Grey Squirrel In a Box

Well my beetles finished working on a squirrel skeleton about two weeks ago, and, I have finally found time to start working on it. I will hopefully have it completed soon but since school does take first priority it may take a bit of time.
The beetles did a wonderful job on the skeleton. For the most part the skeleton is very much intact. I'm very happy about that because when I boil a skeleton it comes out as a jumbled mess and I have to figure out every tiny bone. Also, I have always lost a couple of small bones during the boiling process but so far it looks like I may have all of the bones this time. I recently whitened the bones but will probably whiten some of the bones further. Basically, all that is left for me to do is reshape parts and glue everything together. Here is the squirrel in a box :)Here are a few close-ups:
This is the head. The lower mandible is not attached right now. If you look closely you can see what I am pretty sure is the hyoid bone. It is very thin and delicate but as you can see the beetles left it intact. You can also see the atlas bone at the base of the skull.This is one of the forearms. The best thing about my beetles is that they will keep the tiny hand and feet bones together so I do not have to solve that puzzle every time I work on a skeleton. This is the pelvis and some vertebra. I have started to glue the pieces of the pelvis back together already. The pelvis was broken when the squirrel was killed.This is a back foot.This is the tail. I decided to go ahead and shape it while it was drying. This all brings me to how I would like to pose the squirrel. I plan to position it something like this:I borrowed this image from www.natures-desktop.com where they have tons of free pictures to use as computer wallpaper.

Speedy Bugs

I have been taking daily photos of the squirrel since placing her in with the dermestid beetles. I pasted the pictures together and made a little video to show the progression. It has taken a week for the beetles to remove all of the meat from the squirrel. It turns out she has two broken ribs, a broken pelvis, and a couple of broken spinous processes on her vertebrae. I say that is not bad for a run in with a relatively large dog. Overall, the damage is fixable and the skeleton should turn out nicely. I am leaving her in with the beetles for another day or two just to get off the very last tiny bits of flesh and then I will whiten her bones and start working on her. The beetles have done a wonderful job and I can't wait to get them started on my next specimen.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I just liked this picture of the beetles so I thought I would share it. This one shows more adults. You can see that some of them are a little brownish and some are black.

My Newest "Pet" Addition

Some girls got jewelry, books, and pretty things for Christmas, while I got those things, I also got flesh eating BUGS for Christmas!!! I have been wanting dermestid beetles for a while now and was ecstatic when I opened one of my Christmas gifts from my brother and found care instructions for dermestid beetles. I knew my sister had dropped a hint to him that I wanted to start a colony of dermestid beetles but had no idea he really was getting them for me. If you don't really know anything about them they are small beetles that look like this:Most of the ones in the picture are still in their larvae stages but there are a few adults. These creatures are harmless to the living but love the dead. They will clean a carcass until there is nothing but bone left. They work marvelously fast considering their size and are a skeleton builder's dream. They are regularly used by museums to clean carcasses. So to get back to my story. My brother did some research and found a reputable seller on Ebay and bought me 500 beetles. He had them shipped to his mother for her to care for until he was in town for Christmas. Lucky for all of us, his mother enjoys interesting critters as much as I do so she didn't mind caring for them. To make a long story short, this Christmas ranked as one of the best ones ever.
I have now had these lovely creatures for a month and have put them to good use since the holidays ended. They have already completely cleaned a small bird skeleton and are currently working on a squirrel. In the past, I have boiled the skeletons I have built. It worked well with some but not so well with others. A lot of people do not notice the problems that boiling causes but I can see it. It causes the deterioration of the bones, some yellowing (although peroxide does wonders for that), and makes the bones more brittle. To make this option worse, most family members do not appreciate walking into a room where roadkill is being boiled. I have also tried maceration in the past without much success. In my experience maceration works best in warm weather so it is not a year round way to handle skeletons (plus it smells awful and takes quite a while). Dermestid beetles are great at cleaning skeletons and do no harm to the bones. In theory my colony consists of somewhere around 700-1000 beetles and larvae by now but who's counting. They were able to finish the bird I placed in there in about 4 days. I think the squirrel will take about a week to finish. Surprisingly, so far, there are no horrible odors coming from all of this. The beetles themselves do not stink, it is their food that stinks. To give you an idea of the progress my colony can make in just under 24 hours here are three shots of the same squirrel rib cage.

This one was taken around 6 pm on Friday, 2 days after I placed the squirrel in the aquarium (the white within the ribcage is a paper towel placed within to keep the shape of the ribcage).
This one was taken the next morning around 10 am.This one was taken Saturday around 4:30 pm.The rest of the skeleton is coming along beautifully and I can not wait to start building this skeleton and get my next one started.

My Bobcat

This is one of my favorite projects I have worked on. It is a bobcat that was hit by a car in my hometown. She had some damage but was in remarkably good shape. I built her for Mr. Johnson's Zoology class at East Central. She was a challenge but was a lot of fun to build and taught me a lot. I will have to stop by ECCC and get a better picture of her.

Here are her before pictures:I have to admit I kept her pelt. It was too beautiful to let it go to waste. Judging from her bones and her size, she was still fairly young. I think she was less than a year old. To give you some perspective on her size, the tiles on the floor are 14"X14". I have found two more bobcats since her. One was a good bit bigger and the other was obviously even younger and much smaller. Also, you may be able to tell from the picture that her left elbow was pretty severely broken along with both shoulder blades when she was hit. I ultimately had to replace her shoulder blades with one of the other bobcat's.