can see it here online.

Like the Times one, I have good and bad thoughts about it. It's great to be featured, but there were mistakes in the article. Most importantly I don't have a bald eagle skull (underlined for anyone involved with CITES). I do have a golden eagle skull, and I went to a LOT of effort to make sure I was allowed to keep it by law.

I don't live in Perth (which is a city, I live in Perth and Kinross, which is a county), I don't know why Professor Black was researching furcula so I don't know whether it was part of a 15 year old murder investigation - the murder thing was just what Professor Black had been doing when I did the interview, and the thing I said about Jenson Button was really about when bone experts like Professor Black visit my blog.

Jake's (broken) bones

Here's a bone I never expected to write about !

Yesterday at cross-country club after school I slipped back and fell and there was a crack and immediately my right leg felt extremely painful and I couldn't move. I was covered up with coats and the headteacher called an ambulance and dad who was off work that day came with my baby brothers.

The Bell Pettigrew Museum in St Andrews

During half-term two weeks ago me and dad went out to St Andrews to see the Bell Pettigrew Museum which is part of the university there. It is one of the best museums I have been to. I had to email in advance to ask for permission to go but there wasn't a problem and the museum was open anyway. 

It was a bit tricky to find and all the rooms round it were getting painted and had workmen in, but when we were there we spent a couple of hours there and we could have spent longer.

And my REALLY BIG NEWS is.... (updated!)

I've been hinting at this for a while, but only a few people have known up until now. Now I finally get to tell you ! And it's really really big news !

The roe buck with the odd missing teeth

Last weekend I went out walking in Quoiggs wood as a present for someone called Darren. He was from Malaysia and he had emailed me asking if I would like a tree shrew skull as a present, then he sent through a whole load of amazing stuff that I'm going to write about later.  To say thanks I offered to send him a roe deer but when I looked in my spares box there wasn't one there, so I went out specially to Quoiggs Wood where I knew there were a few roe deer skeletons.

There were two roe skeletons, but the one I picked had both lower jaws. It was lying with the spine almost as it died, with its head lying at the edge of a stream. The legs were scattered a little bit further apart having been pulled apart by foxes:

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 !

Four animal skulls that were shot in the head

This week's post is about four skulls that I have had in my collection for a while. Two of them - the Chinese water deer (bottom left) and the badger (top right) were gifts, the dog (top left) was bought and the partial fox skull I found myself. 

What all of these have in common is that they have holes or damage to their head that showed that they were killed by being shot.  It is rare to find bullet holes in skulls, since for most hunted species like deer, the hunter aims for the chest and ribs (although I found this red deer stag which I found in 2010 was shot in the head). Here's what the damage showed me:

The Prehistoric Autopsy exhibition in Edinburgh

At the end of November last year I had a VERY IMPORTANT MEETING which I can't tell you about yet which was at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. It was a school day and so I had permission to go off school to go to this meeting, and Dad and I took the train and arrived early. 

We looked around the museum (which is brilliant, I wrote about it before) and there was a special exhibition based on a programme on BBC2 called Prehistoric Autopsy. I didn't see the programme when it was on but it was about doing autopsies on skeletons from human ancestors from millions of years ago. This is what the exhibition was like: