this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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Hippo skulls are wild without the rest of the hippo around it!
Also elephants, the trunk has no bones in it so it's just a hole in the skull, I'm sure future generations will portray it but the single giant eye.
But honestly pretty much no animal looks the same as its skeleton because every animal has a lot of fat and connective tissue which just doesn't get preserved. Really the only animal that looks the same as a skeleton as it does when it's alive is the frog.
Iirc it's really where cyclops myth came from, they found a mammoth skull and thought that hole is the eye socket. There's also same thing for dragon as well, people just don't know what the skull looks like when alive so they made stuff up
There's theories that the Cyclops myth came about from ancient people's finding fossil elephant skulls from the period where European Elephants were a species
(They went extinct in Europe 50,000-10,000 years ago)
A hippo skull is a great example of how soft tissue structure can be seen in bone structure. Check out that enormous jaw bone and compare it to a human skull. It's easy to see how it must have massive jaw muscles and an incredible bite force.
For another strong jaw you can look at the orca, but notice also how flat its skull is where you'd expect it to be round. On top is where it keeps its echolocation melon.