It's been a while since we last caught up with my wallaby, which I am suddenly going to decide to call Logan.  When we saw him last, I was concentrating on his feet, although the initial post does also include a photo of the partially prepped skull in right lateral view.

Back in the day — and this was eight months ago, remember — I wrote "I think that [the skull] would benefit from a third simmer-and-pick session before I put [it] out somewhere for invertebrates to deal with."  That's what I did, but the results were not encouraging.  I put the skull (and first three cervical vertebrae, which I'd prepared with it) into a plastic box with air-holes and left it in the woodshed — an approach that's worked well for Darren Naish many times, and has also served me well regarding that baby rabbit that I keep meaning to show you.  But when I went to retrieve Logan's skull a few days ago, I found that it had gone mouldy!

There should be a picture of Mouldy Logan here, but I stupidly forgot to take one.  So instead here is the fifth cervical vertebra of the Erketu ellisoni holotype IGM 100/1803, with its bizarrely sigmoid centrum, from Ksepka and Norell (2006: fig. 5).

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Well, anyway — ouch!  I didn't even know bone could go mouldy.  And what I didn't appreciate at that point is that the mould had also made the bone fragile, brittle — crumbly, even.  Not good at all.  To get rid of the mould, I simmered the skull and vertebrae gently for an hour or so, then cleaned it up with a toothbrush and some washing-up liquid (or "dish soap", as you wacky colonials apparently call it).  It was at this point that the crumbliness became apparent, of course: the respiratory turbinates were completely gone, and the nasals, having come away from the rest of the skull, broke into three pieces each.  Also, the dorsal margins of the maxillae and premaxillae, where they abut the nasals, started to crumble.  Finally, the bone directly above the foramen magnum whose name I can never remember came away, and a small chunk came away from the bone that that abuts it to the left.  It wasn't pretty.

Anyway, I cleaned the bones as carefully as I could, then let them soak overnight in dilute hydrogen peroxide before carefully rinsing them and leaving them to dry.  The result still looks good, but it's disturbingly fragile.  Here it is:

I also prepared a red-cyan anaglyph of these bones, from an aspect slightly anterodorsal of dorsal.  Those of you who have not yet obtained red-cyan glasses for viewing these, get your arses in gear — they are really informative.

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Finally, here is a close-up of the crumbling nasal region, and the remaining pieces of the nasal bones.  You can see that the bone has lost integrity.

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(Those two fragments at the bottom of the picture are, I think, from the dorsal border of the right maxilla.)

And now, gentle reader, I come to you for advice.  What can I do to strengthen poor Logan's skull?  I guess there must be some kind of commercially available compound that I can soak it in or paint on to it to consolidate the friable bone?  Help me out, please.  I don't want to lose Logan.

And by the way …

I realise that SV-POW! has been heavy on these extant-animal-skeleton posts recently, and correspondingly light on actual, you know, sauropod vertebrae.  I hope no-one feels too short-changed: I've been assuming that among that constituency that appreciates sauropod vertebrae, there's a corresponding liking for ostrich and wallaby skulls.  Do let me know if it ain't so (or indeed if it is).