#nutria skull

These skulls get mixed up a lot so I thought this might be a helpful comparison guide for folks to use to tell them apart.

Super cool to talk to the vendors, but very surprised by how many uncleaned or greasy or bleached bones were selling? There was a deer skull covered in fascia going for 140 USD.

I promised bones, and here are the bones!!!! I already cleaned them and now they're drying and sun-bleaching!!! I also have a small jar of teeth cuz some of them fell off and were too small to re-attach

(Nutria skull)

the nutria out of maceration!! 🖤 I'm always stunned by how cool the teeth look afterwards, with that deep black. he had a super rotten molar, the gum was full of rotten plant matter that was the only thing keeping it in, as soon as it was all brushed away it fell straight out. he was very thin, and I'm not surprised, I can only imagine how much pain he would've been in when eating! 😟 unfortunately rodent molars are hard to check, nevermind remove, due to their cheeks.

Surprisingly I didn’t have an opossum yet, despite being in the hobby for over two years now. I couldn’t ever find one I liked but this guy caught my eye, it’s a very large very nice individual with an interesting pathology. The hedgehog is an cool, more uncommon species that I’ve been hoping to find for a while for a decent price. The least weasel is the second to last species I need to round out my collection of all the legal to own mustelid species found in the US (there are two other mustelid species found in the US, the sea otter and black-footed ferret, but both are very endangered and thus illegal to own). The final remaining species is the long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata).

I’ve been collecting skulls for well over twenty years now and oddly enough this is the first nutria skull I’ve ever gotten. Super cool critters with very neat-looking skulls! Pictured next to a beaver and porcupine. 

Nu.tria skulls look extra weird without their incisors.