When walking around in the woods this fall, taking pictures, the sight of a skull sitting in the dirt, caught my eye. At closer examination, I immediately identified it as the Odocoileus virginianus, also known as the White Tailed Deer. I also noticed nearby that there were what looked like a few ribs. Within minutes of searching the area, I had found two almost complete legs, the full back and neck vertebrae, the skull and both jaw bones, the hip joint, both shoulder-blades, and a couple dozen ribs. After finding a clear spot, I started assembling the parts, with the help of an illustration of a deer skeleton, and discovered that I had a nearly complete female deer skeleton that I decided to name Ginny.I've found parts of deer skeletons before, but they were hardly worth trying to collect, considering how damaged they were. What was unique about this skeleton, was that it seemed to have hardly been touched. Except for the fact that two whole legs, and the tail vertebrae, were missing, this skeleton was perfect. Nothing had been obviously chewed on. Last March, I came across a doe that had been attacked and partcially eaten by coyotes (as proven by the dozens of coyote prints found nearby). I kept a close eye on the carrion, and within a week, all of the meat had been stripped from its body. The skeleton was full, but about every bone on it (including the skull) had been knawed on. How this skeleton somehow avoided complete mutilation is beyond me.
An interesting fact that I learned when searching online for an illustration of a deer skeleton, was that with the way that deers are constructed, they are literally standing on their toe nails. For those of you that aren't familiar with the bones of the human body, the bone in your thigh is the
femur, the bones in your shin are the tibia and fibula, and the bones in your feet are the meta- tarsals. As seen by this graph of Ginny, the deer's metatarsals are actually located in the leg. This means the ankle are their toes, and the hooves are their toenails. As demonstrated by the deer's incredible ability to run and jump and incredible speed, their unique structure has been a huge success.I took this picture in the fall of 2006.
7 comments:
Is that why ballarina's are so graceful, because they dance on their toes?
You know, I never thought of that before! Deer are a lot like ballerinas, aren't they? Perhaps we're on to something here...
If martial arts can be based on animal movements, couldn't dances be as well?
I reallyl ike the pictures that you have taken and placed on your site hear. What kind of camera are you using? Is it digital or an SLR? And do you use any type of software to tweak your pictures? I really like the squirrel and the spider's web. The squirrel would make a neat digital painting and the spider's web could be made into an awesome graphic.
Love the skeleton!
Thanks for the compliments! I currently use a Lumix Panasonic DMC-FZ5 Digital camera. It's not the best camera out there, but it does the job. :-) As for the tweaking, once in a while I will, obviously the skelton picture was tweaked because it blended too much with the ground, I was afraid people would have trouble seeing it. But if the picture is too dark or doesn't have enough contrast, I will tweak it sometimes.
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