Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab, my partner and I dissected the pellet of a barn owl, which is essentially the result of regurgitation after the digestion of flesh. The pellet usually contains bones and fur as those are not digested or broken down in the digestion process of the barn owl. We used forceps to dissect the pellets and discovered many bones after clearing away all the fur from them. We deduced that the bones in our pellet were from moles and voles. The first piece of evidence is the piece in the upper right hand corner in the following picture. The only bone that would look like this is the pelvis or hip bone of the mole. Additionally, the other bones in the picture resemble the fibulas and tibias of moles and voles. There are even joints, which look like holes, in them that make them clear to be the lower legs of moles and voles.


For a final touch, we discovered some teeth and some vertebrae. What this tells us is these organisms were definitely not birds, as birds do not have teeth, and their vertebrae is not nearly as large as the ones we found.



1) We noticed that the hip joints were similar to our hip joints as there is a hole for the liquid filled sac to allow for rotation and movement flexibility.
2) In the picture above, the vertebrae resemble ours as they stack with thin layers to prevent friction, just like ours.
3) Although it may seem really obvious, we(humans and moles)both have teeth. This alone, surprisingly, already distinguishes us from birds. Mammals are more closely related to mammals, not birds.


1) We walk on two legs, but moles and voles walk on four legs. Consequently, their hip bones are a lot longer than ours.
2) Again, we walk vertically. So our vertebrae is axial, or up and down. Their vertebrae doesnt exactly have to take as much stress from gravity as we do, so they can be smaller or weaker.
3) Some hip bones look very odd compared to ours, especially the one belonging to the moles. The small, almost rectangular shape really baffles me as it looks literally nothing like our own pelvis.