On New Year’s Day, as I was hiking with a fellow photographer to one of my favorite spots at the local marsh, she spotted this skull, flipped upside down on a mossy log. Had it been placed on the log by a fellow hiker or had it been abandoned there by another animal?
Judging from the length of the one remaining tooth, it looks like this is a skull of a North American Beaver (Castor canadensis). There is no way for me to tell how this animal died, but the tooth marks around the eye socket suggest that something has been gnawing on the skull.
We both took some photographs of the skull and then hurried along, hoping to see a live beaver at its lodge. We saw the lodge, but, alas, did not see a living beaver that day.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Great find! I always enjoy finding stuff like that in the woods and then showing my granddaughter or taking it in to show the kids at school. They are always so amazed!
I wonder if brer fox has a belly full of beaver. It would be quite a fight to watch. Foxes aren’t that big.
I don’t know for sure about the fox, but I did hear from another photographer that he had seen the fox in the area around a dead goose and also in the area adjacent to a dead deer (that had been pretty well picked clean).
Natures treasures are everywhere. Nice find and captures.
Thanks, Dan. I’ll be treasure hunting again in the woods soon–who knows what I’ll discover the next time.
As you know, you are so lucky to have a marsh nearby. Since I don’t have one, I so enjoy your posts.
Too cool..:-)
It looks like it has been there a while. It would be great to find more of the rest of the skeleton, but it’s probably at the bottom of the lake.
It would have been cool to find the other part of the skull or other bones, but I didn’t notice any around.
You’re, um, dead right about another animal having had a go at the bone, probably because of the minerals it contains. It was almost certainly a rodent of some kind, because of the the gouges are so smooth and look like they’ve been filed. I always have a close look, too, when I find something like this–and wonder what the story was.
My boys think these photos are very cool. We’ve actually never seen a live beaver in the wild so even skeletal remains would be uncovering treasure. Thanks for directing me (and my kids) to this post.