Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab, we took an owl pellet and took it apart, so that the bones and fur of what that owl had eaten were in separate piles. We then took the bones and tried our best to identify what it was and tried our best to reconstruct the skeleton of the animal with what bones we had. What we think our animal was, is that it's a rat. We decided on this because the average skull of a rat is 30 mm in length and about 25 mm in width, and the skull we had was 30 mm in length and 21 mm in width. Another feature of the skull that made us think it's a rat would be the way the teeth in it's skull were. The differences the skeleton of a rat to a human are the shape of the pelvis is long in a rat unlike that of a human, the rat's skull is elongated and has a different set up in teeth, and the rat's tibia and fibula are fused together at some parts unlike that of a human's. The similarities between rat and human skeletons are that their ribs are roughly the same shape, the scapula are also roughly the shame shape, and that the overall skeleton is roughly the same, just with slight differences in length and built.