Owl Pellet Soup

Our Biology lab today consisted of dissecting owl pellets and examining the contents within. An owl pellet is of similar size to human's thumb, these pellets are the product of an owl vomiting up the parts of its prey that it cannot digest. These parts that the bird rejects would be bones and teeth. The reason the owl, along with other birds of prey, regurgitates these parts of an animal is because the bones are not digestible and would do great harm to the birds internal organs. Once we began dissecting the pellets we would find a bone, remove it, and then examine it under a microscope, and, using a key would decide what bone the bone we found is. Through this process my partner and I figured out (to a point) which animals the owl, whose pellet we were dissecting, had identified as prey. The process I afore described was not a pretty one, although it was very interesting and a good experience