Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab, we dissected an owl pellet and looked for bones to guess what kind of animal was eaten by the owl. There was a packet with pictures of bones for voles, moles, ect. to compare our findings to.

The rodent in our pellet was a vole. The skull was the main giveaway because voles have their teeth grouped at the back of the jaw rather than it being spread out and all three skulls that we found matched that. It also had elongated front teeth that could only belong to a mole or vole. The leg bones also matched those of a vole.

The anatomy of this rodent was similar to one of a human in that it had all the basic bones like a femur and a skull. There was a ball-and-socket joint that we found connecting the hip to the leg bones, which humans also have. The placement of the skeletal bones itself was similar to a human skeleton: head, spine, arms, legs. The most obvious difference is the shape of the skull. Clearly, humans don't have long front teeth like voles do and our teeth are also evenly spaced throughout our mouths. The skull was also much more oval and long than a human skull (the posterior of the skull was broken off but you could still tell). The voles had a group of 4 teeth in the front and the rest were a the back of the jaw. Voles also have tails-we found a bunch of little bones that we couldn't piece together-but humans don't, unless you count the tailbone as one.