I’m a very curious person by nature, and especially with animals, I’d like to know more about them if they are different. Like I remember I kept Googling for pictures or even description of a glider’s skull. I wanted to know how can a little creature like a glider can have over 40 teeth! Sadly, the pictures were either too small or too blurry.
Well, I finally got a skull. And Noooooooo….. I didn’t go kill a glider. What happened was that last year, a friend of mine decided to let me have his dead glider. It died after some complications with a cat from an accident. It was pretty…. well, weird to me at first, as to how do I preserve the skull properly without damaging the bones. Well, I won’t go into too much detail about it as it was a long long lonnnng process of waiting and cleaning.
So here is the skull. I have yet to know how to attach the lower jaw to the skull since naturally, tendons and muscles hold it in place. Now it’s all bones.
The skull, it actually doesn’t look like it belongs to a glider. The teeth reminds me of an animal that is raccoon or cat-like. But look at the back area, the bone is loaded with pores, almost bird-like. I thought it meant its fragile but just got to know from Yueyi that the pores help strengthen the bone to withstand impact. Very cool.
Like I said, it really doesn’t have similarities to a glider’s face. Looking from the top, the skull really looks like it belongs to a bird.
Look at the tiny teeth of the inner molars of the bottom jaw. And look at the length of that bottom front tooth.
Look at those rows of teeth. Crazy right? To me, why I wanted a closer look was because I wanted to understand, are their teeth like ours? Or like rodents? From my observations, they look almost carnivore-like base on those fangs. The teeth are designed to chew both protein matter, insect matter and fruit matter.
I’m going to do more research on this and show some vets and see what they think. All this is done coz I wanna study more, so ladies and gentleman out there reading, please do not simply go and kill your glider just to have a “souvenir” for yourself.
If possible, I’d like to learn more about their whole skeleton, so in a few years down the road, I’ll get some vet help to preserve a skeleton if it’s possible to obtain it.
**** PS: I hope someone could reply me on how to clean bones and preserve it properly. All I did was soak the skull in bleach and then scrub with toothpaste.
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