Identify dead animal

Today I found the remains of an animal in my backyard. Any ideas what this might be? I'm in western New Brunswick, Canada.

A little indication as to size would be helpful - like nose to back of scull - for scale. Thanks.

From the nose to the back of the skull is about 6-7 inches

100% raccoon

Marc Dube wrote:100% raccoon

i dunno to me it looks more like 15%



...he ded

A raccoon skull tends to be more "rounded" under the jaw, and the "fangs tend to be less wide at the base - I would also expect it to be more in the 4-5 inch range. BUT there are drastic geographical differences in size and shape.

Best guess, a Fisher; size is right, teeth are right, shape is right....but really hard with just a side shot of skull... They are sort of halfway between weasel and wolverine.

Very interesting. Maybe one day I'll go back and take some more and different pictures. If it's still there by then...

One way to identify skulls is by the teeth. Counting number of incisors, canines, premolars and molars on top and bottom gives you the dental formula. Like the example in the first picture attached to this post. That picture was taken from this quick guide: https://egret.org/sites/default/files/skull.pdf

I can't see the incisors in your picture, but for the other teeth, I can see one canine top and bottom. It looks like four premolars top and bottom. And it looks like three molars are visible on top and two on bottom. The third top molar might just be bone, not sure. My eyes aren't the best; speak up if anyone sees something different!

So dental formula would be:
-143
-142

sometimes written like this: -/- 1/1 4/4 3/2

What I have found for raccoon dental formulas seems to suggest they would have only two molars top and bottom. Second attached picture is from the same guide as above. Fishers weren't included in the guide.

Fishers would also be expected to have less molars...

Skull and Dentition. Skulls of male fishers generally are l 10-1 30 mm
long, whereas those of females are 95-105 mm long. Skull width for
males is 62-84 mm, whereas that for females is 52-61 mm (Peterson
1966). For martens, skulls generally are 80-95 and 69-80 mm in length
and 46-53 and 38-46 mm in width for males and females, respectively.
The dental formula for both species is I 3/3, C 1/1, P 4/4, M 1/2.

from this guide to fisher and martin: https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/zielinski/psw_zielinski026.pdf

Unless this guy just had extra teeth or a mix of baby and adult teeth...

I'm not finding many results for 4 premolars and three molars besides the dog family. But that doesn't seem to fit. Probably to get a positive id you would have to go back and handle the skull to check on the teeth for sure and also some other features of the skull.

This is a dichotomous key to mammal skulls that is short, but is a nice overview of skull features useful in identification.
https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Documents/Key-Common-Mammal-Skull.pdf

Thanks for posting this challenge, I learned a lot about mammal teeth!

it does look like a goat the first look but then when I search for racoon then, I'm sure that is racoon.