domestic cat (felis catus) ✸ male ✸ 9.2cm
this skull comes from a feral cat that was predomenantly stripped bones when I found him. there's a couple of things we can learn about this little kitty from his skull: firstly, he was likely young. his teeth were all intact and clean, his skull shows no signs of age related change. we know he was a male because of the shape of his coronoid process on his mandible, which differs slightly between male and female felines. you can see what i'm talking about here - we're looking at the proc. coronoideus (you can click these images to view them full size):
now if we compare that to my little kitty's mandible, we can see that his doesn't seem to bend as dramatically as the female mandible in the example, so we can assume he was likely a male!
