It was beautiful at the lake the other day--lots of scaups and coots, distant geese and ducks, a big bird too high to tell if it was the eagle I suspected...but looking at my feet, I found this perfect gar skull (what a LOT of needle-sharp teeth!) and a butter-yellow dandelion.
I don't know who made a meal of the gar--one of the herons, an eagle? But I found bits of it scattered halfway across the road.
There are a lot of types of gar, the largest reaching 300 lbs! This little guy was either a smaller species or a baby...the skull was only 4 1/2" long by 1" wide. You can read more on wikipedia
or for more than you EVER wanted to know about one our Missouri gar, the longnose, you can read HERE.
The monster fish have beautiful scales that some people dye and use to make jewelry.
Wonderful pages Cathy! Never heard of a gar, saw on Wikipedia it's a fish! from the Pike family? It's like you unearthed something from the dinosaur age! Besides seeing some beautiful sketches here, I am learning SO MUCH from everybody's posts! It's opened a world of wonder for me!
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