Monday Mustelid #37

Something a little different this week ...

i-dacd6361ac2d5a41b181df7820791eb9-Mustela_eversmanni_dauricus_ht_lat_thumb.jpg

i-fa70ea324041ea92c6abb49d42898e67-Mustela_eversmanni_heptapotamicus_ht_up_thumb.jpg

i-2f4c26e7f29928495b02be1c0e914af0-Mustela_eversmanni_heptapotamicus_ht_down_thumb.jpg 

Steppe Polecat, Mustela eversmanni Lesson 1827.

I spent three years of my life measuring mustelid skulls. I kind of miss it.

More like this

Nice. I do so love bones, their strength, resiliency, artistic lines made even more poignant by their functionality. I love, too, how rife a bone is with information, skulls especially. There's an entire encyclopedia in a skull.

Michael,

Extant species. They formed the data for my PhD dissertation. You can find copies of resultant papers at http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/publications.html - scroll down to 1997 and work backwards.

No explorers died (or dogs eaten) in the making of my research :)

By John Lynch (not verified) on 14 Nov 2008 #permalink

Curious why the skull is annotated/labeled in Russian. Do you know anything about the specimen?

By ChrisTheRed (not verified) on 15 Nov 2008 #permalink

The skull reads:
Ðз колл. С. У. СÑÑо
ганова (From the collection of S. U. Stroganov)
Ñжн-ÐÑибал. (south-Pribal.)
[possibly Pribaltiysky: southern Baltic region]
The rest I'm just unsure of.

I did some searching on S.U. Stroganov, and it appears there was a fellow of the Western Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences by this name; this table of contents shows him as the author of the first three monographs:
"Materials on the systematics of Siberian mammals"
"(A) new view of the shrew for Siberian fauna"
"Materals to(ward) the knowledge of Siberian mammalians (notes on nomenclature and systematics)"

Same guy? If so, interesting.

By ChrisTheRed (not verified) on 15 Nov 2008 #permalink

Interesting stuff, but a little quibble on ChrisTheRed's translations: It reads 'Stroganova' as far as I can ascertain, indicating that S.U. is/was a lady (female).
Just for the records.

Genitive of male surnames is the -a phoneme (genitive because it's the collection OF Stroganov), which is the same as the feminine nominal case. If it were a woman's name, it would be Ðз колл. С. У. СÑÑоганови. Iz koll(ektsii) S.U. Stroganovi.

By ChrisTheRed (not verified) on 30 Nov 2008 #permalink