*hands you a bone* @bonesandthelike - Tumblr Blog

pacificremains

Baby bongo skull, with all its shaped-ness

hmtaxidermy

Rounding off the first batch of African mounts with this stunning kudu bull!

If you look closely, you’ll see the base of his left horn is a gorgeous amber color. Beautiful!

coyotebrisket

coyote (eastern, PA, juvenile, black and tan) - full pelt - M

The Mange!!! One of my absolute favorite pelts I’ve ever tanned, he’s a juvenile, only about the size of a red fox and he had, well, mange. I think it makes him look like an 80s horror movie werewolf. Very cute dude

mellum

milksockets

'wool gathered from a decaying sheep worked around a hole,' 2001 in enclosures - andy goldworthy (2007)

kedreeva

This is a quail gizzard!

This little thing contains grit used to grind up anything tough in the GI tract. Since my quail are pretty exclusively fed a processed feed, there nothing too cool in there

But clean it out and you can see the INCREDIBLY tough inner lining

It feels a little bit like wet sandpaper in there. Really cool to open up and look at.

Larger birds like chickens and turkeys that free range have gizzards full of small stones, called gastroliths. There's even a hobby some hunters have, of collecting "turkey pearls" and displaying them!

If the quail have any they are very very very small. I do wonder what the peafowl gizzards...

weekendviking

Here's my collection of Moa Gastroliths, mostly agates, collected in the area of Aotearoa New Zealand that I grew up in, by my grandfather, uncle and myself. In our area the local rocks are Cretaceous Basaltic Andesites, Dacites and Rhyolites, and so there's a lot of agate and quartz geodes, amygdaloids and veins. Just like a hen will go for a shiny rock for gizzard grit, Dinornis Maximus and the other Moa species in our area seemed to go for the agates particularly for gizzard stones, so you find the small ones that had been polished away too small to be useful scattered around in singles, wherever they passed in the droppings, while the larger ones you can find in clusters around where a moa died. Sometimes even in a distinct pile if the skeleton was not disturbed or even still present when fossilised/subfossil remains.

There's a distinct variety of polish that identifies a gizzard stone - pits and grooves from the pebble's original morphology are often left untouched, while high areas and corners are smoothed, but with a pitted or matte polish, rather than smoothly shiny, and often a striated or scratched texture to the polish that's quite diagnostic of gastrolith origin. If the stone is polymineralic, especially porphyritic, softer minerals will be both physically and chemically eroded more deeply than harder minerals, giving a careous texture to the polish.

kedreeva

This is maybe the coolest thing anyone's ever added to one of my posts. Ancient gizzard stones from an extinct giant bird??? I'm in love.

weekendviking

But wait, there's more! Here's what we used to call Weirdstones when we found them. Agates, but not local to our region and geology, and also polished with gizzard style polish on the high points but with the low points and voids still relict texture, but way too big to be Moa stones, even from Dinornis Maximus (The biggest I've ever found from a Moa is about half this size.)

I'm pretty certain that these are much, much older than Moa gastroliths, and my working hypothesis is that because I only find them in, or downstream of, late Cretaceous or Paleocene coal measures and conglomerates that were derived from coastal deltaic river gravel sediments and beach deposits, that they are either Seal ballast stones of Palaeocene seals (Some seal species swallow stones to store in the stomach as ballast, apparently, and they get the same sort of polish as gastroliths) or they are gastroliths from Sauropods or Plesiosaurs if they mainly coming from the older rocks. (The marine transgressive rocks in our area that these stones are found in or from, are diachronous, straddling the K/T boundary.)

kedreeva

I'm ridiculously jealous of everyone's Big Stomach Rocks.

pwlanier

A pair of early 20th century electroplate mounted horse bone and hoof commemorative candlesticks

Each engraved to the plateau top of the upper mount to the hoof, 'KINGS MESSENGER', WINNER OF THE GOODWOOD CUP 1898, THE GREAT METROPOLITAN STAKES 1899 & 1900, & MANY OTHER RACES, & SIRE OF MANY WINNERS. DIED AT SHEFFIELD LANE PADDOCKS. JANUARY 1912, the bone shafts surmounted by plated mounted urn candle nozzles with circular drip pans.

Bonhams

ourfriendsthejays

Okay, I am apologizing to everyone in advance for the unavoidable trauma, and I'm tagging you @elodieunderglass

elodieunderglass

Crikey, ok, well…

at least a nice thing about thoroughbreds is the thorough documentation??!

I love the present tense used in this record:

King's Messenger is a 131 years old Bay Thoroughbred Stallion born 1895 in Great Britain and currently in Great Britain. Sired by King Monmouth (1882) out of the mare Swiftsure (1888).