The skull of a Bryde’s whale – property of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery – has gone AWOL from a beach on the South end of the Great Southern Land (Australia for any non-Icehouse fans out there… not that that is possible).

At 2m long, approximately 100kg and 100% stinky, you would imagine that the skull would have been to difficult to take from the beach, but that didnt stop some exuberant skull collector! Or maybe the Bryde’s skull thought it would take the opportunity to see some of the sights in Tasmania – a state renowned for its natural beauty (and some awesome breweries and a chocolate factory!). Particularly since it is not the natural territory for the 10m long whale.

Pic credit – ABC News

Now I can’t profess to know much (or anything!) about the anatomy of whale skulls, so if any one out there reading is a whale skull specialist, get in touch and tell us what makes them tick. We do know that this guy (or girl?) was a type of baleen whale, meaning there are no teeth in that mouth, but rather it would have fed by filtering water through a set of plates, trapping things that are small and delicious.

The baleen is actually made of keratin (like fingernails and hair) and not bone – and as to whether the Tasmanian scientists managed to recover the baleen from this guys skull, I have no idea!  You will have to visit the museum to see!

Thankfully the skull has now been recovered, but we definitely think this warrants a nomination in the skull hide and seek champs for 2013!

Project Noah.

This website allows people to upload pictures of wildlife that they have seen while treking around the globe and get other people to help them identify what they have found.  In the process, they are creating a detailed map of what species are living where.  The bit that makes this even cooler though, is that someone has made a skull and bones section!  Also known as Identifying animals through osteology

So get on there ASAP.  Show your smarts and help someone out who needs an ID, or scroll through the entries and become edified!

Maybe you can start with this guy who lives with me (if you follow us on twitter you might have seen him before, if you dont – go follow us!)

Well, she didn’t commit a cardinal sin (we hope) but she is certainly invoking one in us with this picture – or maybe even a few…

Apart from being beautiful, the picture has a double (or triple if you count the cardinal birds separately) dose of bones.  In the skeletal reflections of the birds you can see, amongst other things, some cute little cervical vertebrae, and the large sternum characteristic of bird skeletons.  You can also see their cute little birdy skulls, complete with beaks – the avian version of a mandible (jaw).

The human skull – who has a set of chompers that many of us still alive would be jealous of – has a few foramen and some awesome detail in the nasal cavity.  The bit we like best though is his very detailed nasofrontal suture.  Joining the nasal and frontal bones (hence the name!), it has that craggy-ness that makes the skull look real.

So the picture has certainly invoked envy because we want the picture but don’t have it, lust because we love it and greed because we want more of her work.  The good news is that it is for sale!  This painting is at the Copro gallery and there are some prints available on Clare’s website.   Be quick before we buy them all though!

Anyway, enough of our lame puns, what this picture does have is some cool craniofacial anatomy.

He also has a cool feature which we don’t often see in our skull pics as they are generally the wrong angle for it or have a jaw – the styloid process.  This little guy that you see poking down on the bottom left hand side of the picture.  More specifically the temporal styloid process as it is coming from the temporal bone, and sits kind of behind and below your ear.  Its main job is as an anchor point for muscles and ligaments involved in control of your tongue and voicebox so although its small it is important!

We say that Señor Salme is enigmatic for the simple fact that his facebook page is in Spanish so is totally indecipherable by us English only speakers.  You can have a look at it here and see if you can translate…. or you can see a heap of his other artworks at his website here, many of which have skulls but all of which are awesome… AND even better, you can buy prints of these cool pics here!

And, finally, thank you for being patient Craniophiles!  We have recently moved house and jobs so our leisure time (translate blogging time) has been thin on the ground.  We are back in to the swing of normal (as it gets!) life now so we will be inundating you again will skully awesomeness soon!

May your Australia day be full of relaxation and stereotypes… shrimp and lamb chops on the barbie etc…

And a few short Australia day tidbits for you to ruminate on while waiting for your sacrificial meats to roast on the BBQ (partly from the heat of the BBQ, partly from the heat of the sun)

- We don’t call them shrimps, they are prawns

- Prawns don’t have a skull!  Prawns are Decapods (10 feet) and have an exoskeleton, so instead of a skull, their juicy brains are protected on the outside by a hard part of the shell called the Carapace

- As for your lamb, they definitely do have a skull but Im assuming no-one has one on the BBQ today.  Instead you are probably having loin chops or cutlets, which come from the spine and ribs.  BAAAHHH.

Mari Lwyd, or the Grey mare, is a Welsh tradition and although we aren’t 100% sure what it entails we imagine it as an olde school rap battle of sorts where visitors would knock on the door of houses and challenge the people inside to a singing contest with the winner taking all (all being entry into the house and hopefully some good food and booze).  The coolest part of the story however, is that the people would be accompanied by a horses skull, with bottletops or similar as eyes and a veil-like white cloth to cover the guy who drew the short straw and was carrying around the head on the stick.

If you have a close look at the old girl above, in addition to some pretty mean streamers and emerald eyes to die for, you can see the infraorbital foramen (above the teeth on the side) and the mental foramen (below the teeth at the front).  We haven’t seen any good ones for a while so in case you had forgotten the foramen are simply holes in the skull for blood vessels and nerves to travel through.

