Skull audit: Wedel responds

Left to right: alligator, beaver, black bear, armadillo, cat, ostrich. I know, the archosaurs aren’t mammals, and the alligator isn’t even a skull. But if you can’t have a lounge lizard crash your mammal skull party, what are you even doing with your life? Not pictured: about four rabbit skulls I forgot I had boxed up, plus a couple of turtles (yeah, yeah) sitting on a friend’s desk, in their locked office.

It warmed my crooked little heart to see Mike Taylor, noted sauropodologist and disdainer-of-mammal-heads, return mammal skulls to the blog’s front page yesterday. Naturally I had to support my friend and colleague in this difficult time, when he may be experiencing confusing feelings regarding nasal turbinates, multi-cusped teeth, and the dentary-squamosal jaw joint.

My skull collection is split across home and office, but I had to go in to campus this afternoon for a video recording thing, so I got most of the office set, shown above, on that jaunt.

After the workday ended, I had just enough time before the light faded to assemble and photograph the home collection:

Back row: peccary, pig, deer, sheep, dog. Middle row: opossum, rabbit. Front row: opossum, marten (both hemisected). Not pictured: emergency backup sheep, moar rabbits

I’ve blogged about the bear, the pig, and the hemisected skulls, but I think that’s it. I should do more skull blogging, most of these have a story:

• I prepped the armadillo, cat, rabbit, and sheep skulls myself (besides the bear and pig). The first two I found in the woods, the mostly-decomposed rabbit was a gift from my father-in-law, and the sheep head I obtained from the market down the street ($10, and I ate the meat).
• The alligator head and deer skull were gifts, from Vicki and from my brother Ryan, respectively.
• The rest I purchased here and there over the years, usually when they were on deep discount. The peccary is a memento of a trip to Big Bend back in 2007 (I bought it at a taxidermy shop a long way outside the national park), and the dog came from the seconds bin at the Museum of Osteology — I plan to saw off the top of the braincase to see the cranial nerve exits, just as in the preparation by Peter Dodson shown in this post.

I have more heads awaiting skull-ization in various freezers, too. Couple more pig heads at work, and at the house a strategic reserve sheep head, plus skunk, squirrel, and rat. Plus a partially-mummified but mostly defleshed armadillo whose saga deserves a detailed recounting:

NB: the stray bits toward the bottom of the image are from a cat. Mr. Armadillo’s limb bones and vertebrae are still in the armadillo kit.

In the first comment on Mike’s post yesterday, I expressed envy that he had the better skull collection. After pulling together all my critters, I think I just have a worse memory. In my defense, it’s been almost two years since I was in the office regularly, and about half the skulls in the home collection are recent-ish acquistions (~last three years), so a lot of stuff had either fallen out of memory or not gotten properly established yet. But Mike has definitely prepped more — and more exotic — skeletons, and it was his enthusiastic collecting and blogging of dead animal bits that inspired me to start my recent-ish spate of skull preparations. More to come on that front as time and opportunity allow, probably starting with this: