Exploration and Discovery

Our house backs onto a ravine and my grandchildren and I like to explore down there. There is a lot of wildlife that frequents our ravine and we enjoy seeing plenty of deer, raccoons, squirrels, fox and coyote as well as various birds. While we are exploring, we find all sorts of things. Evidence of human life like broken chairs, bed springs, bricks, old poles with ceramic electricity insulators on them and lots of stuff the river washes down. The most interesting things we find are skeletal bones.

Yes, I know some people think that is gross and I used to as well but I have come to see that it is interesting to discover how God put together living things. This blog is about art and my topic today fits with that because after I have found and cleaned the bones and other things we discover, I like to sketch them. Take a look.

These are some finds we stumbled across in early April when the snow was just melting away. The top sketch is the jawbone of a White Tailed Deer that still has teeth in it. I believe the correct term is "Mandible". The lower left is a sketch of a Cephalopod fossil and the lower right is a Freshwater Clam shell.

In May we discovered this skull and mandible. It was too small for a deer and the teeth are not the kind seen in a beaver so I had to ask Google for help identifying them. Note the "fangs" coming out of the bone on the top and bottom of the mouth. There were four of them. This feature helped me determine that this was a fox skull and jawbone.

This week in our exploring adventure, we were lucky to find these bones. It is getting difficult to spot them since the undergrowth has sprouted and covered the ground. There were several bones in the area and a short distance away. Since we never go exploring without a bag, we picked them all up and carried them home with us to study there.

Since I don't know much about skeletons, I first assumed this was another skull piece but the shape of it just wasn't right.

Here we have a leg bone, not entirely sure which leg bone though and along with it were two other smaller bones that fit together which I think were the bones of the Knee joint which from the diagram below are comprised of several small bones called Carpals and only seem to be on the fore legs.

I found many of the above shaped bones and knew they were Vertebrae since I have been under a Chiropractor's care for 6 months, I knew what the basic Vertebrae shapes were. The top left sketch is a Thoracic Vertebrae (side and front views), lower left is a Cervical Vertebrae, upper right is a Lumbar Vertebrae, and the lower left is a Caudal Vertebrae of the tail.

After cleaning the bones and fitting them together, It made sense that the piece I thought was a skull turned out to be the Hipbone or Ilium . It was just like a puzzle putting this spine together but so cool to see how each piece fit into the next. There are several pieces missing and perhaps I can still find them but this was obviously the remains of a White Tailed Deer.

The larger bone at the right end of the spine is the Sacrum.
I also found a few other bones that I could not figure out. They looked like they fit into each other somehow and at first I thought they were part of the tail. Enlisting Google's help again, I found that they were most likely the ankle bones or Phalanxes.

This diagram helped me to make sense of the bones I had found. I really enjoyed drawing them too and they add a story to my Garden Sketchbook that I have been keeping for the last few years.