If you are lucky enough to receive a visit from Mari Lwyd tonight please send us pics! And from V and E at Craniophiles, we hope you have very fun and safe new years celebrations and we look forward to being craniophillic with you in 2013!

Deoxyribonucleic Acid or DNA is the stuff that makes you you.  In essence it is like an molcular instruction manual, telling your cells what to do, when to do it and how to do it.  What makes DNA great for identification purposes is that it is slightly different in every individual (except those pesky twins!), but has similarities that are carried through families.

DNA identification is not totally fool proof and there are a few things that might mean that it is not possible in some cases.  For instance, you need something to compare it to.  Even if a forensic scientist can get DNA from an unidentified skull, if there is no family member to compare it to then it might not help in the identification process.  Luckily for the scientists looking for our old buddy Ned, they did have access to the DNA of some of his living distant relatives.

This is how they knew that this handsomely headless chap below was indeed Ned Kelly.

Picture credit: Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine

It is also how they were able to find out that the skull handed in 2009 by a Mr. Baxter was not.  Is the skull in the posession of the New Zealand witch the real deal?  That remains to be seen….

But now that we have come full circle back to Ned Kelly this will be the last of the skull identification posts for a while.  If you really liked them or there was a topic you were hanging out for that we missed let us know, we are happy to revisit the concept!

…Sexing a skull

We promise this is nowhere near as lewd as it sounds.  Or as fun… no actually take that last bit back, everything to do with skulls is fun!
So as with the skull of Ned Kelly we looked at previously, it is pretty unlikely to find a skull with a big beard or a pretty bow in its hair to tell us whether it is male or female.  That doesn’t mean that a skull can’t tell you what gender it is though.

There are a few factors which can help in indicating the gender such as overall size and weight, bone thickness and size of the cranial vault (brain box) but these are not necessarily as accurate as the other features you can check.

Picture credit here

Two of these features can be seen on the skull diagram above and they are supraorbital ridges and mastoid process.  The mastoid process is basically a bump at the back of the temporal bone that is obviously developed in the male (left) but small or absent as seen with the female on the right.  The supraorbital ridge, or brow ridge, is above the eyes under where your eyebrows sit (hence the name!).  In males there is an obvious bump or ridge here, whereas in females it is less obvious and again, often smooth or non existent.
There is also often a difference in the shape of the jaw with that on a male being more squared and a female being more rounded, and the same trend often rings true with the eye sockets as seen more obviously in the front on picture below.

Picture credit here

Hope you learned something here, we sure did.  Happy skull sexing!!

If you’re anything like us you have trouble putting a name to the  face of a living person, let alone a dead one.  Luckily there is highly trained professionals to do it for us, but how do they do it?  The identifying features that may normally be used have probably long since disappeared- no moles, birthmarks or tattoos, or in the case of Ned Kelly- no spiffy quiff and awesome beard…  One way we can identify is by looking at teeth.

Teeth- is there any limit to what they can do?  They help you eat… they make your smile pretty… well maybe that’s all, but what is cool is that they may still be of use after your death.

Although not quite as individually exclusive as a fingerprint, our teeth do hold some distinctive traits.  If there is dental records available, it may be a matter of just looking and comparing (although not as simple as it sounds).  The number, shape, cavities, fillings, root canals all give points of comparison for dental records and Xrays.

This picture from here shows us how you can compare Xrays taken while still alive (right) can be compared to ones taken after death (left).

However, even if there are no dental Xrays available, teeth can still give an indication and hints towards an identity.

Such is the case with this guy, whose story can be seen in this paper.  Despite the lack of dental records, specialists were able to gain a wealth of information from the teeth- including that he was a male caucasian smoker aged between 25-35.

But of course teeth are not always the answer.  As you might recall from our picture of the (supposed) skull of Ned Kelly a fair few of his top ones were missing and others were looking worse for wear.  There are other ways we can identify our mystery skulls… But you will have to hold out for Part 2!

And we need to put the disclaimer on here that this info is for purely academic purposes…. if you happen to find a random nameless skull while walking down the street- call the Police.

Ms. Hoffman is pretty sure she has the goods, but the skull in question is no longer attached to the famous beard and spiffy quiff, so how do we know that the cranium collecting dust in Ms Hoffman’s cupboard is genuinely that of Ned Kelly?

Hoffman skull pic credit.

Ok, so clearly we’re kidding… but if it has nothing to do with hair, how do we identify what skull belongs to which remains?  There is in fact a few different ways this can be done and forensic/anthropological teams will often use more than one.  Some of these are:

• DNA
• Facial reconstruction
• Teeth
• Measurements and size
• Suture state
• Evidence of injury

We aren’t going to talk about them all today as to be perfectly honest- we don’t know about them all.  But seeing this skull has piqued our Craniophile and we are going to do some research!

So keep your eyes peeled, over the next couple of weeks we will be talking about all sorts of skull identification processes- and if you are an archaeologist, anthropologist, forensic scientist…. Please get in touch!  We would love for you to educate us on your favourite identification technique!