Mummified – The Lost Sea Expedition

Version 2
It’s a mummified…dog, cat, deer, sheep…..?

Lots of things that didn’t make the Lost Sea Expedition TV series are still cool to look at. I thought you’d enjoy these photos about a mummified….what the hell is that anyway…..?

Okay, let me back up. Traveling across America in a wagon is a thorough way to travel. I say “thorough” instead of “slow” because you’re always making detours and stopping for the night where the sun catches you on the western horizon. That means you get an up-close look at things you never imagined.

One evening in Kansas, Polly and I stopped at an abandoned one room school house.

Mule Polly parked in front of a Kansas school house. — Polly and I rarely knew where we were going to spend the night. Here she’s knocking off for the day at the long-abandoned Brown school house. It was named Brown not for the color but for the person who donated the land for the building site.

I unharnessed Polly and picketed her our for the night. As she grazed, Dave Sammons, a road grader operator, dropped by for a visit. He lead me in to the old school house to show me something. Here’s what we saw.

Dave Sammons. Dave took off time from running his road grader to show me something weird inside an old school house.

Inside of a Kansas one-room school house. — An old-timey one room school house just like out of a prairie novel. Note the dry looking heap in the far corner.

A mummified coyote in the corner of a Kansas school house. — As we got closer, I saw this. You can see this critter was cold when it died. The hind legs and tail look like they are folded up tight to conserve energy. Dave thought the body belonged to a coyote that sought refuge in the old school house during a spell of bitter cold prairie weather.

Close up photo of a mummified coyote skull. — From this close, the mummified eye looks almost shark like. It surprised me how many dried out critters I encountered on my voyage across America. In the dry Great Plains air, some of the bodies I found in abandoned buildings looked like they dated back to Egyptian times.

After Dave left, I fed and watered Polly and crawled in to my wagon for the night. I swear that mummified coyote showed up in my dreams. It didn’t help that real coyotes were howling all night long just outside of my tiny, yellow wagon.

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