Science Toy Review

Wow, I did this little science project recently and was pretty amazed to discover what our owl had recently eaten. If you’ve never dissected an owl pellet, you should give it a try. It’s kind of gross, but they say the pellet has been sanitized so I’m sure it’s not dangerous to be handling- albeit it’s still gross. My five-year-old and I had a pretty good time separating the bones from the other matter in the pellet (who knows what that was) and laying them out according to the skeletal diagrams that came with it.

The most interesting thing about this kit is learning exactly what the little skeleton is. We weren’t sure what the owl had eaten until we had enough bone evidence to lay out and determine that our guy had eaten a shrew. It looks kind of like a mouse but with a slightly different looking skull and different teeth.

If you’ve never done this experiment, you may not know exactly what an owl pellet it. Well, basically when an owl eats its prey, it swallows it whole, lets the digestive system do its work, and then regurgitates a pellet of all the undigestible material from its meal. Inside this pellet you’ll find the bones of whatever it had just eaten. Sometimes it will be a small bird, or a rat or mouse and in our case it was a shrew. For about $6-7, this is a pretty cool project. It even made Atomic Elephant Toy’s list of the best selling toys of 2008.