lb_lee | Raccoon Skull

Mori: randomly found a large (4.5, 5 inch) raccoon skull today, clearly accidentally dropped by a human. It had already been cleaned, though incompetently and over-hastily. (There are chisel marks and damage in multiple places; I originally thought the poor ringtail died in a car accident and been skidded across asphalt hard enough to scrape bone away, but the chisel marks are in all sorts of places and directions, including the roof of the mouth, so I think what happened is someone got overzealous in defleshing.) Despite that damage and a lack of almost all teeth, it's a handsome skull!

I'm going to maybe try bleaching it with H2O2 with my rabbit skull, to get it nice and white. May upload ref photos of both at multiple angles when Internet properly set up, since it's hard to get photos of skulls at more than one angle.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

minoanmiss

Coool! I look forward to that.

the_broken_tower

Oooooh, that's a neat find :)

One of the professors has said that beetles do the best job of cleaning bones. I don't think they need to worry much about leaving chisel marks.

- Sylvain (he/him)

lb_lee

Dermestids! They are great if you have a big fresh corpse what needs cleaning... plus the resources to care for a big pack of beetles, which we do not. We know schools and museums keep them around, though! They're good buggies.

Edited Date: 2023-05-31 03:43 am (UTC)