Hello everyone!! What a minute it’s been since I’ve been on here!! I have been so busy with life. I ended up in a mental health facility for a bit to get myself better. I feel great, got engaged last weekend, and have been doing more vulture culture stuff.
Pictured is a litter of opossum Joey’s and an older joey!
Got this guy today hoping I could find his other antler. I was unable to locate it and upon further inspection of him, his skull was very broken! I just cut his antler off after that.
Another roadkill fatality but I was too late getting to him to save his meat!
Had to dispatch this poor guy at work. Got hit by a car and broke both front legs. He will not go to waste though! I dropped him off at the processor and kept his head.
One of my favorite skulls in my collection, this is a Reeves’ muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi). I purchased this skull as is, I did not clean it myself. The final photo is of a live, captive Reeves’ muntjac at a zoo.
Muntjacs are relatively small, primitive deer that have fang-like “tusks” (downward pointing canines), and trust me, they are sharp, sharper than the canines on all the carnivore skulls I have. They also have small antlers that sit on characteristically long pedicles (the permanent outgrowths of the skull’s frontal bone from which antlers grow). Males typically fight with their tusks, rather than their antlers.
There are 12 recognized species of muntjac deer, and one of the fascinating things about them as a group is their chromosome count. Not only does the Indian muntjac (M. muntjak) have the smallest chromosome count of any mammal (males have a diploid number of 7 and females of 6 chromosomes), but the diploid number of chromosomes varies largely within the same genus; Reeves’ muntjacs have a diploid number of 46 chromosomes! Because of this variation within the genus, muntjac genetics are widely studied.
