Putting a partial roe deer skeleton back together

Daddy and I were planning to go on a deer stalking walk today, but it was raining, so Daddy said maybe I could put one of my old deer skeletons together. I was going to do a baby roe deer skeleton, but we couldn't find all the spine bones, so we did this adult roe deer instead (we call it Eddie).

While put the bones back together in the right order, Daddy set up of his cameras to take a picture every few seconds. When we put all the pictures together it looked like this:



You can see how I sorted out the bones. There were 66 bones for this roe deer, which seems like a lot, but it's not a complete skeleton, and most of these were the ribs and vertabrae. When we found the skeleton, most of the front legs were missing, and there are other bones, like the toes, which we brought back but must have put in a different box. I started with the spine first, putting a wire through the bones so they all stayed together in the right order.



Daddy said I did a really good job doing it by myself. I put the shoulder blades in the wrong place in the video, though - they go on top of the ribs, as you can see below, and at the end we found a front leg bone which was in the wrong box. Once the bones were all together, you can see how big the roe deer used to be - about the same size as a large dog, but with longer legs.



Here's a close up of the pelvis, the end of the spine, and the top leg bones.



Here's how the spine connects to the skull. The top neck bone is called the atlas - it looks a lot different from the other next bones, but it fits perfectly onto the skull.



I wrote more about this deer's skull in this post here.

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