Welcome to the foals page. This skeleton is that of a spanish mustang filly born 6 weeks prematurly. The mare had not been brought in from spring grazing soon enough. It was orginally though that there were twin foals. When I walked into the pasture to collect the carcass there were several large areas of afterbirth (the grass look scortched in thses areas). There were just a few bones remaining in one of the larger areas and what appeared to be an entire carcass in another area about four yards apart. Since coyotes are common in this area we didn't think much about one skeleton being so minimal. We collected the carcass and decided to get the remaining bones from the other area 'just in case.'

I brought the body home and I put it in a Bug Box. I left the foal there from about June to October. I then set about the process of cleaning the tiny bones. I removed each bone from the box and placed it into an ice cream bucket w/a 3:1 ratio (3 cups of water for one teaspoon of bleach). I also added some lemon dish soap to the concoction. I let the mixture sit for about six hours. Normally I let the bones sit in this mixture for several days, but a babies bone are not fully devoloped and there for not very strong. I wasn't about to risk these bones. After the completed their soaking process I scrubbed each bone clean with a tooth brush. The dirt came off, but the bones were still very brown in color. Now I needed to whiten them. I tried the claroxide/paint whitener combo (see it here), to no avail. After three weeks of trying various methods to clean the bones, I gave up. I wasn't going to risk the bones for a color.

Step three was putting the foal together. I first laid out the skeleton (to get an idea of where everything goes and if I was missing anything, what). This is were I discovered that the 'twin foals' were one in their own. Every bone the main carcass was missing the other pile had. Since the bones did not get a chance to fuse together before death I had double the bones an adult skeleton would have had. The skull alone was in probably twenty different peices. I then set about the tedious task of supergluing the skull back together (and trying desperatly not to inlclude my fingers!). the fawn's page> Once the skull was complete I started on the vertebra. The cervical (neck) vertebra were not fused AT ALL, and each one had to be glued in three spots before it was a full bone, most of the lumbar (between the ribs and pelvis) vertebra had to be glued as well. I used household "Goop" to accomplish this task. It worked wonderfully! After each bone dried I used a 1/16" drill bit and wired the backbone together. Next I did the same with the legs, and then I attached them to the body. Lastly I hot-glued in the ribs. I'm not a fan of hot-glue (it's stringy and can be a mess, it's not real strong either), but in this case, wiring the ribs in would have been virutually impossible.

Once the skeleton was assembled, it needed to be mounted. I found a nice, pine, 1x8 board to use. I bought the metal dowls I used to mount it. They were 3/8" wide, so I took a drill bit that is just a TAD smaller then that, and drilled a hole in the base about 1/2" deep. I pounded the dowl into the hole, and wired the skeleton to the pole. To make the skeleton just a tad stronger, I also wired each little hoof to the base as well.

*Whew* after all that, what do you get?!...

An Articulated Foal Skeleton!