My cigar box of delights… #1

My cigar box of delights…

Over the years, I have been given many small, fragile or plain odd items, which I keep separate from the rest of my collection in a wooden case once used as a case for fifty finest Cuban cigars but which now contains:

Small bags of rat, mouse shrew and vole skulls from owl pellets
A carved piece of deer antler
An articulated mouse skeleton (homemade, again, from an owl pellet)
An amulet of deer fur
A loose fox jaw with every bone still in place
A jar of assorted loose teeth
A pair of huge cow teeth
A large and slightly scary pair of deer incisors (the hidden weapon of muntjac)
The right half of the face of a cat skull.

The muntjac incisors, its hard to get a good frame of reference, but the unbroken one is three inches long.

The muntjac fangs inserted into a spare muntjac deer skull, you can see how big they are.

This is the fragment of cat skull as seen from the side, it was given to me by my friend Digby who saw it in his garden.

This it the cat skull fragment as seen from the front, I know it is from a cat, as I have two other cat skulls in my collection to compare it to.

All the teeth from the tooth jar, from top left we have red deer incisors, deer molars, fox molars
Middle row, two human teeth from a dentist with similar interests to mine, the rest are rabbit teeth,
Bottom row are all pig teeth ( see last weeks article)

This is the carved and polished piece of antler, showing the honeycomb build inside

This it the other side of the  carved horn showing the patterning and taper.

The fox jaw, like I said, it has all the teeth still in the mandible, which is quite a rare thing to see… check out that canine… its not clean yet, but its only mud, so ill probably use it in a future article on cleaning and whitening bones.

The cows teeth, its hard to get a frame of reference, but each of these is 2.5 inches long.

The deer fur amulet, this was a joke gift from a friend, who saw it at a stall at a wiccan/pagan/goth fair in Norfolk and thought of me… ( I don’t know what she was trying to say…

I hope you enjoyed todays article, and I intend to do a follow up article on the rest of the weird and wonderful items from the cigar box of mystery…