#skull identification

A comparison of similar-ish skulls.

Left to right:

The last thing I'd have expected to find above a Scottish beach.

Spotted below a rocky cliff above a stoney raised beach on the west coast of Scotland.

I first thought, a Seal until I turned it over to see the wide orbits instantly recognisable as a big cat.

The two canines were smashed, I've replaced them and the brain was still inside, dried up. Okay, so it had twine around the back and it had flakes of gold paint on it so it had been hanging up somewhere, maybe on a boat? It fell overboard and remained semi buoyant and ending up on the beach, someone maybe found it and moved it to the higher beach away from the tides and then I came along, an avid animal skull collector at the time . what are the chances!

A female Lion skull - 300cm in length.

if you recognize or have any idea what animal this is from I'd love to know!

New skulls!

Skull ID challenge! From the FB group Skull and Bone Identification.

Identifying skulls online can be sort of hard. I've some pretty weird mistakes (I believe @shadyufo once mentioned someone IRL mistaking a horse for an eagle?)

Online, you can't really "ask google" yet. What are you gonna type in when you find a physical object? Sure there is some picture identification yet but it's not yet ideal. A dichotomous key, like this one from the University of Maryland focusing on "common mammal skulls," is a good step.

But it's really hard to describe skulls, like faces. "It's got two eyes...they're round..." Go ahead, try to explain the difference between your face and that of your sibling.

Teachers say "carnivores have sharp teeth" but then when you look at a lot of skulls you'll see that herbivore teeth also have sharp edges and some carnivores have some wide teeth too. "Carnivores have eyes in the front, herbivores have eyes on the side." Well....both of them have eyes that are sorta front-y, sorta side-y.

My experience is mostly: if you look at enough skulls, you'll understand the shapes. There are some giveaways, like the fact that members of the deer family have "preorbital vacuities," which are holes in front of the eyes, and cattle don't. Describing cow skulls as "wider than deer" is sort of useless, because if you have just one skull in front of you, how do you know if it's the wider or narrower one?

And there is one big difference between the real world and polished specimens: real skulls sometimes have a lot of damage. Even injuries, mutations, and just run-of-the-mill phenotypic variation (differentness).

I once confirmed "yes, that skull is a cow. It looks different from other cows because everyone is different." I once saw someone post a deer skull in a group of deer hunters, and a lot of the comments said something like "I've been hunting and cutting up deer carcasses for 25 years, and that's no deer." But it was a deer. The reason people couldn't ID it? Partially, because it was partial. A carnivore had chewed off its nose.

Which leads me to the above image. Lots of comments saying it's a sacrum (the vertebrae in your butt, in the middle of your pelvis.) I can kinda see that in one of the images...

But it's throwing people off because it's old, weathered, chewed up, broken. Pieces are missing so you can't see them. The little ear baubles are gone, as well as the entire face. Because of that, there are also pieces that you wouldn't see in an intact specimen because those pieces are normally blocked by other bones.

And so, let me compare the above with the bottom of a blackbuck antelope from this paper: