The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 10: The Owl

I finish this year’s set of Halloween skeleton posts with the owl (available for $19.49 at Target), which contains a unique and compelling mix of mistakes.  

As with other fake bird skeletons, this one has bones where the tail and wing feathers should be.   

And the sternum (which connects the ribs at the front of the body) looks much like the sternum of a human being, and not at all like the deeply-keeled avian sternum.  

But the biggest issue is the presence of ears.  Certain kinds of owls do have tufts of feathers on top of their heads which superficially resemble ears, but these tufts are not anatomically associated with the internal ear, and are not involved with the sense of hearing.  And even if owls did have external ears in the manner of mammals, mammalian external ears are cartilaginous, and not part of the bony structure of the skull, a mistake common to fake Halloween skeletons of various mammals.  Thus we see a compounded double error of confusing feather tufts with mammalian ears, and presenting mammalian ears as bony projections from the skull.