Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab, we got an owl pellet and separated all the bones that we found from the fur. We also tried to put the bones together to try and see what organism we found. We think that the organism we found was a vole because its large eye sockets, large beak/nose, and shape of the skull. The bones of a vole was similar to those of a human because they both had an easily recognizable skull, very similar looking humerus, and they both have so many ribs. We also found the tibia and fibula of our animal which looked exactly like a human bone. We found out that on a vole, the tibia and fibula were switched so the small and very thin one was the tibia and the thicker one was the fibula. Unlike a human skeleton, the vole had a large and sharp nose, many leg bones, and very small bones that were hard to identify.

We found two similar looking skulls in our pellet which meant we had two of the same organisms.

We matched the head of our organism to the picture of the vole, which is how we figured out our organism was a vole.

This bone we found was almost identical to the picture of the humerus of the vole.

We put our pieces together with another group to see if we could complete the organism.