Mortal Remains

The Galapagos Islands are like Canadian National Parks and others where you cannot remove any flora or fauna and that includes their remains. I really wanted a sealion skull but I was very good and left everything behind. The remains below are of a male which had some neat taphonomy on the caudal verts. A badly healed break. I was happy to give a quick talk about bones as our naturalist did not know as much about their remains as the animal while it was alive so we had a great exchange of info.

Just a comparison shot. The female Galapagos sea lion on the left is dead to the world only in the sense she is fast asleep and oblivious of her prettily bleached compatriot directly to her right. Most bones were not articulated particularily well but these were pretty much were the animal died. The white bones blend into the sand a bit in these photos.

Kind of blech. I prefer my bones a bit cleaner but they got to get that way somehow. This little pup was unlucky. We figured it likely was abandoned and starved to death. Poor thing. By now its probably clean as a whistle like the bones above.