Friday, August 6, 2010

Arctic Animal Skulls

Wolf

Bowhead Whale (There's one skull in the foreground and another eroding out of the bank in the upper lefthand corner.  Sea level would have been 6 or 7 metres higher when that animal was beached.)


Bowhead Whale: The circular hole at the top of the skull is the foramen magnum, where the spinal column attaches to the skull.  The long maxilla bones (roof of the mouth) are missing, but would have attached to the jagged, broken bones at the bottom of the picture.
Beluga Whale: The bulbous part of the skull is about the size of a tea kettle.  Its facing left and the maxilla is overgrown by willows.  The holes on the upper left side are the nostrils, and the hole on the right is the foramen magnum.

Fox

Fox

Lemming

Lemming

Lemming
Caribou

Photo Credits: Tim Rast
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4 comments:

  1. Paul BaxendaleAugust 6, 2010 at 12:08 AM

    WOW! I would go nuts seeing all of those skulls!!!! Do you ever find large vertebrae from whales? I've always wanted one of those to add to my collection of oddities and curios! Are you permitted to take any of those skulls home with you, or is it a protected area of some sort?

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  2. Paul BaxendaleAugust 6, 2010 at 12:09 AM

    PS I cant even believe how great that caribou skull/antler combo is-- you just find stuff like that laying around all over???

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  3. TimAugust 6, 2010 at 7:54 AM

    One of the conditions of the land lease that my employer has is that no one disturbs or collects any of the animal bones or caribou antler that we come across on the land. The only exception would be if the bones came from an archaeological context, and we had a good reason to collect it. All of the photos I've shown here are from non-archaeological contexts, so they should still be there on the ground for a long, long time. Some of them died of natural causes, others were taken by predators, both animals and humans. Owl pellets are a good source of lemming bones and old campsites are littered with all kinds of marine and land mammal bones.

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  4. TimAugust 6, 2010 at 9:46 AM

    We do find whale vertabrae as well - the discs between each vertabrae can be the size of dinner plates and each vertabrae is the size of a foot stool.

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