Science, Class Response

Today and yesterday during our science class we have began our new experiment. This experiment involves a variety of activities. First, your group receives an owl pellet and you must dissect it to discover all the hidden bones inside. Throughout this experiment you identify the different bones and find out the animal that the owl had eaten. An interesting fact about this class would be that me and my group found two skulls in our pellet. As a result, we learned we have two animals within the pellet and double the amount of bones. Another interesting fact was that I learned the animals have two separate bottom jaws and you can identify them by the small sharp teeth on the rim. Then I also learned that the process of owls producing the pellets is called regurgitation. This means that after swallowing an animal whole it goes through a series of steps before it can be fully regurgitated. For instance, it enters the glandular stomach where the meat of the animal is separated from the bones and fur. After that, the bones and fur go to the muscular stomach where it squeezes the matter into a ball and the owl throws it back up. However, this experiment may sound a little bit disgusting but I very much enjoyed it. My favorite part was scavenging the pellets for any bones we can find. In addition, I also enjoyed how we had to match the bones with the diagram given us. This felt like we were doing a puzzle which I love to solve. Overall, this activity was very much worth all the time and hard work and I hope to do many more fun activities!

http://www.hometrainingtools.com/article.asp?ai=1244&bhcd2=1258132004

http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/owl-pellet-dissection.html