What an interesting find. I've just spent about an hour pondering this spotting. It's built very lightly and there are struts in various places so I'm guessing bird. Here is a bit of an idea. It may not be a skull, despite what appears to be eye sockets, nares holes and a bill. I'm wondering if it isn't a bird's pelvic girdle. I can't find anything quite like this though on image searches, but bird pelvic girdles are often mis-identified even by naturalists as skulls. Eye sockets are well-defined in birds and I don't see that definition here. At least if others are working on this it may provide a different direction to search for an ID. I suspect it is a pelvic girdle. Can you give us dimensions? I'm intrigued....
3 Comments
Not bird pelvic girdle. The large holes are eye sockets, not acetabulum. There are no fused vertebra, which is the majority of a bird pelvis:
https://i.imgur.com/OZriuTF.jpg
Better match for a fish skull plate:
http://helterskeletons.com/bones-2/
What an interesting find. I've just spent about an hour pondering this spotting. It's built very lightly and there are struts in various places so I'm guessing bird. Here is a bit of an idea. It may not be a skull, despite what appears to be eye sockets, nares holes and a bill. I'm wondering if it isn't a bird's pelvic girdle. I can't find anything quite like this though on image searches, but bird pelvic girdles are often mis-identified even by naturalists as skulls. Eye sockets are well-defined in birds and I don't see that definition here. At least if others are working on this it may provide a different direction to search for an ID. I suspect it is a pelvic girdle. Can you give us dimensions? I'm intrigued....
I hope you'll add this spotting to the Identifying Animals Through Osteology mission at http://www.projectnoah.org/missions/8475...