So..... what would you like to ask me ?

On 21st July will be five years since my very first post here which seems quite amazing. I don't often celebrate blog birthdays, but I thought five years would be worth a special post.

So here's my plan: on the 21st July I will do a special Q&A post where I answer any questions you have. I'm thinking the questions would be more about the blogging side and my book, rather than specific scientific questions on bones, but if you have any good other questions I'll try to answer them as well.

Add your questions as a comment here, email them to me at jakesbones@gmail.com, add them to my Facebook page or tweet them to @jakesbones, and I look forward to answering them on the 21st !

Strange bones: the broken roe deer tibia

This week's been very busy: today was my last day of the school year (in Scotland the summer break starts and ends about three weeks earlier than in England), I've been working on a lot of things behind the scenes, and tomorrow morning I'm off on Scout camp for five days. So today I'm going to do a follow-up post about some interesting bones.

Last week I wrote about exploring a wood I was last in a few years ago, and finding the partial remains of a roe deer while I was sheltering under a tree from the rain. The skeleton wasn't terribly interesting, except for the left tibia which was broken. In the end, I brought back both tibias, but when I started asking questions on Twitter from experts I realised there was probably enough to write an entire post about the injury.

Exploring woods, a storm, and an unlucky deer

I  love exploring new woods. I have been to almost all of the woods near my house over the last four years, and know them pretty much like the back of my hand, so last weekend I decided to explore a wood that I have only been to once before.  It's the wood which has the hidden disused watermill above the waterfall, and is close to the deserted castle.

There is only one track to the wood, and you need to drive there. After we parked the car, there was a short track which leads to the top of the south side of a big valley. There was once trees in the valley, but the ones on the south side were cut down when I was last here two years ago. At the bottom, a stream has been dammed to make a large pond, but is is very hard to see it from a distance because there are bushes all round the pond.

Six things to do now Springwatch's finished...

Tonight was the last episode of this year's BBC Springwatch. It was an amazing series, as they all are. If you live outside the UK, Springwatch/Autumnwatch/Winterwatch are a live TV series, three times a year broadcast from a nature reserve, featuring incredible filming about all the wildlife you can find here. You might remember I have been on BBC Autunmwatch before with Chris Packham and Winterwatch Unsprung earlier this year with Nick Baker. This year is it's tenth anniversary.

So if you're a parent, and your children has enjoyed Springwatch, and you want to find out more about wildlife, what can you do next ? Here are five simple ideas, based on things I have done and blogged about before. And as a kid, I can say that I enjoyed them all !

A roe deer birth and a roe deer death

As you know, almost all my time this year has been spent in two woods on the moor near my village, looking for one very small animal: a pine marten ! I've been quite lucky with the filming, but while I've doing that I've been able to have a close look at the other wildlife that lives around there, like the birds, rabbits and roe deer.

Last weekend I was was away camping with the Scouts, but my dad took my two younger brothers up to move my trail camera which had been left for a week watching an owl perch at the very north end of the wood. He wasn't sure where to reposition the camera, so he walked with my brothers down the the south end of the wood. He couldn't think of anywhere to attach the camera, so he just went up to a random tree, but as he did, he noticed something beside a fallen tree branch that he thought was maybe a dead buzzard or owl.

Today I met Prince William and Kate

So, I don't know you what you did today, but today I presented my book to Prince William and Kate, the Earl and Countess of Strathearn...

It's been a secret I've been keeping for about two weeks when I was first asked to do it. Prince William is the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, and is second in line to the throne. In England they are called the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, but in Scotland their title is the Earl and Countess of Strathearn, and Strathearn is where I live. They were visiting around Crieff today, and my school was their first engagement, and when I would get to meet them. !

Six common myths about bone collectors

A friend of mine on Twitter who is my age and who also collects bones mentioned she was getting abuse at school because of her hobby. That got me thinking about a post about the myths and stereotypes about bone collecting, and putting them right.

So here are six of the questions I have been asked most often, and my answers to what my hobby is about to help some people understand what I do a bit better. (Tip: check out the chapter "Seven Golden Rules" in my book to find out how I believe bone collecting should be).

My favourite way to spend a sunny day outside...

#3205380 / gettyimages.com

This week's blog post is a bit different. There are hardly any blogging competitions for child or young adult bloggers, so when the MAD awards added a category, I was quite excited. Then I read the rules, which say bloggers are judged on one post only, and it has to begin with the words "My FAVOURITE way to spend a sunny day outside is...". So here is my entry.

My FAVOURITE way to spend a sunny day outside is to sit down and imagine a world in which all bloggers are taken seriously, regardlessly of their age, a world where child bloggers are not given simplistic tasks in a single blog post to complete in order to win a prize.

Wait, I've done that wrong, haven't I ? That's not what's expected of me. I'll have another go....

So why do deer even have antlers ?

When I gave my talk a few weeks ago at Crieff Library I talked about deer antlers, and passed round some shed roe deer antlers for people to look at and feel. At the end, someone asked: "why do deer have antlers anyway ?"

It's a simple question but it's also a difficult question at the same time. There are some obvious answers, but when you look into them, they don't apply to all deer. I've written a lot about antlers before (like explaining how roe deer antlers grow,  when the antlers 'go back' and when they grow strangely) but I've never looked into why they have them in the first place before, and the reason is more interesting than you might think !

The amazing Ceratosaurus nasicornis

Imagine a ferocious predator, six metres long, weighing up to 1,000 kilograms. Imagine it lived 150 million years ago. Imagine teeth that could rip right through flesh. Imagine it had strong hind legs but small front ones. Imagine it had a massive tail. Imagine it had spikes going down its back. Well I have seen one !

Well, not a real one, of course ! I saw a replica of at the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, which I wrote about visiting a few weeks ago. The skeleton (it's actually a replica) is from a dinosaur called Ceratosaurus nasicornis (or just a ceratosaurus).