Click To Enlarge
This skull was sort of a mystery to me when I first got it. It was lacking almost of it's teeth. But I'm known for coming back to things that I'm not sure on. I was able to come up with a dental formula, which in and of it's was a struggle. I was able classify into the group Carnivora, and but this is where the problem begins. It's dental formula is 3-1-4-2 / ?-?-?-?
The left numbers represent the upper jaw while the question marks to the left represent the teeth on the bottom. To do a dental formula. You count all the teeth on side of the jaw. So in this case, there are a total of 6 incisiors on the top jaw, however for the purpose of a dental formula, you only count the three of them. So this animal has 3 incisors, 1 canine, 4 premolars, and 2 molars.
You can really get pretty exact on this type of identifying if you have both the lower and upper jaw. In my case, the dental formula is 3-1-4-2, which is shared with twelve differnt genera. I limited down to just a small handleful. It's either a small dog, a possible coyote puppy ( I doubt it though ), a raccoon ( I really believe it is a raccoon ), or a fox. I'm sticking with raccoon, unless someone else knows better.
By the way, if you have any skulls or your kids bring home skulls. Get a good pictures of it showing the top like I did, the bottom side showing the teeth in good detail, and the lower jaw if possible. I'll see if I can figure out. Or better yet, I highly suggest getting Peterson's field guide for North America mammals or A Key to the skulls of North American Mammals. You can get the Key to skulls from an online store called Skulls Unlimited. This way, you can figure out the skull yourself.
Recent Comments