Owl Pellet dissection

Today in class we dissected an owl pellet to look at the bones of the owl's prey. My partner and I believe that the organism that the owl ate was a rat. We came to this conclusion through the following steps. First we examined the organism's teeth. Our packet said that if the organism has teeth, the organism is not a bird. Then we examined the teeth and there is a gap between the front teeth or back teeth (as seen in the pictures).

there is a small gap between the front teeth and back teeth

Finally we measured the length of the skull and it was greater than 25mm. Our skull was 32 mm. These pieces of evidence led us to believe that the organism was a rat.

















3 ways that human bones are similar to the ones we found in the dissections is that the bones are hard. They do not break easily, similar to human bones. The organism also had many of the same bones as we do, such as a cranium, mandible, humerus, femur, and more. Another similarity is that the organism had many ribs just like humans do.
3 differences between the organism and humans is that the shape of the skull is different. There tail bone area is also different from that of humans because rats have a tail and humans do not. The last difference is the size of the bones, humans have much larger bones because the size of our body is much bigger than that of a rat.