marder madness

I promise, there are other things going on in my life; I don't spend all my time playing with dead animals.

But right now I'm extremely fascinated with this process and since I never got to dissect anything in high school, I'm making up for it.

Today Mr. Holden, a student, and I got to work cleaning off the skull of both the marder and a pheasant. If you know me at all you know I loathe birds, so I rather enjoyed picking it to shreds and pulling its eyeballs out of its skull. Sorry, too graphic?

I was also happy to see that two of my seventh grade life science students came and got their hands dirty as well. It was neat for them to see the pheasant skull because tomorrow and Wednesday our topic is birds! What perfect timing.

Now both skulls are happily sitting in a beaker of bleach water to get cleaned and disinfected. I'm sure there will be another update when the process is complete.

Here are a few shots from the afternoon: