A Roman pine marten!

[ossamenta]

Remember the mustelid bones I found a few weeks ago? They were either from pine marten or from polecat, but I didn't think it was possible to securely identify them from the shapes of the bones themselves.

So I asked a colleague at English Heritage - they have a huge reference collection of all kinds of animals - and she took some measurements from pine marten and polecat bones, and it turned out that my mustelid mostly matched pine martens! *does happy dance of rare species identification*

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

That's great. There seems to be a nice degree of separation between the two groups.

Steph

[ossamenta]

It was a very happy surprise. I thought there would be quite an overlap between them.

[ragnvaeig]

That's surprisingly divergent.