Here’s an anatomically correct drawing of a rabbit. If you don’t like dead things, turn back now. The rest of the images are not like this one.

 

 

Last winter, a SLAC-ker mom found a dead rabbit at a construction site.  Because she’s not one to miss an opportunity for the kiddos to learn, she bagged it up and put it in the freezer, and there it stayed until we could get the whole club together. Thanks to a warm spell, we were able to bury the bunny in the middle of February.

The girls looked through the Ziploc bag for signs of injury. They found a bit of blood on its nose. Or maybe it was the mouth. The adult documenting these adventures needs to do a better job of taking notes.

Our National Pi(e) Day baker took the responsibility of digging the hole. You know how you drive past highway construction and see one worker digging while the rest of the crew stands around and watches? Yeah, we’re like that too.

One of the drawbacks of posting six months after the fact is that it’s difficult to remember the little details—such as, what on earth caused this reaction?!

Carefully and respectfully putting the rabbit in its hole.

Six months later, in the middle of August, we decided to see if the bones were ready. Either the marker was accidentally moved, or we didn’t mark the grave accurately because it took hours to find our first bone. Fun fact: rabbit bones are teeny tiny compared to turtle bones.

Stick or Bone? is a challenging game, but we’re getting pretty good at it.

After finding some interesting pieces (look at those tiny teeth in the jawbone (mandible) next to the quarter!), we decided to cover everything back up and wait for a cooler day when all the SLAC-kers could be on-hand to help sift through the dirt.

 

We had hoped to find the skull intact, but comparing what we have to the skeleton below, it’s definitely in fragments (the two pieces of jawbone next to the quarter and a section of the nasal chamber in the upper right corner of the picture above). We have more digging to do, so it’s possible we’ll find more bits of its skull to piece back together. With any luck, we’ll find the twitchy sniffer and the fluffy tuft (minus the fluff, of course) too.