Swainson's Hawk skull. Three views from RBCM Avian Osteology site.
I made a post the other day on a cool M.A. thesis about how to tell deer, bear and human wrist and ankle bones apart. Identification of bones is one of the essential specialist activities in archaeology: the bones don’t come out of the ground labelled, and yet they are a key way to understand past diet, behaviour and environmental change. Being able to identify a bone from the ground to the species it comes from requires a collection of bones of known species – a comparative collection – and these do not grow on trees. They are laborious to produce and finicky to curate. The one at the University of Victoria, for example, contains over 1,500 skeletons and is in constant use by archaeologists and biologists, not to mention the awesomely talented people at Pacific IDentifications. Mind you, the UVIC collection is one of the best anywhere in North America, but most archaeology departments and even many consulting archaeologists attempt to have a basic comparative collection on hand. This is a burdensome chore!
While looking at pictures will never be a substitute for a three-dimensional bone for comparison, it can nonetheless be better than nothing. It is therefore nice to see a really useful, if preliminary, set of web pages at the Royal B.C. Museum on Avian osteology.
Northwest Coast Archaeology 