Dissecting An Owl Pellet

In this lab we got to dissect an owl pellet. We learned about what exactly an owl pellet was (I learned that it is not in fact poop) and how it was created inside a barn owl. We got our pellet and had to separate the hair from the bones and organize the bones we found into the different types: long, short, flat or irregular, or more easily into what parts of the body we recognized them to be: skull, vertebrae etc. Sadly, my partner and I did not find any skull or obvious identifying parts to come to a sure conclusion of what animal it was but we knew it was a rodent.

Even without a skull, we had two pairs of pubic bones that looked most like a shrew pubis so we decided that our animals were shrews. After sorting through our pellet we found full sets of legs that also fit the shape and size of a shrew leg, making us more sure of our conclusion.
A rodents skeleton is at the same time, very different and very similar to a humans; we have all the same parts and generally they have the same shape, but rodents use theirs differently so they need to be different. A large difference is the skull shape with the teeth but seeing as we could not find a skull in our pellet I will focus on what we could find. One difference we found was the tibia and fibula. In humans, our tibia bears more weight and is therefore thicker than the fibula but that is switched in rodents and are also fused together as seen here:

Another part that is different is the pelvis. The rodents had a much more elongated ilium than humans giving it a strange shape compared to our own. Given the different shape, it still have the same general structure as our own:

The last difference we could tell with our set of bones was the amount of vertebrae that the rodents have. Majority of the bones that we extracted form the pellet were different vertebrae of all shapes and sizes showing just how many more they have than humans because of how they live.